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Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide Version 1.0

1. All items 1000 Starrec items t x e mE K x 7 amp Your stuff G Snares tems Black holes spinning faster than ever before 6 48 AM 3 hours ag SNotes from Physics Org Trends shl Browse for stuff People you follow 154 3 new followers View PhysOrg com Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe Dr Alejo Martinez Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio optical and X ray data They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Comment view Add star Like Share Share with note lt Email D Keepunread Sendito Pluames Schirmer 88 Sda ieil E Ben McCorkle 52 W Roger Travis 1 Area 51 Secrets The US Military Used Fake May 22 2011 16 hours ago ciancy Ratiitt 2 Cardboard Cutouts of Planes to Fool the Russians Area 51 Bein Loguidice 2 com by Casey Chan Sharing settings 0 people Explore Recommended nems 5 Recommended sources TIGSource OSNews Eurogamer Gamasutra News View all recommendations Subscriptions abandonware 7 Abandonia 7 5 E academic gaming 24 J Grand Text Auto 24 Alot of Cold War era Area 51 documents have been Geclassified and National Geographic has discovered a rather low tech method the US
2. lt html gt Now save the file and view it in your web browser It should look just that same as before You won t notice the benefits of fully specify ing the HTML page in this way until you get further along in your coding skills But for now if you look at the source code of a web page you ll have a better understanding of the major elements that frame the text 66 Web Writing Style Guide Finally there is one last thing to do See where it says Untitled Document in between the lt title gt tags in your HTML code You need to change that to the title of your web page to look like this lt title gt My First Web Page lt title gt Once you have done so save your file and view it again in your browser Now you ll see that the title of your web page shows up in the top bar of the browser window Search engines will also use this to help index your website See Every Page Needs a Title for more on on the rhetoric of page titles There are certainly many more HTML tags worth knowing about in order to properly markup your content To learn more begin either W3Schools s HTML Tutorial or HTML Dogs HTML Beginner Tu torial they can take you from here Time to Style Your Document with CSS CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets It is the system used on the web to control the appearance and layout of web pages In the early days of the web coders would change the visual look of their content by embedding a
3. A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability Berkeley New Riders 2006 Print Lake Chris How to Write for the Web 23 Useful Rules Econsul tancy Enconsultancy com Ltd 28 October 2010 Web 27 May 2011 Lennartz Sven Should Links Open in New Windows Smashing Magazine Smashing Media GmbH 1 July 2008 Web 27 May 2011 Linotype com Linotype GmbH n d Web 30 May 2011 A List Apart A List Apart Magazine n d Web 27 May 2011 Lynch Patrick J and Sarah Horton Web Style Guide 3rd edition Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton n d Web 27 May 2011 Mashable Mashable n d Web 26 May 2011 McAshan Travis Is Your Website Design CRAP Glide Glide De sign 18 May 2010 Web 27 May 2011 MetaFilter Matthew Haughey n d Web 26 May 2011 Networked Blogs Facebook Facebook Inc n d Web 27 May 2011 Notepad Don HQ n d Web 27 May 2011 Open Source Web Design OSWD n d Web 27 May 2011 paint net dotPDN LLC n d Web 27 May 2011 pixlr pixlr com n d Web 27 May 2011 Reddit Cond Nast Digital n d Web 26 May 2011 Redish Janice Ginny Letting Go of the Words Writing Web Content That Works Boston Elsevier Morgan Kaufmann 2007 Print Reid Alex Why Blog Searching for Writing on the Web Writing Spaces Readings on Writing Vol 2 Writing Spaces 2011 Web 26 May 2011 RSS in Plain English Common Craft Common Craft LLC 23 April 2007 Web 27 May 2011
4. 2011 Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation n d Web 27 May 2011 WordPress com Automatic Inc n d Web 26 May 2011 WordPress org Automatic Inc n d Web 26 May 2011 Credits A special thanks to Michael Day for his contributions in developing the idea for the Web Writing Style Guide Writing Spaces also would like to thank our partners at Parlor Press WAC Clearinghouse and Grand Valley State University s Sus tainable Community Development Initiative for their continued sup port of Writing Spaces The Web Writing Style Guide is hosted on the Writing Spaces s website using Drupal an open source content management system The RSS icon in the What the Hell Is RSS section is Bharath Prabhuswamy and is from his Android Icons Set 2 76
5. Rundle Mike How C R A P Is Your Site Design Think Vitamin Carsonified 10 April 2006 Web 27 May 2011 Resources 75 SEOMoz The Beginner s Guide to SEO SEOMoz SEOMoz n d Web 27 May 2011 Shea David and Molley E Holzschlag The Zen of CSS Design Visual Enlightenment for the Web Berkeley PeachPit Press 2005 Print Snell Steven 100 Free High Quality XHTML CSS Tem plates Smashing Magazine Smashing Media GmbH 1 December 2008 Web 27 May 2011 Stanworth Max 25 Examples of Clean and Well designed Web Sites Design Shard Design Shard n d Web 27 May 2011 Stevens Ted Committee Meeting Comments US Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation Washington D C 28 June 2006 Stock XCHNG HAAP Media Ltd n d Web 27 May 2011 Technorati Technorati Media n d Web 26 May 2011 TextWrangler Bare Bones n d Web 27 May 2011 Twitter Twitter Inc n d Web 26 May 2011 Typekit Typekit Inc n d Web 28 May 2011 United States Dept of Health amp Human Services Chapter 3 Acces sibilty Research Based Web Design amp Usability Guidelines United States n d Web 28 May 2011 WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool WebAIM n d Web 28 May 2011 W3schools Refsnes Data n d Web 27 May 2011 Web Pages That Suck Flanders Enterprises n d Web 27 May 2011 Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Foundation n d Web 27 May
6. Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide i Version 1 0 Edited by Matt Barton James Kalmbach and Charles Lowe A Writing Spaces amp Parlor Press Open Textbook 2011 by Writing Spaces This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike 3 0 Unported License and are subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use To view a copy of this license visit http creativecommons org licenses by nc sa 3 0 or send a letter to Creative Commons 171 Second Street Suite 300 San Francisco California 94105 USA To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use visit http writingspaces org terms of use All rights reserved The Writing Spaces mission is to grow an active community of teachers that improve student learning by creating using and pro moting open educational resources for the writing classroom Grand Valley State University s Sustainable Community Development Initiative is the institutional home for the Writing Spaces project Parlor Press LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications write to Parlor Press 3015 Brackenberry Drive Anderson SC 29621 or e mail editor parlorpress com Contents About v Contributors vi Licensing vii Introduction 2 I Know How to Write Papers Does Any of That Stuff Apply Online 2 Whar s the Same When Writing for the We
7. and content strate gists specialize in managing that content for an organization writ ing editing organizing managing media and sustaining the website over time Although they work on teams with graphic artists HTML coders interface designers and programmers they still need to under stand how the HTML code that runs the web works to be effective You do not necessarily need to be a whiz at coding web pages but you should understand what the HTML mark up codes are and what they do OK You Convinced Me What Is This About Marking Up A Document Understanding HTML and CSS can help you understand how many documents work including documents not on the web HTML is a de scendant of something called Standard Generalized Markup Language SGML that was developed in the mid 1960s at IBM as a way of pro cessing large sets of documents on mainframe computers HTML a very simplified version of SGML was developed in the late 1980s and is at the heart of all web pages Extensible Markup Language XML another variation of SGML was developed in the late nineties specifi cally to exchange information between different kinds of servers Since then XML has become a popular way of exchanging all sorts of information Did you know that modern word processors use XML and style sheets to format your text and style it The x in docx for Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010 denotes that your word processing file is XML based Meanwhile HTML now in
8. ate writing classes it can also be a suitable resource for other writers interested in learning more about writing for the web This document is available as a web text for reading online a print er friendly PDF and an EPUB ereader versions Visit http writing spaces org wwsg to learn more Contributors The following people contributed text revisions and or copy edits to the Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide vi Susan E Antlitz South University Online Matt Barton St Cloud State University Colin Charlton University of Texas Pan American Dennis G Jerz Seton Hill University James Kalmbach Illinois State University Virginia Kuhn University of Southern California Charles Lowe Grand Valley State University Cedrick May The University of Texas at Arlington Patricia A McCabe Remmell Technical Writer for Aslan Document Management Services Craig A Meyer Ohio University Rick Mott Eastern Kentucky University Holly Pappas Bristol Community College James P Purdy Duquesne University Jim Ridolfo University of Cincinnati Kyle D Stedman University of South Florida Pavel Zemliansky James Madison University Elizabeth D Woodworth Auburn University at Montgomery vii Licensing The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide Version 1 0 http writingspaces org wwsg title is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3 0 Unported License The Writing Spaces s in
9. images layout video and other media Using these new forms of writing also raises new issues about copyright and fair use A good starting point is to learn some basic design principles To think about visual design of your pages you need a design vocabulary a set of terms you can use to talk about what you like and don t like in a web page While there are many different sets of terms you could learn con trast repetition alignment and proximity CRAP is a good place to start Read Mike Rundle s How C R A P is Your Site Design and Travis McAshan s Is Your Website Design CRAP Go read them now Seriously It s going to be hard to make progress with visual de sign without understanding CRAP White Space Is Your Friend In the previous section we recommended that you read about the CRAP design principals as a way of getting starting thinking about and talking about the visual design of your web pages Now that you understand what CRAP is a good next principle is that the background on the page the white space also known as Rhetorics of Web Pages 41 negative space is your friend Cluttered websites where everything is smashed together can be difficult to read Take a moment to browse Max Standworth s article 25 Examples of Clean and Well Designed Web Sites See how in these examples of good design there is plenty of white space The text has room to breathe and the pages are much mo
10. its own expectations and its own commu nities In the articles in this section you will find information about these various genres and advice about the best ways to write within them The second section The Rhetoric of Web Pages looks at the rhetorical issues that surround writing for the web Whether you are writing blog entries wiki pages or creating your own personal portfo lio web site you are creating web pages and you will want to do more with these pages than slap up grey walls of text This section contains advice about various rhetorical issues such as managing your hyper links using headlines to organize your pages attending to visual issues such as layout fonts and graphics understanding copyright issues and a primer to HTML coding Writing in the Genres of the Web Do you have a blog Do you contribute to a fan wiki about your favor ite TV show movie or book series Do you tweet If you do you may be thinking I don t need no stinkin style manual But wait Maybe just maybe you will find some advice about improving your blog or managing your wiki useful And if the above paragraph is Greek to you you will find an intro duction to some of the genres of the web helpful The web is not a blank piece of virtual paper waiting to be filled with content It is a network of communities each of which has its own expectations its own values and its own strategies for success In this first section
11. we examine some of these communities and their preferred genres In addition because the web is a big community in itself you should also be thinking about how you can promote your writing in the greater community of the web To help you we have included sections on using Reddit Digg Facebook and RSS feeds to promote your writing and manage your reading Wuar Is A BLOG WHAT ABOUT TUMBLR WHAT ABOUT TWITTER ARE NOTES ON FACEBOOK THE SAME AS A BLOG I am confused Are all these things blogs It s complicated In some senses yes all of these writing spaces could be described as blogs which blend opinion news aggregation posting links to news articles or columns embedded images video and and and and they allow readers to comment But following some definitions not all of these spaces would be called blogs In their most typical form blogs are easily updatable sites that collect a series of posts in reverse chronological order i e newest post first at the top of the page allow comments and are often orga 6 Genres of the Web 7 nized by tags Notice the wording there a blog is made up of multiple posts not multiple blogs as folks new to the word sometimes claim Even though a Twitter feed or Facebook Notes page may fit many of these traits if you said Hey you should check out the new post on my blog the listener is most likely to think that you are talking about a site created on Blogger
12. 21 How CAN FACEBOOK HELP TO PROMOTE My WEB WRITING I have a bunch of friends on Facebook How can I take advantage of these nitwits to help promote my writing In many cases your friends and family will hopefully be the ones most likely to want to see your work After all they have a personal investment in you and would like to see you succeed So announcing your work on Facebook and posting links on your wall is a good way to start getting exposure That may sound lame at first you want a big audience of strang ers not your mom cousin and that friend from kindergarten you just reconnected with Nevertheless you now have the world s largest so cial network working for you If your mom posts to her friends and some of them post to theirs pretty soon you have dozens or hundreds of people checking your work out m Gr oups creative blogging TT e artylizer creative micro blogging network v iPhone Android apps e 1 Join Group Entertainment amp Arts 2 861 members I bet I can find 100 000 people who love creative writing blogging 1 Join Group Just for Fun 44 members Creative Confectionery Blog i Common Interest 1 Join Group 87 members z5 TiS Positive Blogging Week G Intemet amp Technology 1 Join Group cu 18 members CBW Creative Blog Writing pea 7 members Figure 8 Use Facebook s search bar to find any existing groups dedicated to your topic You can then join th
13. Also you should copy the image to your server rather than link ing to a copy of the image on the orignal server so that you are not using the original artists bandwidth Outside of classroom settings where you may be using an image to make a point in an online essay or as part of a mashup or other project see the next section you should only use other people s visuals after you have obtained permission from the copyright holder Even if you are creating a website for a client as part of a service learning project or in an internship think carefully before using images you find on the web You ll want to avoid the professional embarrassment your client or employer would receive from a take down notice How Can I Use Images and Create Remixes and Mashups If I Can t Copy from the Web If you are creating texts for a class assignment that will only be shared with your teacher and in your class educational fair use rights do al low you great liberty to borrow copyrighted works from the web Fair use rights are specific exemptions to copyright law that allow for use Rhetorics of Web Pages 57 in certain circumstances creating works for the classroom being one of them Only you can t share what you produce with anyone beyond the context of that class No showing your multimedia production to family and friends And certainly no publishing to the public Internet That would violate copyright law There are some fair use exceptions o
