Introduction: Orality, Literacy, & Electronic Discourse

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 ...

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 question. Whether 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.

	What you will read about in this book are some of the evolving conventions of writing for the WWW. Yes, though the WWW is a fairly new medium, it is possible at this point in time to begin thinking about conventions. This does not mean, however, that they will be set and will not change. What the Web is all about is change.

And yet, there are some basic principles of communication, even in electronic discourse, that are not going to change that rapidly, if change at all. You have heard the adage that the more that things change, the more that they stay the same? There is reason to believe this statement to be the case. There are constants in human communication. But at the same time, there are equally good reasons to believe that the electronic environment of cyberspace itself is causing us to rethink and restructure what will count as successful communication there.

	The technology and its constraints are demanding the evolution of newer, appropriate conventions, with which we will have to be familiar, if we are to live successfully in virtual communities. Already, for some of you, whether you know it or not, the WWW is the medium for your future livelihood. It will be the other place where you will also be a citizen ('netizen').
								In general, it is the place for your personal and professional identity in cyberspace; in particular, it is the medium for presenting yourself to prospective employers and to others on the Web who might want to conduct business or associate themselves (link up) with you. You might at present be proficient with electronic mail, but building a virtual home or business on the Web is a great deal more complicated.
						Let's recoup and slightly reformulate and elaborate What I have suggested thus far in passing is that there are constraints on and conventions for speech (oral discourse on sound waves), for writing (printed discourse on paper), and for electronic discourse/WWW (magnetized pixels on black and white or colored monitors).

	We know from experience and study that if someone writes a speech that has very complicated sentences, that are not necessarily broken up into parallel repetitive structures, but that are labyrinthine in structure, twisting and turning while exploring different avenues of thought, the audience will most likely be at a loss to follow what is being said. If, however, such writing is done for print, it might be easier to follow, though for some people still difficult to process. It might be easier to follow because the readers can usually reread what they only partially understood. (Though the previous three sentences were not written for a speech, you might have found yourself having to reread them in order to get through them. They are purposefully written as they are so as to illustrate my point of what is acceptable in writing for oral delivery and for print.)		Writing that attempts to inform or persuade an audience has got to be relatively easy for readers to process. There is a general rule of thumb that an average listener or even a reader can process only 7 + or - bits of information at one time. So writers either intuitively or experientially have come to understand that they must chunk and package their information in certain ways. And even repeat and summarize what has been said before going on to the next point. In Order to be Successful. And yet, writing that attempts to be literary or experimental does not necessarily have to be easy to follow. Such writing presents puzzles or mysteries for the reader to solve or presents strings of words to learn to appreciate. Often the reader is expected to reread what has been written. And to study it. Ponder it. The way that you might look or stare at a painting in a museum.
					A writer who wants to communicate information but presents it ineffectively, however, should never hide under the pretense of ... being an innovator. Writing in an innovative style requires great skill and command of a language and it requires also to understand when to abandon oneself to the flow of language. This book, though it will touch on innovative writing for the WWW, is not a book about what is normally called 'creative writing.' It is a book that will concentrate on the basic, yet evolving, conventions of writing electronic discourse. What will complicate matters--and bears repeating here--is that the basic conventions are very unconventional when compared with the conventions of speaking and writing. And therein lies the problem that we have to ponder and solve if we are to be successful.

writers tend to compose with very few words because they rely more on icons (images, pictures, graphics) as a means of communicating or guiding the reader, who for the most part just clicks from section (or file) to section. If you were to write for the WWW the way that you write a lengthy essay or report for your teacher--say, ten-typed pages--you would probably altogether lose your audience, who would just click you out of sight. And go elsewhere. I am not suggesting, however, that you should not have ten pages of type; I am suggesting, as you will see eventually in passing in the discussion of this book, that there are conventional ways of presenting even that amount of text, making it easier for your readers to sift through it all. A chunk at a time. But beware, for in my making this statement, I have taken leave of what some people believe about what should or should not be an acceptable practice on the WWW. Many believe deeply in the motto: "Fewer words, more images." And additionally believe that everything (each page or file) is to fit on the monitor (after every click) without the reader of a page having to scroll down at all. The average size of a monitor is about 14-15" measured diagonally across, and therefore that physical constraint is generally considered to be your target size. To this issue of words versus images and size of screen, we will perpetually return.

... is what you will be studying and practicing here. So from time to time remind yourself: Electronic discourse is not Oral discourse and is not Printed discourse. It is (becoming) something else. Your success as a communicator on the WWW will in great part, therefore, be based on your understanding the differences among these three technologies and media.

for Electronic discourse often incorporates Oral and Printed discourses. Electronic discourse is an olio of technologies and media including words, speech and music, and graphics and video. It's a lot like operas, classical or rock, with all of the elements of words, speech, music, graphics, props, etc. It will become more and more like MTV, but interactive. In learning to write for the WWW, you will have to learn eventually how to mix all three forms of discourse in terms of multimedia, though we will concentrate more so on words and graphics in what is called hypertext (a format, literally, of extended-words that may or may not be always logically, but figuratively, connected). You, therefore, will be doing more than is suggested in the foregoing by the word writing; we might better characterize, instead, what you will be learning and doing as COMPOSING. Here is what the American Heritage Dictionary variously has to say about the word composing:

You will be shown how to perform everyone of these tasks. (For example, you will be setting type when you put in hypertext markup language [HTML] for the fonts and their sizes and colors.) And you will be invited to improve on these tasks.

