Hi, folks! I’m here to talk with you (or write at you) about writing for the web.

The first time I wrote a web piece, I kind of freaked out. Even though my fingertips danced over the keyboard like they would with a traditional, academic paper, I knew that they weren’t doing the right thing. I wasn’t transferring what I know about writing in one situation—print environments and academic readers—to digital environments and web users.

What I’m going to do here is give you a few tips for writing using basic rhetorical theory. I find rhetoric useful as I’m writing in new genres for new audiences because the most basic rhetorical theory, the rhetorical triangle, helps me ask the right questions and find the best answers for my writing situation.

Rhetorical Situation

(BTW, do you see what I did there, using a section heading? Section headings are great for web writing because they help your readers scan your text for relevant or useful content.)

So, first, the rhetorical triangle. Those of us who have studied any rhetoric might call it the rhetorical situation. I use the terms interchangeably, so I want to give you that heads up right now.

All right, as interesting as I find it, I promise I won’t give you a history lesson about how a bunch of gnarly, old, white dude scholars have fought over the rhetorical situation for the last fifty or so years. Instead, here’s the useful stuff.

The rhetorical situation is just a way of imagining the situation into which you’re writing so you can make the best possible decisions. By rhetorical situation, I am thinking of the relationship between the communicator, the audience, and the communicator’s purpose.

Communicator

 

 

 

Text

 

 

Audience                                                                                 Purpose

 

The rhetorical situation, imagined here as a triangle, helps us to think about what a communicator needs to know about an audience in order to shape an effective purpose in the text.

When I think of my rhetorical situation, I start by asking questions about my audience:

• Who am I talking to?
• What do I want them to do, know, or believe?
  • Considering my audience’s identity and beliefs, is my initial or “ideal” purpose feasible?
  • How might I need to reframe or temper my purpose because of the audience’s beliefs?
  • What are the stakes for the reader?
  • What can the reader actually do?
• What do they know about the topic?
• What don’t they know?
• What do they believe (culturally, politically, perhaps religiously) that I can use as common ground to achieve my purpose?
• What are some differences in our positions that I may need to address?

By thinking about my reader, I can write a better text.

Genre

As a writer, I want to please, or satisfy, my reader’s expectations, and one way I can do that is by fulfilling their genre expectations.

Blogs are a specific genre. As you can see from this post, I keep my paragraphs short. That’s because, on a screen, readers often struggle with reading large blocks of unbroken text. I would never use this many paragraph breaks in print communication, but in digital communication, especially blogs, I want the text to look as interesting and engaging as possible, which paragraph breaks help to achieve.

Blogs also use hyperlinks (see what I did there?) to take readers to other places of additional reading. In fact, hyperlinks have replaced citations for many writers of digital texts. If you’re talking about someone’s article, tweet, whatever, you should hyperlink a word in your prose to that different text.

Bloggers also include images in their posts, often at the beginning of the text under the headline and throughout the body. The images help to illustrate points or provide evidence. This images should also be hyperlinked if possible. Always use a caption to explain the image’s relevance or to provide a brief attribution to a photographer. If the image is a screenshot, you should let your reader know that in the image. If it’s not a screenshot, make the image a hyperlink that the reader my click on to go to the original source.

Keep it short. Blogs shouldn’t be long. Right now, this blog post is under 800 words. I won’t go on much longer, because it wouldn’t be appropriate for the genre and for my readers’ expectations.

Titles

There’s a lot of controversy about clickbait, or headlines that misrepresent the content just to get “clicks,” or visits, to the article. If you check out the comments on popular blogs, such as Jezebel, you’ll probably find a thread of commenters complaining about the “clickbaity” title.

 

 

But titles are important. You need the clicks. You want the clicks. So give the article a title that will get those clicks. Just remember to represent the content as accurately as possible.

 

Comments? Questions? Suggestions for writing successful blogs? Comment below!