14. Click on the Link icon in the upper left hand corner of a map copy the code and then paste the code into your page following the same process as above JAZZING Up YOUR WEB PAGES THE GOOD THE BAD OR THE UGLY If images videos and fonts are a good idea why not animated GIFs Emoticons and flashy things of all kinds Why not just kick things up a notch with some moonwalking Yeah That looks cool But wait This handbook is all about the rhetoric Does your flashy thing have a purpose What will your reader user think Will they say This is so cool I want to be just like this person Or will they say No way I am touching this flashy page with a ten foot pole and move on as quickly as they can click the back button Each time you jazz up your web page you need to think about your readers and about the values you are communicating to your readers Wait Animated GIFs Aren t Cool Anymore What s considered cliche in the world of web writing Animated GIFs are cute but they can slow down page loading times considerably While they were immensely popular in the 1990s today they are usually only found on MySpace pages fan web sites and sig nature lines in forum posts in some online communities Animated 52 Web Writing Style Guide GIFs do not show up on smart phones and they are usually limited to certain interface elements And while we re at it Flash can be uncool too especially when it s u
15. In the early days of web design you would have to wade through the code of each and every one of those pages changing the various in line attributes associated with the background image and every oc currence of the italics attribute of your font face tags With CSS you have to edit only a few lines in a single document your stylesheet Plus if you ever have to go back and edit the content the writing that is marked up by the HTML it s much easier to read and add to the content when that content is not littered with formatting attributes So let s get started with a little CSS coding exercise In the article Creating a Basic Web Page Is Easy you learned how to code a simple web page Use your text editor to open the webpage html file you created Still have it If not you can copy the example HTML text from that section and create a new file View the file in Firefox Chrome or Safari again rememeber not to use Internet Explorer As you do resize your browser window See how your paragraph always expands or contracts to fill the width of the window Suppose you wanted all of the paragraphs in your web page to be the same width regardless of the size of the browser window Easy to do with CSS 1 Open your text editor to a new blank file 2 Save the new file as style css Note if you are using Windows Notepad you will need to change the save as file type to All Files Important Be sure that you are saving t
16. Miltary used to fool the Russians It involved cardboard the occasional heater and infrared satellites 14 Take our new survey Emaithis 76 comments on th s tem Oigg This Figure 9 Google Reader is a full featured RSS reader with tons of features The Rhetorics of Web Pages You may be thinking that if all you are doing is writing blog entries why do you need to think about rhetorical issues And it is true that many blog templates offer you very little control over the look of your pages Still no matter how little control you may feel you have you still can add hyperlinks headers and subheaders graphics and videos Different genres of web writing offer different degrees of control over the rhetoric of your pages but these issues are always present to one degree or another This section is not a how to guide you will not find step by step directions or software tutorials There are plenty of other sources for such tutorials on the web We encourage you to consider your overall strategy and purpose before getting down to specifics Once you know the best ways to appeal to your audience the rest is easy HYPERLINKS ARE THE TUBES OF THE INTERNET While U S Senator Ted Stevens metaphor of the Internet as a series of tubes 2006 is inaccurate we can reasonably think of hyperlinks as the paths or if you want to get sci fi geeky wormholes through which we travel across the World Wide Web Click a link and
17. Pages Notes colleagues educating students on the misuse of passive voice rather than expecting his pam students to remember the archaic rules that were once embedded in their heads a long time LJ My Notes 4 290 LJ My Drafts g Notes About Me That s in the hippocampus right where archaic rules are stored Jump to Friend or Page Readers know what to expect when they read a novel or a poem because there is almost always a synopsis of the piece of written work they are reading Figure 2 Dennis Baron s Facebook Notes Facebook Notes are very similar to blogs but are primarily intended to be read by friends on Facebook My Blog Sucks Can You Please Help There are millions of blogs What will make mine stand out Know why youre writing and who youre writing it for Although the stereotypical blog consists of a Rebecca Black like ramblings of uninteresting personal events there are also plenty of respected and thoughtful blogs out there on every topic imaginable There are also bloggers who are paid by companies to blog about their products or services as well as bloggers who work for professional news organi zations Most bloggers cultivate audiences by showcasing their per sonalities and opinions Even blogs about the latest gadgets such as Engadget are frequently humorous and irreverent making them 10 Web Writing Style Guide enjoyable even for people who don t care about the gadget or device they re writing ab
18. Web Pages 43 Make sure your visuals are appropriate and relevant to what the rest of the text says on the page Don t pick a visual just because it looked cool when you found it Visuals should enhance the meaning Make sure your images are good quality JPG artifacts and pixelat ed images caused by making a very small original image larger look unprofessional and sloppy A good rule of thumb is to stick with the high setting 60 or more when saving JPGs Crop images to remove unnecessary information e g when creat ing screenshots remove the browser window and to focus the reader s attention on what is important in the visual Cropping an image to exclude extraneous detail can dramatically improve the image s effec tiveness Beware of stretching images out of proportion if you prepare them in an image manipulation program Don t make your images look like they came from a distorted reflection in a fun house mirror Provide captions when using multiple visuals in longer web texts Captions will orient the reader to your reason for including the visual Otherwise readers have to guess your intentions Reduce very large images using a graphics program While HTML provides a method for defining the width and height of an image this method does not change the file size You don t want your reader to have to wait for that 5MB image file to load when you could have eas ily resized and resampled the image to 50k
19. a website title Here s an example using a modified version of the Endgaget post As reported in The iPhone Tracking Fiasco and What You Can Do About It the buzz this week on tech news sites is Ap ple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone Yes This is contrary to what writers do in print where quotations and italics are added to emphasize that the text is a title of a work and whether it is a small or large work In web writing the format ting for the hyperlink will emphasize the title that you have already capitalized The reader can click the link and immediately see what kind of work it is adding quotes or italics adds unnecessary additional emphasis EXCEPTION if you include a bibliography in your web writing you should follow the conventions for punctuating titles in the citation format you adopt for your references whether or not you chose to hy perlink the title of a reference that is also available online Rhetorics of Web Pages 29 PAGE TITLES HEADLINES AND SUBHEADERS OH MY The one thing you never want to see in your web pages whether on your blog your wiki or your own website are grey pages with noth ing but text no links no headlines no images People like to scan and skim on the web This is no surprise Read ers have skimmed and scanned ever since newspapers st
20. added to image tags with HTML WYSIWYGs may prompt you for this to describe the image for those that cannot see it It is particularly critical that any image that does rhetorical work in your web pages have an alt tag For example if you use a graphic button as your home link a blind person will not be able to infer the purpose of the link unless you tag it with something like alt home An automated assessment tool like WAVE Web Accessibility Eval uation can help HTML coders determine the accessibility of their web pages Still WAVE is only going to get you so far if you don t under stand the principles of how to design for accessibility For an introduc tion on how to make your website accessible consult usability gov s chapter on accessibility It s NOT PLAGIARISM IF IT S ON THE WEB RIGHT You wish Let s think for a second about the difference between copyright vio lations and plagiarism a helpful distinction to keep in mind when discussing how this stuff works online Copyright violation is a ega issue Because we want people to make awesomely creative content Words Music Art Philosophy Etc the United States has laws that allow content creators to control how their creations are used for a certain amount of time The law states that people have an automatic copyright on their own creations Anything you create is automatically copyrighted once it is fixed in a medium When you are writing a p
21. assist readers by putting the links in context by linking to something meaningful in the text Using contextual links we can create effective transitions for the read er to the next web text and we better connect the texts we write to those on other web pages Here are two different revisions of the previ ous example that illustrate this concept As reported at Endgaget the buzz this week on tech news sites is Apple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone As reported at Endgaget the buzz this week on tech news sites is Apple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone In the first example the link is emphasizing where you got the information and where readers should go to learn more about it The second example emphasizes what the link is about Since you men tioned Engadget earlier in the sentence users will probably realize the link will go there But it could also go to a Wikipedia definition or to a link on Apple s apps store In any case the meaning of the two is slightly different One provides direct indication of where the reader will go on the web revision 1 and the other indicates to the reader what will be learned revision 2 If youre reporting news or i
22. be savvy with HTML and CSS you can often customize these templates with your preferred graphics or colors And that s a great way to learn more about HTML and CSS many of the contributors to this guide learned much the same way Fortunately for you you won t run of out of good resources to learn about web design Because web designers design for the web they tend to share all kinds of resources online For instance A List Apart is the premier web design trade magazine With it you can read about topics of interest to professional web designers such as tips for bet ter coding how to work with clients and web content strategy And it s published for free online A little Google magic and you can find many more resources about how to do almost anything in web design Resources The following list of resources includes not only many of the web tuto rials and social media services you have previously encountered in this guide but also others that will help you in your journey to become a virtuoso writer for the web Aviary Aviary Inc n d Web 27 May 2011 bitly Betaworks n d Web 26 May 2011 Blogger Google n d Web 26 May 2011 Brain Traffic Brain Traffic n d Web 28 May 2011 Castro Elizabeth Creating a Web Page in HTML Berkeley PeachPit Press 2004 Print Color Meanings by Culture The International Business Edge Global ization Group Inc n d Web 27 May 2011 Color Scheme Designer 3 Petr S
23. get a little fancier Black text on a white back ground is boring Let s reverse it We can do that by specifying proper ties for the entire lt body gt of the web page Since the body tag controls everything that appears in the browser window it s a good place for global style rules In your CSS file leave the previous code you entered for para graphs and add the following body background color 000000 color ffffFF The first property sets the background color for the entire page There is also an attribute background image that you can use to Rhetorics of Web Pages 71 specify a visual as the background instead of or in addition to a color If you examine the CSS code used in the CSS Zen Garden designs you will find many background images The second property color always refers to text color even though it doesn t say font or text With both the background color and color properties the color is designated using a six digit hexa decimal number Using W3School s HTML Color Picker or Color Scheme Designer you ll find a wide variety of colors are available for your background color as well as their corresponding hex number Save your CSS file and refresh your webpage html in the web browser It should look something like this Firefox 7 LI My First Web Page ile gt gt i My First Web Page Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it I ll be a
24. make you or your company look bad Don t use your blog to vent about your crappy job or stupid boss You may assume the people you insult won t ever see your blog but don t count on it If you re not sure how someone you re talking about will respond to what you post it s probably best to leave out the names and keep revealing details vague You might work at Wal Mart and enjoy making fun of the weird customers you see in your store but if your supervisor sees it you ll be blogging for a living You Are Now a Part of the Blogosphere When first starting your weblog you ll have to develop your credibil ity and personality to attract readers One way to do this is to use the writing by other influential and widely read bloggers as research and Genres of the Web 11 sources in your posts Provide direct links in your posts to those oth er bloggers blogs Such direct linking allows you to join the blogger community the blogosphere and will help to increase the visibility of your blog on the Web Think about how good you d feel if a fellow blogger linked to one of your posts and talked about how interesting or useful it was to them Wouldn t you be more likely to read that per son s blog and want to learn more about it Find your niche in the blogosphere Services like Technorati or Google Blog Search can be used to find blogs that deal with the same topics you write about Start reading those blogs Bloggers oft
25. or less Almost any stand alone or web based image program can be used to reduce your image file sizes and the results can dramatically increase the speed at which your pages load See the next section for more information on image programs Free Image Editing Programs You Can Use If you need an image manipulation program to crop or resize your visuals don t feel like you have to buy Adobe Photoshop Almost any contemporary image program will work In particular there are free desktop graphics programs you can can download and install on your computer such as Paint Net Windows and GIMP Windows Mac Linux While not as powerful as Adobe Photoshop the industry standard used by commercial photographers and graphic artists these pro grams are more than sufficient for a new web writer designer Later 44 Web Writing Style Guide on should you have access to working with Adobe Photoshop the skills you learn from GIMP or Paint Net will transfer If you just need a one shot tool to do a quick resize or crop or to re duce the size of a graphics file and you don t want to install a program online graphic editing programs such as Aviary or pixlr are becoming more powerful and should work just fine WTE Way Tuis FONT There are thousands upon thousands of fonts out there Why stick with Times New Roman or Verdana when you could use a font that looks just like The Matrix However will an awesome looking font really make peop
