ACTIVITY 9.5
Writing the First Draft

By now you should have all you need to begin your first draft. You have read, observed, reflected on, and shared with others your impressions and progress. Your thoughts may still be in an unfocused state, but the very act of composing the first draft should help you narrow and focus.

Step 1: Finding a Focus

You have probably collected enough data and have thought of enough random observations to write a twenty- or thirty-page paper, but your goal, you will remember, is only four to seven pages. So you need to find a focus. In fact, all the prior activities were designed to help you start narrowing in on two or three features of your virtual community that might serve as a focus for your paper. Here are some suggestions for determining a focus:

Focus on one member. You might select a person because he was outrageous and stirred up lots of trouble, because she was thoughtful and wrote well enough to emerge as a leader, or because he somehow served as a model for the membership of the community. What characteristics (nature of contributions, writing style, interactions with other) did that person display that made him or her stand out from the crowd?

Focus on a small group of people who either formed a clique or who engaged in virtual tugs of war on certain topics. What bound these people together? What effect did their clique have on the rest of the community.

Focus on a dramatic event like a flame war. What caused the event? Profane language, clashing beliefs, misunderstandings, miscommunications? What effect did the flame war have on the community? Did others join in? Did the event cause others to sit back and wait it out? How did it end? Did "calmer voices" prevail? Did it just sputter out from lack of interest on the part of the combatants? Did one side or other offer a white flag? Other on-line "events" might include romances, deaths, births, and so on.

Focus on gender, race, or class issues. Did males tend to dominate in one way or another? Did there appear to be an equal number of males and females on-line? If so, how did the number of contributions from each group compare to their numbers? How did the males treat the females? Was one group taken more seriously than another group?

Focus on a particular topic, strand, or thread. Which topic seemed to dominate while you were on-line? What were the range of contributions? What made it a dominant strand? Were there lots of differences of opinions on a controversial topic that led to debate? Was it a complex topic that required lots of people to contribute different bits of information and knowledge? How did the strand contribute to or otherwise affect the community's knowledge or harmony?

Focus on language. Did a particular style of language dominate? If so, how? Did the language, style, and content of some subgroups' messages (i.e., males, females, experts, nonexperts) demonstrate or reveal anything about that subgroup?

Focus on how the virtual community you studied was like or unlike more traditional communities to which you've belonged. For instance, was your community like (or unlike) an educational community (a classroom), a religious community (a parish or congregation), a social community (a fraternity/sorority, a club), a family?

Step 2: Developing a Tentative Thesis

Once you have zeroed in on a focus, try writing a tentative thesis that will serve as your controlling idea for the essay. By tentative we mean to imply that as you actually develop the paper, you may need to further narrow and revise the thesis itself, but articulating one now will give you something concrete to work with. Some samples are described here. Yours, of course, will be different based on the realities of your virtual community.

Focus on a person:

"Of the thirty members of the rec.autos.crashes newsgroup, one stands out. Mario Andretti, even though he didn't send as many articles as some others in the community, was the most influential member of the group and thus controlled the directions that topics and the community took. His influence can be seen through the number of topics he initiated, the number of responses his articles received, and the number of times his words or comments were quoted by others. He was able to play such a leadership role because he was among the most knowledgeable about the topic threads and he wrote well."

Focus on a clique:

"The IRC Channel 'tv' was dominated by three males, Tom, Dick, and Harry. These three, bound by their shared interest in flirtatious behavior and ribald humor, effectively shut out others by sending a rapid succession of messages that 'drowned out' other's contributions, by frequently making laudatory references to one another's contributions, and by engaging in gender baiting which made 'tv' an uncomfortable environment for women."

Focus on a how the virtual community compares to more traditional communities:

"The listserv discussion list novels-l@upu.edu, a virtual community dedicated to the discussion of 'serious novels,' is like the most intimidating and boring class I was ever in. Its membership is divided into three basic categories: those who ask questions, like students in a classroom; those who participate but have little of substance to say, like class pets; and those who pontificate, like the worst of overbearing teachers in traditional classrooms. For a relative novice and fan of 'trash' novels like myself, I felt unwelcomed and at times humiliated."

Step 3: Describing Your Community

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, much analytical writing involves breaking the whole into its component parts. In most cases, you have some sort of "object" of analysis, be it a molecule, a painting, or an event. Because your readers, most of whom we can assume have not visited your virtual community, need to understand the "object" you are analyzing, you could help them better understand your analysis by describing in some detail your community.

What was the name of your virtual community, and where is it located (listserv address, IRC channel, newsgroup name, etc.)?

What was the stated or implied purpose of the community?

What kind of data did you collect, and how did you collect it?

During what time period did you make your observations? For an asynchronous community (listserv, newsgroup, bulletin board service), when did you begin and end your data collection? For a synchronous community (IRC, MUD/MOO/MUSH), exactly when (what days and dates, what times, for how long) did you visit?

What is the demographic makeup? (number, gender, race, class, educational level of participants) of the community?

What was the traffic volume (total number of messages, average number of messages per participant, etc.)?

Step 4: Building Your Analysis

After you have offered a detailed description of your virtual community and drafted your thesis statement or controlling idea, you need to begin building your analysis. In general, you are trying to construct logical support and clarification for your controlling idea. Let us take the example thesis offered earlier about Mario Andretti and his dominance in the rec.auto.crashes newsgroup as an illustration of the kinds of information a reader might expect to find:

Of the thirty members of the rec.autos.crashes newsgroup, one stands out. Mario Andretti, even though he didn't send as many articles as did some others in the community, was the most influential member of the group and thus controlled the directions that topics and the community took. His influence can be seen through the number of topics he initiated, the number of responses his articles received, and the number of times his words or comments were quoted by others. He was able to play such a leadership role because he was among the most knowledgeable about the topic threads and he wrote well.

To support the assertions in this statement, you would have to do these things:

Offer evidence about how many messages Mario sent as compared to others in the group.

Offer evidence of his "influence" by showing:

-how many and which of his messages initiated topics,

-how many of his messages received responses and/or were quoted by others,

-what in his messages illustrate his superior knowledge,

-what in his messages illustrate how well he wrote.

What counts as evidence? The best, of course, would be direct quotations from the articles Andretti posted. You do, however, want to select your examples judiciously. It will not suffice to string together lengthy quotations just for the sake of doing so. You want to select only those messages or, better yet, the portions of those messages, that directly support the assertions you are making.