For the Students and Facilitators: What and especially How I have written ... composed ... the foregoing statement is purposefully rendered to illustrate a point. I myself find it rather dull and bland, primarily because of the tone, which, at times, projects a voice, or attitude, of seriousness and pedantry. (Notice the jarring contrast between the opening full-page quote from Amy Bruckman and what follows in the first section of the 'professional' preface. And notice the differences in the formal and informal sections of the Preface to this book.) The foregoing part of this introduction is not written, as I would normally write, in a different style for my particular audience: Students. And yet, as I said, it is purposefully written in this manner. Why? So that I might illustrate a point, namely, that I--and you--can take a piece of prose that is extended over a series of pages in print and recompose it for the medium of the WWW and turn bland expository prose into a high-energy presentation. In that way I--and you--can be as Bruckman suggests "artistic instigators." Or so I would think so. This is a very tricky thing to attempt, but attempt I . . . we . . . must, because as I will explain and illustrate through out this book, the medium of electronic discourse is very, very different--so very different--from printed discourse that a piece of clear, successful exposition in print, say, in an encyclopedia, can be, an absolute failure on the Web, if simply presented there as in print; or that your essay assignment in print that received, let's say, an "A" can be an absolute failure as electronic discourse on a website. As Marshall McLuhan said: The medium is the massage. Or as I would rephrase: The container shapes the content of the message.

     By the time you get this book, my publisher and I will have established a website on which there will be supplementary and complementary files with links to each section of the printed book. (In this way, we can constantly update the site and keep in touch with you.) At that site, I will also include a file/link to this Introduction but as recomposed in a hypertext format and in part a multimedia format, so that you might see the difference between the print version here and a multimedia version of the 'same' Introduction on the Web, and perhaps might even see it as being more palatable. (I will limit what I do in terms of markup language [HTML] to the codes and techniques given in the book.) It may very well be, however, that if you are the kind of person who prefers words in print alone and in a regular font size with black ink on white paper, it will not matter at all what I--or anyone else--will or could have done to this Introduction in the electronic medium that we are about to study. I have many friends who are consistent in preferring a story told in print rather than presented in film, and who have never enjoyed a novel that has been made into a film. (As if the two genres are even comparable!)

     Should I rewrite this introduction and include a second--at least, for me--more exciting, high-energy draft in this book? Why should I? The purpose of the book is not to compare the differences between what I believe to be 'good' and 'bad' writing, or bland and highly rhythmic, perhaps punk, prose in print for students, nor is the purpose to illustrate what I personally or in conjunction with my colleagues consider in general to be 'good' or 'bad' writing for print. Should I place a better draft of this introduction on the website for this book instead of here in the book? Why?, so that it can sit there and, in the eyes of people who are familiar with and sensitive to appreciating the genre(s) of the WWW, just look worse, or look like an unsuccessful fish out of water? I have the rest of the book to write in print. Why double up here, when I can double up this introduction by way of the very medium I am attempting to invite you to learn and to use?

     Really, What's more important? Writing for print or for an electronic environment? To be sure, this is a question that we in academia and in the popular press are wrestling with. Right now, as will continue to be the case, writing/composing electronic discourse is seen as supplementary, not as primary. In other words, it is generally assumed that it is more necessary (hence, more important) to be able to write following the conventions of print. Given where we are right now, I do agree. Given where we will be, however, I agree and I disagree. Writing/Composing for the Web and any future technology that lies beyond the WWW, wherever and whatever that might be, is equally, if not in some ways more, important than writing the academic essay for print. Therefore, we (students and facilitators) must learn to write and to teach for the present and for the future. As Michael Joyce says, we must be "Of Two Minds." As I would interpret to mean: We must firmly place one writing hand on paper and boldly move one typing hand in(to) the future.

     These are, no doubt about it, heavy and quarrelsome questions and issues and will remain so for a long time. When in our long academic history we moved from an oral culture to a print culture, there were and still are today similar disagreements. Battles! And many are political. McLuhan, for instance, writes: "Today's child is growing up absurd, because he lives in two worlds, and neither of them inclines him to grow up. Growing up--that is our new work, and it is total. Mere instruction will not suffice" (18; McLuhan's underline). I am not here interested in attempting to resolve this issue of separate tasks or totality; it is irresolvable by me or us and will either be solved or just dissolved in time and space. As time and space themselves are refigured or dissolved. As I stated, these are 'heady' questions and topics, which I will set aside; for I am more interested, instead, in introducing this new medium to you, students, so that you might, for the time being, not only understand it and practice it and introduce others to it, but more specifically so that you might come to understand that what counts as a good speech, as a good theme/essay, as a good webpage can be radically different from each other. And that you 'best' be skillful and successful at communicating in all three media. Living, working, and playing in all three and in any additional media. Paradoxically, we (as students and facilitators) must learn and invite others to be, as I said in the preface, amphibians. On our way out of the "absurd" world we find ourselves in, perhaps to the global (total) village and, yes, back again to the absurd, at least, for a while. Finding ourselves to be sojourners in both.

McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. NY: Bantam, 1967.

P.S.: There's something new on the Web that you might enjoy. It's called "The Main Quad: A Global Community for College Students." Visit. You might want to enroll.