26. say a day go ahead and start making the changes Also when you do make a change be sure to use the justification feature to explain why you thought the change was necessary If youre only making a small change such as adding a missing period or correcting a misspelled word click the minor change option Most wiki people are happy to have you join their efforts but only if you re sensible enough to be polite and upfront about what you re doing there Comments 3 babbishm said at 7 55 pm on Apr 19 2010 One hurdle that expertise tumover may face is the human element where an employee withholds critical information from other employees thus to strengthen his her role in the company This is becoming very common especially today for people are desperate for job security in light of recession induced competition and globalization Ainsley said at 8 12 pm on Apr 19 2010 I know at this point we are just supposed to be identifying threats but I m interested in seeing the solution As it stands the strategy is steps should be taken to ensure that multiple people have access to specialized knowledge within a given organization What forms might this take I noticed the Appropriate Exit Preparation area so perhaps a solution could be senior members of these groups be required to write some type of exit document sharing their specific knowledge that would help the remaining members Would the write a prop
27. the Same Style I have a bunch of people using my wiki but it s making it really rough How can I get all these people to write the same way On one hand you can t On the other hand as the text comes to gether new contributors may pick up on the existing style and begin to adopt it Other contributors may notice the places where the styles don t match and over time the text may self correct Even though the purpose and structure of wikis prevents you from having complete control over the text you can edit the contributions where needed to improve coherence and consistency Some wikis are entirely open in which case you are giving up con trol as an author but other wikis are set up with more editorial control You ll have to decide which best meets the needs for your project Let the standards evolve organically if you can then apply them retroac tively to existing pages Whatever you do don t make a bunch of complex rules before the wiki takes root Doing that will only scare off potential contributors who will be worried they might accidentally break a rule or misunder stand something Remember you want to make your wiki a friendly welcoming place If you come off as stern and quick to criticize or en force your policy you may intimidate the very people who would help you the most A so so wiki with lots of content and participation is better than a really awesome ghost wiki Genres of the Web 19 WHAT ARE REDD
28. to 4 Web Writing Style Guide always title your work In addition once people arrive at your pages you have broken big chunks of text into smaller sections with sec tion headings so they can find what they want quickly Anything that takes longer than 10 minutes for the average person to read should be broken up into multiple posts or sections Instead of thinking in terms of articles or essays try to think more about paragraphs blogs and sentences tweets Writing for the web also means that you are part of an information ecology Other people may find your writing through a search engine or an RSS feed They can easily search your text for keywords or zip instantly to a chapter or section Writing for the web also has built in community features it s a lot faster and easier to get feedback from your readers and have dis cussions about your texts when you put them online Communities are what make writing for the web so much fun Before authors had to wait weeks if not months or even years to get feedback on their work By that time it was old news Now writers can post a blog and get comments in only a few hours or less Interacting with your audi ence will help you tailor your writing style and topics to better suit them so pay attention to what they say Writing for the web also means writing with media You can in clude color images and videos with your texts You can include ani mation and sound You can write wi
29. visit your site to see your content and fewer and fewer people are willing to do that Simply put if you don t have an RSS feed youre already invisible to a big chunk of your potential read ership Almost all wiki blogging and content management software al ready have RSS feeds built in and it s usually on by default so there s nothing to worry about Just make sure you see the orange square when you visit your site If you don t see it check the options and help menus to figure out how to turn it on If youre coding your site from 24 Web Writing Style Guide scratch you ll need to look into XML and learn how to properly tag your stuff Try the W3Schools RSS Tutorial Most software will let you choose what you want in your RSS feed Typically you ll have the option to just show the page title the page title and a teaser or the full posts Usually you ll want the second option since you want to tease the audience enough to have them ac tually visit your site If you don t care about that go with the third op tion The first option is the most restrictive and will probably reduce your visitors Once you know your RSS feed you can promote it using Feed burner Feedburner will let you track your subscribers and learn some things about them such as where they re from GB Aca a subscription All items Show Expanded Li Home Show 1000 new items all tems Mark all as read Refresh View settings
30. will do during the semester of your internship For each credit hour earned you must work at least 48 hours e Enrollment in ENG 398 498 is by permission of the internship director only Enrollment permission will be given by Dr Savage when application materials are completed and proof of an approved internship is provided e An Internship Proposal Form must be submitted for internships with organizations not previously approved by the English Studies Internship Program The proposal form must be signed by the internship site supervisor and by the student Certain internships have specific requirements of class standing coursework or prior internship experience to qualify Figure 13 Example from Internship Qualifications and Requirements of content organized into a list You may also have noticed that in these negative examples there weren t any paragraph breaks and instead the information was pre sented as one long paragraph In both examples putting each new topic in its own paragraph would have made the text much more read able Keep your paragraphs short when you write on the web to help your readers Well written short paragraphs have much the same impact as subheaders and lists they break your text into visible chunks that help the reader find the information he or she is looking for quickly Can I Use Catchy Titles and Headings Catchy titles and headings can be helpful in some writing contexts such as on news public
31. you use other people s words or ideas acknowledge them Similarly you should also acknowledge your use of images or other media elements See the next section for more information In terms of what can be quoted there may be legal issues involved but generally you are allowed to quote any material that is freely avail able on the web in the same way that you can in your research writing By convention and respect for the copyright holder though it s a good idea to quote only a few lines of text or at most a single paragraph You may also quote small portions of text from print sources Copying all of the text of a source print or digital into your text would be a copyright violation There are a few differences between how you handle citing sources in a research paper and on the web When using quoted material some bloggers use the rich possibilities of the web to do more than just use quotation marks Blogging templates often provide a way to indicate long quotations through some design element a different type font or size a text box of some kind a change of background color large quotation marks etc If you use many quotations in your posts you may want to think about using some design element to set off those quotations visually Rhetorics of Web Pages 55 Good news for bloggers in all this For acknowledging source au thors you are let off the hook in terms of MLA Works Cited pages or APA References pages Yippee Ins
32. D IT S ALL ABOUT THE CODE I use Facebook and other social media sites to post to the web Why should I learn to code While social media allows you to create and post a lot of content to the web without knowing how to code using hypertext markup lan guage HTML or cascading style sheets CSS you may eventually want to have more control over the presentation of your content Social media sites such as blogs and wikis are a great way to get your writ ten content out to the world quickly however these platforms all use templates that limit the control you have over the appearance of your pages The amount of tweaking that you can do to a template will vary from service to service and sometimes you will have to upgrade to a paid pro account But in almost all cases if you want more control over how your pages look on the web you have to learn about HTML and CSS If You Want to Work on the Web You Will Need to Know Some Code If you are a Writing English Marketing or Communications ma jor and you enjoy writing on the web you might wonder what career opportunities are out there One of the most promising career paths you might pursue is as a content strategist For more information on content strategy see Kristina Halvorson s article The Discipline of Rhetorics of Web Pages 59 Content Strategy in A List Apart as well as her company s web site Brain Traffic Content is at the heart of every good website
33. IT AND DIGG I ve heard these can give a big boost to my readership But how do I use them Reddit and Digg are social news or social bookmarking sites The Internet is huge and expanding faster than the jogging pants at an all you can eat buffet There s just too much new stuff for any one person to keep up with Social bookmarking sites rely on networks of special interest groups to find the best of the new stuff and report it back to the group Once the item is available on the site the rest of the group can vote it up or down The idea is that the cream will rise to the top It doesn t always work out so well in real life since there are ways to submit to gaming link text title Five Tips for Contributing to Redditi url suggest title reddit gaming popular choices reddit com AskReddit IAmA funny gaming pics politics todayilearned videos worldnews Figure 6 Submitting to Reddit is a straightforward process but you ll need to be creative with your title and make sure you select a proper reddit com munity Reddit communities exist for virutally every topic such as writing gaming and politics 20 Web Writing Style Guide game the system such as recruiting your friends to vote up your stuff Still the bigger networks have enough legitimate users to counteract these shenanigans Before worrying about how these sites can boost your views study them carefully paying attention t
34. O If you want to learn more strate gies and tips for improving the search engine ranking of your own or your employer s website check out SEOmoz s tutorial The Beginner s Guide to SEO Use Your Platform s Heading Styles and Life Will Be Good Once you have come up with a good title for your writing and sub headings to use within it you ll need to enter them on your site When using blogging software and other content management systems you ll likely be creating your text using a WYSIWYG what you see is what you get editor which gives you some formatting controls 5 Add New Post How to Write Titles and Headings Permalink http ce wordpress com 2011 05 15 how to write t s and headings Edit Upload Inset B A B Visual HTML B Z i e E SSe VY Gos Paragraph Oy U SAY MH MmMAlQ EEO 2 Can I Use Snazzy Catchy Titles Catchy titles and headings can be helpful in some writing contexts such as on news publications or a blog where the goal is to attract a loyal following of readers They might not be such a good choice for a business website or other more formal professional writing situations depending on the overall tone that is being set for the site Path p Word count 6 Figure 14 The standard WYSIWYG interface for WordPress Other blog software and content management systems have similar tools for creating and posting content 38 Web Writing Style Guide Beware the temptatio
35. Serif Sans literally means without so a sans serif font does not include any extra stroke at the ends of the letters WTF Arial WTF Helvetica Neue WTF Tahoma Figure 18 Examples of sans serif fonts Rhetorics of Web Pages 47 Many people feel that sans serif fonts look cleaner and more modern while serif fonts look more traditional more book like The conventional wisdom has been that serif fonts are more readable par ticularly in print while sans serif fonts are more legible If you have to read large blocks of text the serifs at the ends of letters makes them easier to identify and easier to read On the other hand the simplicity of Sans Serif fonts are thought to make these fonts more legible and easier to read in small sizes or on coarse screens For these reason you see lots and lots of sans serif fonts on web pages Which should you use We are not convinced that the serif vs sans serif argument really matters anymore Pick a font you like that fits the tone and the message of your site Pick a font that you think will appeal to the sorts of people that you want to read your stuff If you have a more traditional site you may want a more traditional serif font If you want a more hip modern look you may want a sans serif font Want More Choices Use Font Linking If you find your choice of web safe fonts to be too limiting or if you want to use a more decorative font for a headline your cho
36. Wordpress Typepad or another site like it not a section of your Facebook profile More on that below The presence of comments is crucial to blogging Comments make blogs a social often conversational form of writing so you should en able the comment feature of your blog Having comments builds ethos STEVENDKRAUSE COM School work life and everything olse Grien A simple iPad 2 movie May Howy Search LOGEN AND STUFF Figure 1 Writing professor Steve Krause s blog Note how user comments are featured as an important part of the site on the right hand side But be mindful of comments especially if anyone can post one such as someone that does not have an account because it may dam age your ethos if those comments are not monitored are completely off topic or spam Spammers and their spam bots are always coming 8 Web Writing Style Guide up with clever ways to get their seedy casino and male enhancement products out there and they ll often try to mimic real people If you see a comment that says Great post and has a link to a casino site delete it quickly Otherwise real people may see it and think you don t pay attention to your comments So why should they bother posting Who Writes and Reads Blogs Blogs are often written by one person but they can be written by two writers a team of people or even a whole community of contribu tors for example the popular community blogging site Met
