ENGL 4169/5169: Web Content Writing

spring 2007 | revised, January 2007

Prof M C Morgan
HS 314 | 755 2814
Office Hours: M - R 9:00 - 9:50 Other hours by appointment.
mmorgan at bemidjistate dot edu

Texts

Required

• Price and Price, Hot Text. New Riders, 2002.

If you haven't taken ENGL 4170/5170: Web Design

• Siegel, Kevin. Essentials of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Skills and Drills. IconLogic, 2005.
• Summers and Summers. Creating Websites that Work. Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Course Statement

This course gives you the opportunity to gain experience in writing and editing content for web sites based on rhetorical principles. It's a course designed to help you develop both hands-on skills in writing for the web and larger rhetorical strategies for web site content creation.

The course focuses on rhetorical situations and circumstances particular to writing for the web (such as differences from print in reading and audience relations) and the rhetorical affordances for addressing those circumstances (hypertext, page layout, textual elements such as headings and lists, links). We'll be working with

• rhetorical principles as they are adapted for writing on the web
• user-centered page design
• changes in audience relations, reading, and text layout on the web

by

• creating structured texts and pages and using text elements appropriately
• writing hypertext and adapting print text to hypertext

Goals

The course won't necessarily make you an expert in web content writing but it does give you a chance to practice writing web content so that

• you can develop your understanding of web content writing further on your own.
• you can make sound rhetorical decisions in novel situations.
• you can critique, troubleshoot, and revise or edit web pages and sites that you have designed or those you oversee.
• you can edit texts for the web.
• you can recast and repurpose texts into multi-page hypertexts

Focus on Content

The course takes a content- and user-centered approach to web writing. That is, we start with content and the reader's position and make rhetorical choices from there.

And this is a studio course: dominantly hands-on, with web-based projects, some editing exercises, and oral critiques.

For the first half of spring 2007 semester, we're reworking (rethinking, reconsidering, revamping, revising, adding to, subtracting from, ... ) the English Department's web site. For the second half, you will be writing or repurposing a hypertext essay or taking on a web site project of your own design.

All the activities for the course - the projects, the editing exercises, the discussions - are designed to give you opportunities not only to learn the practice, the how-to, but to develop and refine your understanding of the rhetorical strategies and principles behind the practice.

A Rhetorical Approach

This course incorporates some of the rhetorical principles and methods introduced in Elements of Electronic Rhetoric: using rhetorical appeals of logos, pathos, and ethos; changes in writer-reader relations and changes in text construction from print to digital media; a focus on persuasion as creating meaningful and purposeful texts addressing public audiences. It also lets you to employ methods of description and analysis that you practiced in that class - to put them to practical use in analyzing web writing on the way to writing your own.

The field of rhetoric provides us with most of the concepts we will be working with. Rhetorical principles are behind the organizational decisions designers use to structure sites. Rhetorical principles inform how categories, pages, and links are named. Rhetorical concepts let us think about audiences in ways that help us write for people who are not just reading text but doing something with it. Rhetorical concepts guide writing and revising text to be read on the web. Text elements such as bulleted lists, callouts, and structured heads, and hypertext elements of nodes and links are rhetorical affordances in web design, just as metaphor, apostrophe, and chiasmus are rhetorical figures in content writing.

So, expect rhetorical terminology and new ways of working with rhetorical concepts such as audience. Expect to be making rhetorical choices when you write, and expect to be speaking and writing and thinking about web sites and page design in rhetorical terms.

Projects

Projects change from year to year. I will give you details on each project as the course proceeds, but expect a selection from the following:

• re-casting an existing site (2007)
• a how-to page
• writing for the content area of the course wiki, My Weekly Reader
• repurposing a multipage print text to a multipage hypertext
• a hypertext essay: academic, personal, informal... your choice (2007)
• assorted exercises in editing, rewriting, recasting
• as a final project, a small- to medium-sized web text of your own design, individually or collaboratively done (2007)

Each project and exercise gives you the opportunity to develop both skills in web page design and content writing, and to develop and refine your understanding of page design and content writing.

Exercises, discussion, and quizzes maybe

To introduce new concepts, to broaden the range of opportunities, and to let you experiment a little, I'll be giving you some exercises in writing and recasting web text, drawn from principles and practices in Hot Text. The exercises can open up our discussion on strategies and complications in addressing rhetorical situations on the web.

Typically, a course might use quizzes and tests to determine your mastery of practices and concepts. Instead, as is appropriate in a workshop, I will ask you to demonstrate a growing mastery of the concepts behind the practice by talking about your work, and the work of others.

I may, for instance, ask you to draw on Hot Text, chapter 7 to discuss why you made the choices you did in placing and labeling links on a page. Or I may ask you how Price's consideration of genres and conventional personae shows up in the FAQ you've designed and written. Or I may ask you to discuss how else you might shorten the main text of a page and deal with the necessary supplemental material.

Expect to be asked in class, on the fly, about writing and design choices you (and your group, if you're working in groups) have made. When you are asked, don't panic. It doesn't mean you have made poor choices. Take your time, think, consider, and do your best to explain your course of thinking. Ground your choices in the principles we're working with. Ask others to help you out. Let others help you out. Look for alternatives.

