A First Look at Web Pages: Description

This is the first pass as applying a rhetorical method to web pages and sites. As with emali, the exercise is designed to help monitor your own thinking by asking you to organize what you're doing. By now, I'm hoping the approach is becoming more comfortable, more habitual.

Review with Stoner and Perkins, chap 3, and chaps 4 and 5 on description and analysis.

You will also need the HandlistOfWebDesign page.

Here are the pages to work with:

• http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html
• http://www.stcloudstate.edu/english/

First pass: Describe

Start a new subpage from your WikiName? page for your notes. Title it *FirstLookAtWebPages?. As before, use headings and subheadings to help you organize your notes on this page. For each page, develop your notes in subheadings

description

analysis

If you'd like, you can also create an !!! interpretation section.

For this first pass, focus on describing the web pages. Assume a balcony view. Use neutral language. Use the HandlistOfWebDesign to help you focus your attention.

Your process of describing might start with working through the details of the page. Use bulleted sentences or more extensive prose for these notes. You might even make a map (off-computer) to help you see elements and start to put them in relationships. Selectively quote from the text. Keep taking and organizing your observations in notes until you begin to identify patterns and regularities on the page.

A web page, like any message, is a particular response to a particular situation in a particular context. Your description includes this context.

• You will want to describe the rhetorical aspects of the specific circumstances the page addresses,
• you will need to place the page in relation to other pages near it on the site,
• you will want to place the page in relation to other pages of its kind, and
• you will want to characterize the relationship between the rhetor/writer/designer and the audience the page seems designed for. Look to the rhetor's role, and the roles the message assigns to the audience. (S&P pp 52 - 58).

Address

• overall design of the page
• navigation on the page
• the text of the page

Use your observing notes to develop a rich paragraph or two that characterizes each page: that presents the essential characteristics and patterns of the page and the text. End your description of the page with that paragraph.

And consider form, style, organization...

As you work, you may want to make notes on analysis and interpretation. Fine. Place those notes under the appropriate headings.

Second Pass

Next will be analysis.