37. ad PC These free programs are better in many ways than TextEdit or Notepad They have nice features such as color coding HTML tags showing line numbers and auto indentation all of which are really handy and speed up the coding process Important Whatever you do do not use a word processing pro gram like Microsoft Word The content produced in Microsoft Word does not play well with web browsers and should be avoided at all costs when you are creating your own pages Use the proper tool for the job use a text editor not a word processor 2 Now you are ready to begin creating your web page Type the following in your text editor Hello World 3 Save that file as webpage html Note if you are using Windows Notepad you will need to change the save as file type to All Files Be sure to type the extension html All files on the web must have an extension Your browser uses the extension to determine the file type html image video etc Without an extension the browser can t process the file 4 Open up the file in Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome or Apple Safari Important Even though Microsoft Internet Explorer IE is still the most popular web browser we recommend that you DO NOT use it as your primary browser for designing web pages IE has always been notorious for not following HTML CSS standards No browser gets standards perfect but IE is the worst at it by far You can com pose your code pr
38. afilter has about 50 000 members The cost of a blog may be underwritten by the writer no lunch is ever free and placed on a free blog hosting site such as Blogger Twitter WordPress com or within a corpora tion s main web site The Wall Street Journal The New York Times Mashable and magazines like Spin have blogs and people assigned to writing entries for them At the same time many people blog for themselves such as those using the easy to publish site Tumblr or those who download the open source version of WordPress and install it on their own server If you write on the Internet you may have a particular audience in mind but there will be untold numbers of second and third level audiences And generally all will have the ability to comment on your blog posts But You Didn t Answer the Bit about Facebook Notes Ahh Facebook As you know Facebook is a social networking site a virtual space that walls off friends from the rest of the Internet Only those who you have friended will see your Facebook Notes unless you designate that the entire universe of Facebook users can read your Notes In this respect Notes are much like Internet blogs Is it wise to allow all Facebook users the ability to read your Notes As with all Internet writing it depends on what you post and what you want others to read Therefore be sure to read how to safeguard your privacy on Facebook just as you would for an
39. almost instantaneously you will move to a new page within a web site or seemingly magically to some new website hosted half way around the globe In fact the importance of hyperlinks cannot be overstated there is no web without hyperlinks connecting one text to another or more often one text to many Thus understanding how to create effective hyperlinks is impor tant because when you create hyperlinks you are adding your pages to the network called the World Wide Web The following sections will help you to effectively use hyperlinks in your web writing 25 26 Web Writing Style Guide Click Here to Learn More about Hyperlinks One of the most common mistakes that noobs make is using the click here to hyperlink Consider the following example As reported at Endgaget the buzz this week on tech news sites is Apple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone Click here to learn more Well duh Because Internet users know that that if they click links the browser will take them to another web page it s redundant to say click here That s why the words are underlined and a different color than the rest of the text Here s a quick fix As reported at Endgaget the buzz this week on tech news sites is Apple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers
40. and click on a link leading you to a page with the following major headline Page 1 Do you think you will read on or will you return to your Google search for another page What if instead you found the following major headline Using Audacity to Recreate the Autotune Effect As a reader you may or may not know that this page will help turn you into the next T Pain but at least you know that it isn t a site about comma splices online casinos or Twilight Put your major headline at the top of each of your pages Tell us what your page is about and make that topic easy to find Subheaders and Lists In addition to page titles and major page headlines you also want to break up your text with subheaders Nothing you put on the web should look like the papers you turn in to professors Nothing says move on without reading to web users like grey blocks of text Ginny Redish recommends that you think of your subheaders as a conversa tion that you are having with your user People come to your pages with questions Use your subheaders to answer those questions Here is a page from the website of the English Department at Il linois State University about English minors with all of the subheaders and other formatting removed Minors are a combination of courses designed to provide a cohesive introduction to an area of study beyond the student s major The English Department offers four minors English Studies English Educatio
41. and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone Learn more We also recommend that you never set your links to open into new windows Your readers can be confused by this action and often do not realize that the browser has opened a new window they will try clicking on their back buttons only to find they no longer work Web savvy users can always force content to open in a new window anyway so it s not like you re eliminating the option for anyone who wants it Sven Lennartz s article Should Links Open in New Windows from Smashing Magazine has an excellent discussion of this issue For now though just remember to have your links open in the same window Use Contextual Hyperlinks Most people won t click on a link unless you let them know why they should bother Let s consider the previous example of the post about the iPhone Where you put the link can let the reader know whether youre just citing it as a source If you put it at the very end it usually signifies either that it s your main source of information and that users should click it to learn more For example a company who puts a press release on the Web fea turing a new product might add a learn more link at the end point Rhetorics of Web Pages 27 ing to a product page on their website The company wants you to read the press release first then follow the link However in many texts we can better
42. aper in your word processor and save it to your hard drive it is copyrighted Take a picture with your digital camera or phone The moment it is saved onto your camera or phone memory it s copyrighted No copyright notice required on your part 54 Web Writing Style Guide Copyright gives content creators a chance to make money from their work and hopefully continue making more As a copyright hold er of a creative work you control how that work can be redistributed and whether or not it can be modified There are certain circumstanc es where it s legal to use copyrighted material in ways beyond what the copyright owner allows These are called fair use situations but let s not get into that yet Plagiarism is an ethical issue While violations of copyright are determined in court and are mandated in laws acts of plagiarism are often not illegal at all though they can be Instead plagiarism occurs when someone uses content usually text but not necessarily in a way that isn t allowed by the community e g writing in a school setting or academic publishing in which the content is being used With that distinction in mind we can see how using text or images found online can violate standards of copyright plagiarism neither or both The same basic principles you use for your college research papers apply when you write for the web The short version if you use other people s words put quotation marks around them if
43. arted cram ming their pages with information centuries ago We are hunters and gatherers searching for information as web content strategist Ginny Redish likes to say in her book Letting Go of the Words We don t read we hunt If we do not think your page offers the information we want we move on Quickly Consider the times you have used a search engine to look for infor mation on a particular topic Type in your keywords Google shows you 150 234 results How do you choose what to read The page title that is displayed to you in the search engine results influences you on whether or not to visit that web page And then once you visit a web page from your search results you will often skim the headings when available to find what you need If the headings aren t yielding fruit ful indications that you are in the right place you may leave and try another search result even though the information you seek was ac tually there Or think about the times you have jumped on your favorite news site e g CNN ESPN Wired etc Much like when reading newspa pers the first thing most readers do is skim the headlines looking for something to catch their interest Readers do the same thing when they visit a blog that they haven t been to before As Copyblogger points out at the beginning of his tutorial about writing headlines for the web Your headline is the first and perhaps only impression you make on a prospective reader Withou
44. ask Why Do Wikipedia People Keep Deleting My Stuff Some idiot just deleted all my changes and hours of work What gives Imagine barging into a room announcing that the people there are idiots and rearranging the furniture Wouldn t you kick that person out The important thing to remember about wikis especially active ones is that they re social in nature Other people have put their best efforts into making it good and they won t appreciate an outsider making changes without first seeking their approval If you really don t know why people are deleting your edits go to the Discussion area of the entry and ask Tell the others that Hey I wrote this about that but someone deleted it Any idea why that s happening There s a lot of give and take going on behind the scenes Genres of the Web 17 which really isn t all that behind the scenes since it is made visible If you know you are right you may have to convince someone who has more clout a more respected ethos But if you provide the necessary evidence and rationale your stuff may just become part of the record It s better though to preempt deletions by announcing your in tentions first Go to the discussion or talk page for the article you want to change and read what s there in order to find out whether you re about to walk into a minefield Then describe what you think needs doing on the page If no one objects after a reasonable time
45. ations or a blog where the goal is to attract a loyal following of readers They might not be such a good choice for a business website or other more formal professional writing situations depending on the overall tone that is being set for the site 36 Web Writing Style Guide Think about the purpose of your text Are you trying to help users locate specific bits of information or answer specific questions they may have If so then simple direct headlines and subheaders are prob ably a better choice But if you are trying to encourage web users to stop and read your content then a catchy title can be a good idea es pecially if it leads to catchy engaging writing If you choose to use catchy titles for your web pages beware of making them enigmatic They should at least hint at at the focus of the content Otherwise readers who are actually interested in the specific focus of the page may not realize what it s about Over at Econsultan cy a community for digital media marketing specialists Chris Lake suggests using awesome adjectives as an easy tip for creating catchy headlines Headlines that include awesome adjectives tend to attract a lot more interest clicks retweets links than those that avoid them For example 16 bitchin shortcuts and commands for Twitter beats 16 shortcuts and commands for Twitter Ad jectives can be highly persuasive Try to incorporate them into your headlines But Lake also talks abo
46. b 3 Writing for the Web What s Different 3 What Will I Find in this Guide 5 Writing in the Genres of the Web 6 What Is a Blog What about Tumblr What about Twitter Are Notes on Facebook the Same as a Blog 6 Twitter Only Gives Me 140 Characters What the Heck 12 What Is a Wiki Is Ita Blog 15 What Are Reddit and Digg 19 How Can Facebook Help to Promote My Web Writing 21 What the Hell Is RSS 22 The Rhetorics of Web Pages 25 Hyperlinks Are the Tubes of the Internet 25 Page Titles Headlines and Subheaders OH MY 29 Damnit Jim I m a Writer Not a Graphic Designer Or Who Gives a CRAP 40 iii iv Web Writing Style Guide You Can t Write for the Web with out Working with Visuals 42 WTF Why This Font 44 How Can I Use Video on my Site 49 Jazzing Up Your Web Pages The Good the Bad or the UGLY 51 Not Everyone Can See Your Graphics 53 It s Not Plagiarism If It s on the Web Right 53 In the End It s All About the Code 58 Learning More About Code 72 Resources 73 Credits 76 About The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide was created as a crowd sourcing project of Collaborvention 2011 A Computers and Writing Unconference College writing teachers from around the web joined together to create this guide see our Contributors list The advice within it is based on contemporary theories and best practices While the text was originally written for students in undergradu
47. ble to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stupendous website S 4 Figure 26 Using a little CSS we have changed the background color to black and the font color to white From here you can go on to learn CSS rules that set margins add borders adjust line height or font size change the placement of items on the page etc the creative control available through CSS is quite extensive Start with HTML Dog s CSS Beginner Tutorial or W3Schools s CSS Introduction and you ll soon be on your way to coding like a pro 72 Web Writing Style Guide LEARNING MORE ABOUT CODE Admittedly weve made it sound easy so far It does take some work to get fluent in coding HTML and CSS You have to learn a new lan guage after all One way to grow from here as a coder without feeling the strain of creating it all yourself is to use templates Many web hosting sites like WordPress or Blogger provide pre coded templates made by graphic designers for those who want to build a web site but have no design experience Blogger will even let you edit the HTML in your template but do so with care it would be good to save a backup copy first Look around the web You ll find other places too For instance Smashing Magazine has an article by Steven Snell depicting 100 Free High Quality XHTML CSS Templates Open Source Web Design is another good place to look If you happen to
48. by making sure your text is clear and free of obvious errors You will look smarter worth taking seriously It s your ethos your English teacher profes sor might have told you about this the way you come across to your reader the face you put forward to the virtual world Better good than bad Better thoughtful than thoughtless If readers know that you respect their time and attention they ll be a lot more likely to read your stuff carefully and respond to it Don t waste their time and they ll be more likely to give it to you WRITING FOR THE WEB WHAT S DIFFERENT When writing for the web focus on the things that the web does better than print Use links to direct readers to related articles background infor mation and the source of your information Why settle for including only a small quotation when you can send your readers to the entire article Clicking a link is a lot easier than driving down to the library to find the book or article in question You can also use internal links which make it easier to move through a single document or connect to other pages within your website Google Docs for instance has a table of contents feature that will link together all the parts of your doc If you have a blog you can link to earlier posts that are relevant to what you re talking about Writing for the web means thinking about all of the different con texts in which your stuff can be found That s why it s important
