by Victor J. Vitanza
For the Students: The Purpose of this book, as the title states, is to introduce you to Writing for the World Wide Web (WWW). Writing a speech that you or someone else is going to deliver and writing an essay that you are going to submit to your teacher for a grade are both very different tasks from one another. Writing for the WWW is just as different. You might ask, "How could this be the case? After all, Is not writing just writing?" My answer to that question has got to be "No!" Why? Because ...
Researchers have learned by studying both experienced and inexperienced writers that success or failure is greatly dependent on whether or not writers are aware of the constraints and conventions of the genre in which they want to speak and write and whether or not they can execute them well.
By constraints, I mean the limitations that are placed on both the writer and the audience. For example, whereas writing for print can be reread if not understood, writing presented orally can pass on by, at times, without being clearly heard. Whereas discourse in print, with the author not present, cannot at times be understood, no matter how many times we reread it, discourse that is presented orally, with the speaker present, can similarly not be understood or in passing heard but is open to being clarified if a member of the audience asks a questionWhether the author/speaker is present or absent is of major importance. (The speaker's presence, however, is not necessarily a solution to the problem that the audience might be having with the aim or meaning of a statement. The author is not considered by a lot of people today to be the final authority for what was said. In other words, it is difficult to defend the proposition today that the author means what s/he says; and says precisely what s/he means. And yet, we still in many ways hold on to the possibility of asking the author for a clarification is we wish one.)
By conventions, I mean the commonly accepted genres of communicating (or kinds of discourse) for different purposes and media. Listeners and Readers have certain expectations, given their understanding of the purpose of the communication, that they desire to be fulfilled. For example, if you want to appeal a grade you received in a class, there is a time-honored way of formulating your request to be heard and way of linking together good reasons for the request to be granted. You have to know what will and will not count as an argument and what will be compelling enough to influence your audience to grant what action you want them to take. There are numerous conventions for all kinds of writing to be orally delivered or put in print. And there are, of course, even conventions for being unconventional.
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Established 8 Oct. 1996; last modified 9 Oct. 1996
Introduction to Writing for the World Wide Web. Allyn&Bacon, 1997.