I may give on or two short quizzes during the course. If I do, I'll mention it in advance. But more often, I will expect you to be able to use the terms and concepts introduced as part of this class to consider and discuss whatever it is we're working on at the time.

Experimentation

While what we do in class builds from fundamentals, I encourage you to take time out of class to experiment. Create pages of your own making. Read around in the text. Create complex pages. Mess around, just to get a feel for what's possible.

Be aware that web page development can eat up hours of free time.

Learning Dreamweaver

Most of what happens in web design does not happen using Dreamweaver, or Photoshop, or Flash. And in the same way, much of what you'll be doing in this class will take place in the field, in groups, often using paper and Post It notes and notecards and whiteboards, as well as the wiki and email and your text editor of choice.

But we'll be putting the sites on the web using Dreamweaver.

We'll use a programmed text: Essentials of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Those who have already worked through the text are set - although you may want to review chapters as we go and keep it around for reference.

Those who haven't worked through the text will need to. Each week, you'll be expected to work through three chapters. I'll ask you to print out and hand in evidence of your work for that week. I'll let you know each week what you'll need to hand in. Those who are already familiar with the text and Dreamweaver will start us off on the site project for the course; by the time it comes to creating your own site in the second half of the course, you'll be ready.

Using a programmed text means you can learn Dreamweaver on your own time at your own pace on your platform of choice. It means we don't have to use time in class learning tedious practices that are best learned slowly and individually. It means you can go over the modules as often as you like. It means that you can probably share a text.

The programmed text is pretty good - visual design aside. The modules build from chapter to chapter, taking you from basic moves of creating and linking pages through advanced page design, templates, drop down menus, rollovers, and cascading style sheets: all the technical matters you'll need to be familiar with to design and update a site. The programmed text will help you learn Dreamweaver better than I could.

You could rush your way through the Dreamweaver text. Please don't. If you know Dreamweaver well, it will be just that much easier to move through the text, and I'd bet you're going to learn a few things that will make you more productive with Dreamweaver. I don't expect you to master Dreamweaver - although you're welcome to if you like. But I will - and your group will - expect you to know the topics the programmed text covers well enough to contribute to your project.

Images and Other Web Technologies

If necessary, we will cover how to prepare original content images - scans and digital photos - for the web, using Photoshop Elements. We have a scanner and a digital camera available in the classroom, and many of you already own digital cameras.

Although you are welcome to explore the following technologies on your own, we will not be covering them in class, nor do you need to know about them.

• Java
• Javascript
• CSS
• Flash, Shockwave, or other animation software
• Database access
• CGI or forms processing

The WCW Wiki

We'll use a wiki to support the practices and procedures in this course.

• I'll use it to post assignments, announcements, instruction sheets, my observations on class ...
• You'll use it for your projects to plan, keep notes, share text, track what you're doing, submit plans, and record individual work.
• Individually, you may use it for class notes and assignments.

Grad Student Requirements

As grad students, you are expected to demonstrate more mastery of the concepts we're working with, be more forward in offering your input grounded in those concepts, and take on leadership in groups. We'll discuss further grad requirements for projects and exercises as we approach them. My advice: Get out in front.

Due Dates and Preparedness

The class moves quickly. And because this is a studio class, you'll be expected to have materials ready and with you to work on when you come to class. Since you will be able to work anywhere you have a computer, online or off, you should have little difficulty being prepared.

Assignments are due on time, please. Late projects and assignments will loose a full grade for every day they are late. If you don't submit the materials at all, I'll subtract the points from your final total.

Attendance

This is a workshop course. So after the first few weeks, many class sessions will be group work sessions. I want to keep course meetings flexible. Some days, we might meet for ten minutes, then scatter. Other days, we might not need to meet as a class, although the room will be open and I'll be available. We'll decide how to proceed as we go. We will touch base at least once each week, and attendance at these meetings will count towards your final grade.

So plan on being in class when it is scheduled, and on time, please. Missing four scheduled classes will cut into your final grade. Miss six and I'll ask you to drop.

You may be making group presentations during the course, mainly to get comments and feedback from others. You'll have plenty of time to prepare, and we'll discuss what to prepare in advance.

Assessment and Grading

Your grades on projects - and your final grade - will reflect both your work on the design and writing and your understanding of the rhetorical principles on which you base your choices. While the sites demonstrate that you can do something, in-class critiques, exercises, and in-class discussions demonstrate your understanding of the content writing principles on which you grounded your choices.

All work must be completed to receive a final grade for the course. But here's the way grading will work out - subject to change. I may adjust the number of points on some of the projects.

• Completing the Dreamweaver Essentials workbook - 100 points
• The site reworking project - 500 - 700 points
• Exercises/quizzes - varies. Possibly 5 - 7 exercises of 50 - 100 points each
• Final project 400 points, report 100 points, including demonstration of understanding of page design and content writing principles in your oral presentation of your site
• general civility, engagement, helpfulness to others - up to 200 points

Cutoffs

A final word: Learning is about going past what you've done before, even setting aside something you're comfortable with, and trying something new, something you haven't seen before, and thinking about why and how it works - or doesn't. The course gives you that opportunity. Take it.

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I may revise this syllabus during the semester if needed. I will inform you of any revisions and mark them in the syllabus.