49. d CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stupendous website The line break is gone That s because we need to use HTML to tell the browser about the structure of our document in this case that there are two distinct paragraphs There is a predefined set of HTML tags or terms that makeup the HTML language Your job as a HTML coder is to pick the one that most accurately describes the function of the content It is a heading A paragraph A list A link In this instance we need the paragraph tag lt p gt Note that every HTML tag is specified with angle brackets Add a lt p gt opening tag to the beginning of each paragraph and a lt p gt closing tag to the end of each paragraph The in the closing tag tells the browser that the paragraph is finished Rhetorics of Web Pages 63 NOTE You can learn more about the lt p gt tag at W3Schools in this section we ll frequently link to HTML definitions at W3Schools or HTML Dog so that you can learn more about HTML on your own and so that you can begin using these sites as resources Consider W3Schools s and HTML Dog s HTML reference pages as invaluable dictionaries of terms you won t be able to learn the language of HTML or CSS without such references Assuming that you have typed everything correctly your file should now look like this lt p gt Hello World lt p gt lt p gt This is my first web page Once I m done creating
50. d a PhD in Nerdology RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication The somewhat silly word syndication refers to the distribution of radio and television content to sta tions who didn t create the content but want to show it anyway On the Web content distribution is naturally easier in fact it s really simple All that is to say when we re talking about RSS we re talking about the delivery of content or the question of how to get the Internet content you want brought straight to you like your own personalized radio or TV channel But let s back up and talk about how RSS actually works and what it can do for you A great explanation of RSS is in the video RSS in Plain English produced by the fun folks at Common Craft They describe how in the traditional model of Web browsing people surf from site to site to site looking for new content that they re interested Genres of the Web 23 in That model is like shopping on a busy city street where you some times find stuff you want but you re just as likely to find crappy fake watches and illegal DVDs of The Matrix as the stuff youre actually trying to buy RSS technology allows you to change your Web brows ing to a model that s more like online shopping where you can stay home and have the things you want delivered instead of going out and browsing for them With RSS you can subscribe to the sites that youre interested in and be notified in one central locat
51. e boundaries between permissible and impermissible imitation stylistic Figure 23 Wikipedia provides sources for its information in a Notes section at the end of this entry on plagiarism 56 Web Writing Style Guide Pictures Don t Count Right It s as legal as trading commercial MP3s online Not Photographers artists and graphic designs put just as much time ef fort and expense for travel and equipment into their work as writers do Just as you shouldn t plagiarize or violate the copyright of written texts images deserve the same consideration If you need to use an im age you can create your own look for free graphics sites online pur chase an image or contact the creator for permission to use it There also are a good number of sites where image creators offer their work to be used for free for personal non commercial use asking only for credit and a link back to their site Nevertheless you ll find that bloggers frequently borrow images from other websites without permission because they know that the worst thing that will happen is that the copyright holder can send them a take down notice a formal letter which says stop using my image because I own it If you do choose to do like other bloggers be sure to properly attribute whose picture it is and where it came from even though you borrowed the content without permission many copyright holders might be appeased when they see proper credit is given
52. em and read what everyone s talking about If no group exists you can create your own group and then invite anyone you think might be interested to join 22 Web Writing Style Guide Of course if youre trying to keep your work anonymous steer clear of Facebook Even the old I found this cool thing online might backfire since you re sending it to the very people most able to know it s really you You can also save time by using Facebook apps that will coordinate your efforts to let the world know about your most recent stuff For instance the Facebook app Networked Blogs can be set up to auto matically update your Facebook and Twitter accounts every time you publish a new blog post and you can set things up so every time you Tweet it shows up on Facebook or vice versa Your first step for promoting your stuff on Facebook should be to find an existing group of users who are already interested in the topic you re writing about Connecting with like minded people is a sure way to not only grow your audience but also improve your skills Don t just pester people to look at your stuff Instead spend time browsing their work offering feedback positive only Be friendly and supportive at all times As you gain the group s respect you ll also be encouraging them to take your work more seriously and give you feedback on it WHAT THE HELL Is RSS I ve heard that you can subscribe or something to RSS the lowdown or do I nee
53. en in clude sidebar links called a blogroll to other blogs of interest often on similar topics Then begin your participation Post comments in response to blog posts that interest you When you add a comment there s usually a place to include your name and the web address of your blog which will encourage that blogger and all her readers to click on your name and check out your website Make valid comments and not just requests for people to come to your blog Nobody likes beggars and whiners Please come look at me On the other hand if you make intelligent comments others on the site may get curious about you and check out your stuff on their own You can also talk with other bloggers by responding to their posts with a blog post of your own Be sure to include within your own post a link to the other blogger s post Make sure to use the permalink to that individual post you may also want to provide a link to the blog as a whole As your list of blogs that you enjoy reading grows consider add ing a blogroll to your own blog Just don t start begging to be added to someone else s or expect them to reciprocate I added you to my blogroll please do the same Again begging and whining about stuff like this will only make you look sad and desperate What Weblog Software Should I Use WordPress com and Blogger are two of the more popularly used free weblog services and both could work well for a class that r
54. en need to use HTML mode rather than the visual editor Embed codes are also generated for slideshows such as Prezi Vuvox or even a Picassa album of still images allowing you to embed these moving images like you would a video 5 Add New Post The Machine Is Permalink http c 280 wordpress com 2011 05 15 machine is Edit Upload Inset MH AS B Visual b i link b quote del ins img ul ol li code more proofread lookup close tags lt p gt Web 2 0 The Machine is Us ing Us lt p gt lt iframe width 425 height 349 src http www youtube com embed 6gmP4nk0EOE frameborder 0 allowfullscreen gt lt iframe gt PRADA RAY Word count 6 Figure 21 Look for HTML or Source in your WYSIWYG editor and use it to paste in the video embed code as in this example from WordPress Rhetorics of Web Pages 51 To embed a YouTube video 1 Click on the Share button just below the video or slideshow A link will be shown but there is also another button labeled Embed 2 Click on Embed and you ll get the HTML embedding code with various options you can select such as size play in HD etc If you are using a WYSIWYG editor on your blog yow H have to select the view source code or similar option to paste in the HTML that YouTube has provided Not surprisingly Google who owns YouTube provides a very similar process for embedding Google Maps into blogs wikis or web pages
55. equires you to keep a weblog Of the two WordPress tends to be used more by more serious and professional bloggers It may be the better choice for ethos if you intend to blog long term While Blogger may be easier to use to start with due to its Google account integration simpler con 12 Web Writing Style Guide tent creation and management interface and template customization engine you may eventually outgrow it s more limited feature set While Wordpress com provides free hosting of a version of Word Press that offers limited features there is also the WordPress org com munity dedicated to sharing and developing WordPress as open source software You can download the full WordPress version and install it on your own server or on a commercial hosting account that you sub scribe to giving you much more control over the configuration and hundreds of additional modules that you can use to expand the feature set Installing WordPress on your own instead of using Wordpress com however also means that you will have to keep up with security updates as they are released by WordPress to stop your site from being hacked Other free hosted blog sites like Destructoid cater to specific types of bloggers in this case videogamers and allow people to set up their own blogs there for free This can be a good choice because there will be plenty of other like minded bloggers there for you to talk to In any case you can always change your mind
56. er a part of the text is a paragraph heading etc It s important to use these pre defined styles when available so that the formatting is consistent across the site Rhetorics of Web Pages 39 In Figure 15 the topic of our new subsection is Can I Use Catchy Titles We can tag this text with the Heading 3 style and the header will be formatted to match all other same level subheads across your blog Why Heading 3 Most blogging platforms and templates apply the Heading 1 style to the name of the blog As a result many bloggers use either Heading 2 or Heading 3 as the first level subhead in the content that they write You could try Heading 2 first and then if you discov ered when posted that it was the same size and emphasis as the title of your post you could change it to Heading 3 What s happening here is that your WYSIWYG editor is applying the proper heading H3 HTML tag that you would use if you were coding the text yourself See Creating a Basic Web Page is Easy to learn more about coding 5 Add New Post How to Write Titles and Headings Permalink http e wordpress com 2011 05 15 how to write t s and headings Edit Upload Inset MO AG B Visual HTML B Z 21 FB3BBPeeavaxz Heading 3 m DU BAY HH 22 2 9 oO Can I Use Snazzy Catchy Titles Catchy titles and headings can be helpful in some writing contexts such as on news publications or a blog where the goal is to attract a loyal followi
57. es have changed Firefox 7 _ My First Web Page E Di fit ej GoocP te My First Web Page Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it I ll be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stupendous website Firefox y L My First Web Page E Di fiey 7mm vy 29 Googe Ee My First Web Page Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it I ll be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stupendous website h 4 Figure 24 An example web page as viewed in a narrow and a wide window Notice that the length of the text expands to fit the width of the window 68 Web Writing Style Guide While you can embed CSS directly in an HTML document we recommend that you avoid doing so and instead keep your CSS rules in a separate file much as the CSS Zen Garden designers have done Having a separate CSS file is much more efficient once you move be yond having only one web page in a web site Imagine that you have a website that has a dozen or more pages Now imagine that on all of these pages you have added a particular background image and itali cized text in certain places that you want to change you want to give your pages a new background image and turn all your italicized words into bold print
58. es now worthless Yup Prepare to un learn everything you know about writing Not LOL Contrary to doomsayers and web critical pundits most people who read things online still appreciate good writing and editing Although we often hear scary predictions about the dumbing down of our cul ture by texting and internet speak there will always be a demand for skilled writers who clearly communicate their thoughts Beyond that even if you re just sending short text messages the rhetorical concepts you learned in college will help you craft better messages communi cate more effectively and be more persuasive Finally people will take you more seriously even on public message boards if you write with good syntax present clear ideas and take care to acknowledge your sources of information 2 Introduction 3 Let s take a look at how writing for the Web compares to writing for print WHAT S THE SAME WHEN WRITING FOR THE WEB Coherence organization grammar mechanics punctuation and spelling Just like any game you play these are the rules by which you are expected to play Although people might tell you that nobody cares about this stuff online unless you re talking to your closest friends and family your audience will expect or at least appreciate it if you put some effort into your writing Think of it this way it takes time for someone to read what you write Why not respect your readers time and intelligence
59. gner 3 and Color Schemer Online v2 can help you to come up with matching colors You CAN T WRITE FOR THE WEB WITHOUT WORKING WITH VISUALS What would the web be without images Pretty boring right Consider using relevant visuals on your web pages to enhance the meaning of the copy that you have written Here are a few important tips to fol low There are three main file formats for images that you can currently use on the web GIF JPG and PNG GIFs work well for icons and other graphics with large areas of simple colors but because GIFs are limited to 256 colors they are a poor choice for photographs JPEG or JPG as they are commonly called is a lossy format like MP3s that supports millions of colors and can work well for photographs In fact JPG is likely the default file format that your digital camera uses Beware The more JPGs are compressed to reduce file size the more image quality information they lose PNG is a lossless format that can support both a small range of colors like GIFs and millions of colors in photographs like JPGs only without any visual quality loss but larger file size Given all these considerations you may need to experiment saving your images in the different image file formats to determine which provides the quality you need at the lowest file size If you want to learn more see Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton s ex cellent article on graphic file formats on the web Rhetorics of
60. he style css file in the same folder on your computer as webpage html 3 Type the following in your style css file Rhetorics of Web Pages 69 p width 300px The p is known as the selector It is the object in this case a para graph tag that you want to apply a style to Inside the curly brackets are properties Your rule can consist of one or many properties We ll see an example later on Each property should end with a semicolon The width of the text inside the paragraph tag is specified in pixels px Since screens have resolutions that are measured in pixels the pixel is the common unit for describing size on the web Now back to styling your text Save your style css file once you have added in the rule for paragraph styling There is one more important step The browser needs to know where to find your style css file so it can apply your style rules to your HTML page In Creating a Basic Web Page Is Easy we talked about how the lt head gt section of your HTML file contained metadata that is information about the page that the browser processes The location of your style css file is another example of metadata Add the following in between the lt head gt lt head gt tags on the line after the lt title gt in your webpage html file lt link rel stylesheet type text css href style css gt This code will tell your browser that there is a CSS file called style css in the same fo
61. ices used to be very limited One approach was to set your text in Photoshop and save it as an JPEG but then search engines could not index your content and screen readers couldnt read your pages to disabled web users In addition every time you wanted to edit your text you had to make a visit to Photoshop to recreate your image Fortunately in 2009 the major browsers started supporting the font face specification in CSS3 Cascading Style Sheets see Time to Style Your Document with CSS that provides significantly more flex ibility for website designers in terms of font choices The font face rule provides a mechanism for linking font file that is stored on a serv er to the content in a webpage The browser downloads the font file and uses it to set text in that typeface Joshua Johnson s The Essential Guide to font face 2010 provides an excellent summary of current font face solutions for those who are coding their own websites In his review Joshua mentions sites such as TypeKit and FontSquirrel which provide both free and paid font solutions Joshua also mentions the Google web font service which has ex panded considerably since the article was published TypeKit part nered with Google to develop a simple open process for using CSS font linking and in 2010 Google began their Google Web Fonts font 48 Web Writing Style Guide sharing service You can read more about this service at the Google Web Font Blog As
62. ion an aggre gator or feed reader when those sites have been updated Instead of hopping from site to site in search of new content Anything new on this gaming site Nope Anything new on this music blog Yeah you can see all the updates in one spot In action it works like this you go to the site of a feed reader like Google Reader one of the most popular and set up your account there with your Google account Then whenever you are on a page that supports RSS and you want to subscribe you look for an image of an orange box Depending on your browser you may see that image in the address bar when you re on a page that has RSS support When you click it you will be given the option of subscribing to the feed in Google Reader again a process that may look slightly different on different sites and browsers After you ve subscribed every time that site posts new content you ll be able to read it on Google Reader without having to bounce around to all kinds of different sites Google Reader also allows you to organize your subscriptions into folders like humor anthropology or cooking however you want We ve talked about how RSS can benefit readers but how about writers It s actually very very important if you want to build an au dience for your blog wiki or pretty much anything you do If you don t offer an RSS feed for people to subscribe to you re forcing them to have to actually
63. it PH be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stu pendous website lt p gt Save your file and refresh your browser and voila You ve told the browser that those are separate paragraphs and it now displays them with default paragraph formatting Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it I ll be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long Ill be creating my very own stupen dous website If for some reason your HTML didn t work like it is supposed to check for typos Also check that each of your opening tags lt gt has a closing tag lt gt A web browser is a much more strict grammarian than a writing teacher and the least little error in adding HTML tags can make your document wonky Next let s add a headline to the page My First Web Page To do so at the top of your webpage html file type lt hl gt My First Web Page lt h1 gt This tells the web browser that My First Web Page is the top level heading on a page Usually coders will reserve lt h1 gt for the major headline on a page and then use lt h2 gt lt h3 gt etc for subheads much 64 Web Writing Style Guide like an outline or a table of contents where lt h2 gt is used to tag all the primary sections of a document and lt h3 gt is used to tag the next level of subsections NOTE Even though you ca
64. later so feel free to experiment until you find something that fits Learn More about Blogging If you do some searching on the web you ll find plenty of resourc es on how to be a better blogger If you are blogging for the class room Alex Reid s Why Blog Searching for Writing on the Web in Writing Spaces Readings on Writing Vol 2 could be a very useful resource because it s written by a writing professor who regularly blogs TWITTER ONLY GIVES ME 140 CHARACTERS WHAT THE HECK Twitter is everywhere What does it take to become the next Twitter su perstar We ve already mentioned that Twitter is a microblog To become a Twitter superstar you need to decide on what your niche will be such as politics WoW Halo or gender studies You must also decide on your level of interaction How often will you post Some people post once or twice a day whereas others post dozens of times per hour Genres of the Web 13 What s happening So a funny thing happened on the way to Twitter Add your location Tweet Figure 3 Twitter limits you to 140 characters so make every character count One of the easiest ways to get more readers on Twitter is to provide people with your URL on Twitter typically www twitter com your username Much like getting more readers for a blog it takes time but if you re diligent your twitter followers will slowly grow Well that is if you have great information that others want
65. lder as your webpage html file Your browser will then use the rules in your css file to style the content of your HTML page Once you are done the top part of the HTML in your webpage html file should look like this lt Doctype html gt lt html gt lt head gt lt title gt My First Web Page lt title gt lt link rel stylesheet type text css href style css gt lt head gt Now view your web page in your browser It should look some thing like Figure 25 70 Web Writing Style Guide If your page does not look like Figure 25 check your CSS and HTML file for typos CSS rules are very unforgiving Make sure each rule is surrounded by curly brackets and each style property ends in a semicolon Also make certain that your webpage html and style css files are in the same folder Proofreading issues and misplaced CSS files are the two most common problems that students have when first learning to use CSS to style their web pages Firefox mE xX LI My First Web Page q y gt D fileye 77 C 3 Google P A D My First Web Page Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it I ll be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stupendous website i _ Figure 25 By using CSS the paragraph width stays the same regardless of the browser window width Suppose we want to
66. le like your writing better Although computer monitors continue to improve in terms of reso lution and clarity keep in mind that some fonts can look fuzzy and thus become hard to read at extremely small font sizes Under certain viewing conditions particularly Windows with font smoothing dis abled your fancy typography may be completely unreadable There s a reason why almost every website and blog uses the same small selection of fonts Usually people want you to pay attention to what their words mean not just the way they look Using too many fonts can make a site look messy and chaotic which is fine if that s what you re going for The following sections will help you decide on which fonts will work best for you So Many Fonts Which Is the Right One Unless you are coding your own web pages most social media ap plications will give you little control of typefaces The what you see is what you get WSIW YG editor that you use to create content may allow you to add bold or italics Sometimes you can change the font size Rarely will you be able to specify the font However if you are coding your own web pages and have the option of choosing different fonts start by first considering your rhetorical situation Who is the audience What is your purpose for designing What is the context Do you want to be humorous Serious Are you announcing an event There are a million things to take into consid eration but the
67. ll of the text magically changes because the appearance of that text is all defined by that rule The principle of separating appearance from content is also used in the workplace by many writers when managing formatting in very large word processing documents and it is used by designers and book publishers when producing print documents with desktop publishing software In addition EPUB the open ebook standard used by many ereaders works the same way using HTML to markup the content and CSS to add the formatting Learn a little bit of HTML and CSS and you could create your own ebook Creating a Basic Web Page Is Easy Right I ve heard that line before Any page on the web no matter now media rich it appears is at its core a small text only document The document may contain links to images or to videos that the browser retrieves to create the media rich page you see but the core web page the document ending in html is all text Your browser whether you use Internet Explorer Firefox Chrome Safari or some other browser is simply a program on your computer that interprets the HTML code in these text files combines text with media files and creates pages Okay let s begin getting things done Rhetorics of Web Pages 61 1 Open up a plain text editor On Macs the default is TextEdit on Windows Notepad If you are working on your own computer you may want to down load and install TextWrangler Mac or Notep
68. lment in ENG 398 498 is by permission of the internship director only Enrollment permission will be given by Dr Savage when application ma terials are completed and proof of an approved internship is provided An Internship Proposal Form must be submitted for internships with organizations not previously approved by the English Studies Internship Program The proposal form must be signed by the internship site supervisor and by the student Certain internships have specific requirements of class stand ing coursework or prior internship experience to qualify Does it make your head hurt to work through this list Figure 13 shows the same information organized in a list as it appears on the website Notice how it is much easier to see what you need to do to secure an internship when the steps are organized in a list Rhetorics of Web Pages 35 Requirements The following are requirements for an English Studies internship e Complete an internship application and a Professional Practice Insurance Certification form e An approved internship must be arranged with a provider before you can register for your internship e Enroll in ENG 398 if you are an undergraduate ENG 498 if you are a graduate student e Three credit hours is the minimum number of credit hours for which you can enroll but internships can be done for variable credits ranging from 3 to 12 Credits are determined on the basis of the number of hours of on site work you
69. lue background was cool well it might be true you might as well be color blind Even though most of us can tell that the awful color combination of text and background given in the previous section is a completely insane choice it still can be difficult for us to work with colors effec tively A designer has to choose colors that are the right tone to support the mission or focus of the website Most people know that blue be cause of water and green because of plants can symbolize life Red can hint at anger or ironically love Black blackground websites with some harsh red and white might have a Goth or Heavy Metal feel to 42 Web Writing Style Guide them no one wants their website to have a hair band feel unless the website is for a hair band Now that you are writing for the web you might also be expect ing a global audience Did you know that colors symbolize different meaning in other cultures Check out Color Meanings by Culture at The International Business Edge For instance in Japanese culture red symbolizes life Beyond understanding symbolism it can still be hard to come up with a color scheme of multiple colors that work well on a site If your website has a primary logo or visual one technique can be to use the color picker in an image editor to choose the colors that match with that logo or visual Or if you still feel challenged in trying to pick out colors that go together in your design Color Scheme Desi
70. most important thing to consider is readability Don t Rhetorics of Web Pages 45 use overly fancy fonts just because they re cool At the same time don t use plain fonts when you re trying to generate some excitement or in terest For example if you have a Halloween theme going you can find fonts that appear to be dripping with a liquid like blood boo Half the fun of fonts is searching for new and interesting ones If you want to see some of the many commercial fonts available for purchase go to Linotype s web site and check out some of their stan dard fonts You can also find free fonts on the Internet but be careful of viruses or other malicious software and downloads If you want a safe place to download free fonts go to dafont com or fontsquirrel com Note that even if you downloaded a font onto your own computer and included that font in your website design it was not be automati cally usable on the computers of others viewing your site Until recent ly anyone looking at your website would have had to pre install that specific font file on their own computer in order to see your website as you intended For example if you include the Arial font in your website design everyone who visits your site must already have the Arial font file pre installed on their computer in order to see the site the way you de signed it And that font must have the exact same name The good news in this particular example is that alm
71. mpressive if you can write succinctly using few words rather than resorting to texting conventions like u for you The superstar Twitter users have mastered the art of saying more with less What s happening Just saw culturecat s presentation at amp w2011 Loved her take on lolcats Now needz me a cheezeburger Meorrawr Add your location 22 Tweet Figure 4 The and have special meanings in Twitter learn to use them effectively Genres of the Web 15 Wuar Is A Wixi Is IT A BLOG Wikis are websites collaboratively written by groups that seek to docu ment and inform about a specific topic Wikis can be private open only to those in the group or they can be publicly available such as Wikipedia Like blogs wikis include comments and allow links im ages and video However there are some differences both structurally and func tionally between blogs and wikis Blogs are usually linearly arranged so that the most recent posts show at the top of the page with archive links off to the side Wikis are organized as a series of pages arranged to suit the people maintaining the wiki a front page usually intro duces the content of the wiki and typically includes a search box In blogs only authors of the blog can add posts and only administrators of the blog may change or delete those posts viewers respond in com ments Most wikis on the other hand allow any user to add or remove any content
72. n Writing and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL English faculty and English courses are also included in a variety of Univer sity wide minors Minor in English The minor in English is a good choice if you want a minor with a variety of Eng Rhetorics of Web Pages 33 lish courses Learn more about the minor in English Minor in English Education The minor in English Education is an option for students in other Secondary Education programs who wish to be endorsed in the Language Arts By complet ing the minor you will be certified to teach Language Arts in addition to your major area Learn more about the minor in English Education TESOL The TESOL minor is most often taken by students who are seeking an endorsement in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL Learn more about the minor in TESOL Writing The writ ing minor is taken by students in a variety of majors Stu dents in the minor can specialize in creative writing technical writing or rhetoric and composition Learn more about the minor in Writing University wide Minors Students selecting a University wide interdisciplinary minor can take advantage of the many exciting resources of a large university commu nity Learn more about University wide minors How much time would you be willing to invest searching for infor mation about a minor that interested you Figure 12 shows a part of the page as it is actually rendered on the departme
73. n go up to a lt h6 gt level of subheads we recommend that should you ever feel the need to go beyond an lt h3 gt subhead you split your content into more than one page instead Anyway save your file and view it in a web browser See how My First Web Page shows up larger with emphasis much like this My First Web Page Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it PI be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long Ill be creating my very own stupendous website There are many more tags that you should use to describe your content in HTML For instance lt strong gt lt strong gt around a part of text in a paragraph denotes strong emphasis usually styled with bold type lt blockquote gt lt blockquote gt is used to tag yes you guessed it a long quote that should be indented or otherwise empha sized Then there are tags for constructing lists and tables for making hyperlinks and for inserting images to name a few But before we move on to CSS this web page is not quite done yet Take a look at the following code that is similar to what you will find on most web pages lt Doctype html gt lt html gt lt head gt lt title gt Untitled Document lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt lt body gt lt html gt The first line with the lt Doctype gt tag tells the web browser that you are using html which means yo
74. n to style your headings using bold italics and font size changes Your website likely already has styling set for different headings as part of the overall site theme you just have to tag the heading For example suppose you are writing your own blog post about How to Write Titles and Headings using WordPress and you ve written a few paragraphs Then you decide to add a new subsection within it that needs a subhead We ll use some sample text from this guide and show you how to style it using the WYSIWYG To add your major page headline that will appear at the top of the page Type your text into the WYSIWYG and highlight the text Look for a pull down menu that says Paragraph some content management systems might say Normal for the default text and open it up 5 Add New Post How to Write Titles and Headings Permalink http c S wordpress com 2011 05 15 how to write t s and headings Edit Upload Inset MH AS Visual HTMI Bla iit BBs 2 Gl Paragraph U Si Ay 2 FE 1 eo 4 s Hre y Titles Address igs can be helpful in some writing contexts such as on Preformatted log where the goal is to attract a loyal following of Heading 1 de sucha good choice for a business website or other Heading 2 al writing situations depending on the overall tone that Heading 3 bY Path p Word count 6 Figure 15 The pull down menu allows the user to set wheth
75. ng of readers They might not be such a good choice for a business website or other more formal professional writing situations depending on the overall tone that is being set for the site Path h3 Word count 6 Figure 16 Once the Heading 3 style is applied to Can I Use Catchy Titles it appears newly formatted within the WYSIWYG editing window 40 Web Writing Style Guide Why tag your headers When you tag your headlines and subhead ers you are letting the web do the work for you If you switch to a new template for your website all of your Heading 3 headlines will auto matically change to the new Heading 3 style used in your template but any headlines you have styled by hand will have to be changed by hand each and everyone over and over and over again DAMNIT JIM PM A WRITER NOT A GRAPHIC DESIGNER OR WHO GIVES A CRAP It s easy to get by in most college writing without thinking about visual design or graphics About the most visual design college writing asks for is that you emulate the MLA or APA document format pretty bare bones visual designs in themselves Create your text of letters and numbers and plug it in The web though is a different place To be a web writer you have to expand your definition of text beyond merely copy the alphanu meric symbols on the page you might have previously thought exclu sively constituted all writing to include visual design as well as the use of font
76. niversity community Leam more about University wide minors Figure 12 Example from English Minors at Illinois State University of con tent organized into short paragraphs and subheaders 34 Web Writing Style Guide Notice that on this page you can easily find information about the various minors Don t Forget Lists Lists both numbered and bulleted lists are another form of subhead ers in that they make the underlying structure of your content visible to your readers A good list can make clear the steps in a process the advantages of an option or the requirements of a program Here is another bit of text from the Illinois State English Department Website about the requirements for an internship with all of the list formatting removed The following are requirements for an English Studies intern ship Complete an internship application and a Professional Practice Insurance Certification form An approved intern ship must be arranged with a provider before you can register for your internship Enroll in ENG 398 if you are an under graduate ENG 498 if you are a graduate student Three credit hours is the minimum number of credit hours for which you can enroll but internships can be done for variable credits ranging from 3 to 12 Credits are determined on the basis of the number of hours of on site work you will do during the semester of your internship For each credit hour earned you must work at least 48 hours Enrol
77. nt s website English Minors at Illinois State University Minors are a combination of courses designed to provide a cohesive introduction to an area of study beyond the student s major The English Department offers four minors English Studies English Education Writing and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL English faculty and English courses are also included in a variety of University wide minors Minor in English The minor in English is a good choice if you want a minor with a variety of English courses Leam more about the minor in English Minor in English Education The minor in English Education is an option for students in other Secondary Education programs who wish to be endorsed in the Language Arts By completing the minor you will be certified to teach Language Arts in addition to your major area Learn more about the minor in English Education TESOL The TESOL minor is most often taken by students who are seeking an endorsement in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages TESOL Leam more about the minor in TESOL The writing minor is taken by students in a variety of majors Students in the minor can specialize in creative writing technical writing or rhetoric and composition Leam more about the minor in Writing University wide Minors Students selecting a University wide interdisciptinary minor can take advantage of the many exciting resources of a large u
78. o what kinds of blogs or websites get the best scores and thus have the strongest appeal You might study the top ranking items for a few weeks or even months trying to find similarities or patterns in what rises to the top Equipped with that knowledge you should be able to make your own work more likely to succeed with them Keep in mind that nobody but you cares about how many views or comments you get You might spend hours working on a blog post just to find that nobody wants to read it Whining begging or trying to trick people into viewing your site will only ruin your reputation If you post on a social bookmarking site and the results aren t good don t post about it again Instead go back to the drawing board and work on making your posts more appealing to the audience you re trying to reach Title Required The Halls of Redemption Armchair Arcade Description Were you a pirate back in the 80s Do you download games now from abandonware sites Shame on you But now you can redeem yourself by donating money directly to the people responsible for your favorite classic games Gaming v News v Figure 7 The Digg submission has an optional field for entering a descrip tion of the site Again it is very important to word both the title and de scription as accurately and succinctly as possible You can also select an appropriate topic and screenshot for your submission Genres of the Web
79. of May of 2011 the Google webfonts site offers 148 open source typefaces for use on your webpages These fonts in clude many decrotative typefaces that are well suited for use in head lines The Google Typekit solution is straightforward and easy to use The fonts are stored on Google servers You link to a Google style sheet for the typeface you want to use Google even supplies the linking code and then you add the font to your CSS rules Google includes sample rules as well As an extra bonus all the fonts are licensed to be used for free on the web Blogger now offers the Google webfonts as choices in its WSIWYG text editor we suspect many other platforms will follow Anton Cabin Sketch Cal LUCKIEST GUY Raleway Figure 19 Examples of typefaces from Google s free webfont service Rhetorics of Web Pages 49 How CAN I USE VIDEO ON My SITE Nearly all websites will allow you to add video but there is a difference between hosting and embedding video on your page Most blogging software and web hosting services limit the amount of video you can add directly making streaming from a video hosting site such as YouTube Vimeo or the Internet Archive a far better option Processing and streaming video is their business Significantly Expanded Google Docs Discussion and Commenting Features View Eon Outline Track 16 Mar cel t45 google docs Giga OM reports that Googie Docs has added a whole siew of new features for disc
80. operly according to what you learn in tutorials and IE will sometimes not display it correctly Even though if you become serious about web design you will have to learn to code for IE s id iosyncracies using IE is very tough on new designers trying to learn 62 Web Writing Style Guide the basics of HTML CSS It s like having a teacher who marks your answers wrong when they are in fact correct 5 Using the menu in your web browser choose File gt Open and select webpage html The words Hello World should now display in your browser Congratulations You have created your first web page Now let s add to it After all most web pages have more than one sentence Open your webpage html file add a line return and type a paragraph about your new web page Something like this Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it PI be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long ll be creating my very own stupen dous website Save your file and open it again in your web browser or if your web browser is open to the file already you can hit refresh CTRL R you must refresh because your browser wont know that you have updated the file The problem is that the browser will display your two paragraphs something like this Hello World This is my first web page Once I m done creating it Pll be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML an
81. osal with recommendations for the organization or further steps to take There is also a problem of having too much information to share near their departure Perhaps steps should be taken to train inform the other members throughout the process BillH D said at 6 39 pm on Apr 26 2010 I really like where this one is going John amp Carolyn It is a model for others as well in terms of the level of detail and style choices you ve made Figure 5 Many wikis offer commenting features and encourage editors to discuss their work The Threats to Sustainability of an Organizational Content Strategy wiki was created by students in a professional writing class at Michigan State University 18 Web Writing Style Guide On a side note some wiki people are skeptical of students who are only there because of a required project or assignment Even if this is the case don t announce it or act like you re just there because it s required Don t ask the community to help you with your project In stead be sincere about wanting to join the community and contribute towards the project A good rule of thumb for dealing with strangers online is to be ten times more polite and friendly than you normally are If you go to great lengths to show respect and sincerity you ll be welcome on al most any wiki If you go in guns blazing and treating the locals like crap don t expect your edits to stick How Do I Get People to Write in
82. ost everyone already has the Arial font file pre installed on their computer so they would see your website the same way you saw it when you designed it But if you choose a less common font like Plantagenet Cherokee many of your users most likely won t have the Plantagenet Cherokee font file pre installed on their own computer When that happens a user s computer automatically replaces the unknown font in this case Plantagenet Cherokee with some other font that is available most likely Times New Roman all of this means that to at least some of your users your website ends up looking completely different than what you had intended Consequently you usually want to stick with fonts that are com monly available see Common Fonts to All Versions of Windows amp Mac Equivalents for an excellent list 46 Web Writing Style Guide Choosing a Font Serif vs Sans Serif Ok my blogging program lets me pick a font Now what Your most important typographic decision is what will be the main font you use on your pages as this font will set a visual tone for your pages While there are a variety of decrotative fonts that look good as headlines for this main font you should pick between a serif or a sans serif body text font Serif A serif is the extra little stroke those little curves at the ends of letters WTF Times New Roman WTF Palatino Linotype WTF Georgia Figure 17 Examples of serif fonts Sans
83. others to be able to use their works beyond what copyright law allows by default and they have granted legal rights using Creative Commons CC licenses Try Creative Commons Search and you ll be able to see that there are many works online that are CC licensed Another method for finding photographs that may be added to your site legally is to use the public domain and freely licenced media content available through Wikimedia Commons s terrific online media file repository There are tens of thousands of images available in this repository Just make sure you check to see what type of per missions are granted for the files you want to use 58 Web Writing Style Guide Similarly you can use the Advanced Search option on Flickr to find images licensed with a CC license Flickr provides search options for CC content tagged with permissions to use commercially or modify adapt or build upon But don t think of this as a free for all where you can do whatever you want with the works that you find Some CC licenses only allow you to make copies of a work no derivatives allowed Others allow you to modify a work and integrate it into your own creative composi tion subject to specific requirements of the license CC licenses typi cally require you to attribute the original author If you decide to use a CC licensed work be sure to read the license carefully to know what you can and can t do IN THE EN
84. out If you want to make your blog standout take strong positions on a particular subject or theme and write in a colorful fun way The more fun you have writing your blog the more likely it is that others will have fun reading it For instance if you re a wedding photographer you can blog about the weddings you attend and the inevitable funny incidents that ensue at each one Combined with some funny photos and witty writing this could easily become a popular blog If youre heavily into a sport such as parkour or racquetball you can keep a blog about local events and the people you meet there If you re work ing the tech support desk at your university you can blog about un usual incidents and talk about how you fixed them or why you failed to fix them What Not to Write About on Your Weblog Keep in mind that sometimes prospective employers or your boss might do a search to see what they can dig up about you Even if you are post ing something just for your friends a group you belong to or to ex press yourself remember that other audiences can potentially see what you write Some of those people might have the power to hire you or to put your application in the discard pile Heather Armstrong is a blogger who was famously fired from her job for snarky comments she made about co workers on her blog Now she runs dooce a popular mommy blogging site and is laughing all the way to the bank Don get fired posting things that
85. re reader friendly for it Now suppose your white space is not white but a background image this is why we need the term negative space If the background image is too strong such as a bright picture or a repeating design behind your text it will call too much attention to itself Reading text may be extremely difficult and you may obscure important in formation Look at Ugliest Worst Over The Top Web Sites of 2009 over at Web Pages That Suck You ll find some examples where strong backgrounds are a problem Consider a solid color background and add pictures to create interest Or if you want to use an image as a background you might be able to fade the image so that it is very subtle against a solid background almost transparent Still even solid backgrounds can be a problem if there is not enough contrast between the background and the copy on the page See we just used the C of CRAP contrast to talk about a web design is sue The worst cases are color combinations that will give readers mi graines like red text on a blue background It might look interesting at first but it will make your readers eyes bleed or at the very least give them a headache if they have to look it at for longer than a few seconds Chances are they won t stick around that long if they see a page full of jarring colors anyone tired of MySpace yet But I Might As Well Be Color Blind If you thought the previous example of red text on b
86. rograms automatically insert Untitled Document as a placeholder title and many users of that software do not bother to change that default Too bad for us readers ane Untitled Document Figure 10 A Google search shows that there are millions of untitled web pages While your page title will appear atop the currently open window page titles also appear in places that are totally apart from the actual web page you have written For example your page title appears in representations of your open page in the taskbar or dock it appears in history and bookmark lists and it is used in search results and RSS feeds Because a page title has a life separate from the page it represents you should write page titles that provide both context and topic so that Rhetorics of Web Pages 31 the page title can stand alone What does a page title like home or intro tell you about a web page when viewed in an RSS feed What about Blog 1 or Please Read Do you really have so much free time on your hands that you re willing to click on one of these A good page title should announce the topic of your page and the name of your blog wiki or website Earlier in this book in Figure 1 you saw a picture of a page from Steve Krause s blog Here is a page title from one of his blog entries stevendkrause com A simple iPad 2 movie STEVENDKRAUSE COM School work life and everything else Figure 11 An effec
87. sed to create a slow to load super fancy introduction screen that does little but keep users from getting to the content they want What about Those Big Flashing Animated Menus They re So Rad I keep hearing about Flash Silverlight and all this other stuff that will make my site more interactive and animated Can I add these to my blog Before delving into how to learn to use Flash or Silverlight keep in mind that not all readers will be able to access the content iPad and iPhone users for example won t be able to see flash animations or applications Silverlight may require a download and visitors to your site may not have the time space or inclination to download it just to view your site If you really want to learn more about animation HTML5 offers many animation tags that are becoming more popular and more wide ly supported See Mark Pilgrim s Dive into HTML5 or W3Schools HTML5 Tutorial Figure 22 Animated GIFs are no longer in style Rhetorics of Web Pages 53 NoT EVERYONE CAN SEE YOUR GRAPHICS Because you have enhanced the meanings of your texts using images and visual design you have to think about how that will impact read ers with visual impairment Although many people with disabilities use devices or software to assist them there are still things you can do as a web writer to improve their reading experience For instance minimally any images should have captions or alt text an attribute
88. so your contribution might be deleted or changed in some way Most wiki software includes some type of history so you can track when and by whom changes were made and if desired revert to an earlier version The best wikis are sprawling collections of information on a topic the writers are passionate about My Wiki Is the Blair Wiki Project I don t know where to start How can I get this wiki moving Wikis are a form of crowdsourcing a term that implies taking advan tage of the crowd to grow your project Of course that means being able to appeal to a crowd and have some incentives in place to encour age them to volunteer their time and energy to your project So the first steps to consider are who will most benefit from the wiki Who has the most to contribute Who is likely to have the time knowledge and skills necessary to participate If you don t have good answers to these questions go back to the drawing board A lot of wikis start off as local or site specific projects powered by friends or co workers For example imagine you re part of a local group that s into snowboarding You might launch a wiki that maps out the best spots for snowboarding stores that sell equipment and other such information that will interest your friends If the project is successful on a local level there s a chance it might expand as other 16 Web Writing Style Guide snowboarders from other towns stumble upon your work and decide
89. someone posts a tweet and it s misread or misunderstood by others Consider the times you might have had 14 Web Writing Style Guide this happen with text messaging on your phone This happens more often than you think It takes time to get the hang of tweeting Try to think about how someone will read your tweet without knowing the context in which you wrote it You can also use Twitter as an information sharing network Some of the best tweets are those that direct followers to useful or fabulous content that they wouldn t otherwise have heard of often using a url shortener like bitly or Google URL Shortener to allow long links to fit into the short space allowed in a tweet This makes a lot of sense after all aren t you more likely to check out content shared by people you follow and trust as opposed to whatever some big news network s website thinks you might find interesting A lot of people like Twitter because of the thousands of apps you can use with it There are apps for every mobile phone and tablet apps to integrate your tweets into Facebook and much much more There are also widgets that you can copy and paste into your blog site to dis play your tweets If you can think of something youd like to do with Twitter chances are there s an app for that Tweeting can be fun but if you want to be popular don t post stuff nobody wants to read Does anybody really care what you had for breakfast Also it s more i
90. t a compelling promise that turns a browser into a reader the rest of your words may as well not even exist On average 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest Editors of professional news publications and serious bloggers know this and they typically spend significant amounts of time com ing up with the right headline to attract readers Whether you are keeping your own weblog creating an information page for a client working on a wiki page or building a personal portfolio website you ll 30 Web Writing Style Guide need to take some time too to create page titles headings and sub headers that invite your reader to explore and understand the content you have created Every Page Needs a Title A recent Google search for the phrase Untitled Document yielded 47 million hits What s with that Are untitled documents the latest Internet meme Are they a viral YouTube sensation Nothing so exciting When you encounter one of those 45 million web pages that has Untitled Document in a tab or a window what you see is a lost opportunity you are looking at a Web page with no page title A page title is the name of a page that is stored in the head tag See the section on HTML for more information about the head tag The page title does not appear anywhere in the actual web page instead you will see it in the top of the browser window as in Figure 10 Many web authoring p
91. tanicek n d Web 27 May 2011 Color Schemer Online v2 ColorSchemer n d Web 27 May 2011 Copyblogger How to Write Magnetic Headlines Copyblog ger Copyblogger Media n d Web 27 May 2011 Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Copy right Information Center Cornell University 1 January 2011 Web 27 May 2011 Creative Commons Creative Commons n d Web 27 May 2011 Creative Commons Search Creative Commons n d Web 27 May 2011 CSS Zen Garden The Beauty of CSS Design David Shea n d Web 27 May 2011 dafont com dafont com n d Web 30 May 2011 Digg Digg Inc n d Web 26 May 2011 Facebook Facebook Inc n d Web 26 May 2011 Flickr Advanced Search Yahoo n d Web 27 May 2011 Font Squirrel Font Squirrel n d Web 28 May 2011 GIMP The Gimp Team n d Web 27 May 2011 Google Blog Search Google n d Web 26 May 2011 Google Reader Google n d Web 27 May 2011 73 74 Web Writing Style Guide Google URL Shortener Google n d Web 26 May 2011 Google Web Fonts Google n d Web 28 May 2011 Halvorson Kristina The Discipline of Content Strategy A List Apart A List Apart Magazine 16 December 2008 Web 28 May 2011 HTML Dog Pattrick Griffiths n d Web 26 May 2011 Johnson Joshua The Essential Guide to font face Six Revisions Six Revisions 8 June 2010 Web 28 May 2011 Krug Steve Don t Make Me Think
92. tead bloggers normally acknowl edge authors by linking to their articles or website If information is taken from a print source it s pretty standard to link either to the Amazon page for the particular book or to its page on a publisher s website Nevertheless if youre writing in other web genres you may need to provide sources for example Wikipedia provides footnoted refer ences And if you are are writing for a class blogging or not don t assume that your teacher doesn t want a Works Cited or References list You would be wise to ask Notes edit 1 25 From the 1995 Random House Compact Unabridged Dictionary use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one s own original work qtd in Stepchyshyn Vera Robert S Nelson 2007 Library plagiarism policies amp Assoc of College amp Resrch Libraries p 65 ISBN 0838984169 2 2 From the Oxford English Dictionary the wrongful appropriation or purloining and publication as one s own of the ideas or the expression of the ideas of another qtd in Lands 1999 3 2 4 Derrida 2001 p 57 quotation The history of literature since you referred to that is constituted by that kind of thing reproduction by quasi mechanical and automatic functions always on the border of plagiarism a notion as obscure and problematic as cloning 4 2 d Arnau 1959 quotation p 40 Th
93. tems from another blog or website it s typical to put a link to the original source in the text Yes There Are Punctuation Rules for Hyperlinks Just as with other types of writing punctuation has a role in creating hyperlinks Exclude ending punctuation from hyperlinks When hyper linking text that has punctuation immediately following it we rec ommend that you do not include the punctuation in the hyperlink Consider again this example from the previous page 28 Web Writing Style Guide As reported at Endgaget the buzz this week on tech news sites is Apple s iPhone tracking software Using data from cell phone towers and wifi networks iOS constantly stores the phone owners location in an unencrypted file on the phone See how the comma following Endgaget is not included in the hy perlink Do the same thing if hyperlinking text at the end of a sen tence followed by a period don t include the period in the hyperlink either Leave off quotes and italics from titles in hyperlinked text in prose Another style rule that we recommend involves hyperlinked titles Bloggers and other social media writers will often include the title of another post or web page in their writing and then link that title to the original web page When doing so be sure to capitalize the title but do not include quotations as you would in print with smaller works e g a blog post title or news article or italics with larger works e g
94. terpretation of non commercial use is that users may not sell profit from or commercialize Writing Spaces s texts Determination of commercial vs non commercial purpose is based on the use not the user Read more in our Terms of Use If you wish to copy modify or redistribute this text you must a include this license b attribute the Writing Spaces project and c if you revise the text clearly note that your version is a revision of the original ove vii WEB WRITING STYLE GUIDE Introduction Who is this style guide for You Well to be more specific it s for anyone interested in learning more about web writing It s not intended to be a general book about writ ing we re focused here on the type of writing people do in social media sites such as blogs wikis Twitter and more We also have a sec tion about the issues you face when you create web pages whether on your blog your wiki or your own website We re tailoring it for college students so we re not using terms like deconstruction or hybrid narrative here Nor will we tell you much about how to do things with software Our focus is on the rhetoric of writing on the web how to write things that people will actually want to read We had fun writing this and we hope you ll have fun reading it Enjoy I KNow How TO WRITE PAPERS DOES ANY OF THAT STUFF APPLY ONLINE Oh my God Are all my English and composition class
95. th the white space around words and play with designs to better show off your stuff You are no longer turning in grey pages of text to a professor you are writing to a real audience and you need to use all the tools available to connect with that audience and show them that you share their values In addition the web is no longer accessed only on desktop com puters and laptops Visitors to your site may be using a mobile phone s smaller screen which means they will have different needs than read ers using a full size monitor Conversely Internet TVs are becoming more common and before long many people will use iPads or An droid tablets as their primary device for reading the web With such variety in screen sizes and resolution the challenge becomes making sure your content looks good across multiple web browsers platforms and devices Since you can t be sure how people will access your stuff keep the design elements simple so that browsers can accommodate it Flash movies for instance once the standard for animations on the Internet are not compatible with iPhones and iPads Introduction 5 WHAT WILL I FIND IN THIS GUIDE The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide is organized into two sections The first section Writing in the Genres of the Web is about the various places and communities in which you may find yourself writ ing on the web These genres include blogs wikis and Twitter Each genre has its own spaces
96. ther than educational fair use that allow for using a copyrighted work Copyright law allows for the use of copyrighted works without permission when creating parody that is social commentary And fair use is what allows authors to quote text ina work One can also make limited use of a small part of a copy righted image that is significantly transformed On the other hand even the tiniest sample of a piece of music is considered a copyright vi olation Because the laws governing fair use are very complex it would be best to consult your teacher before deciding that something is fair use on your own So play it safe You can use websites that offer free images such as Stock XCHNG which contains both free to use though check the license requirements carefully to see what is allowed and pay for use images Sometimes artists will let you use their work for noncom mercial purposes Another option is to look for works that give you clear copyright to use the work in certain ways such as public domain works and Creative Commons licensed ones For instance public domain works are those that are no longer cov ered by copyright law Works originally published before 1923 in the U S are in the public domain and can be freely used however you like learn more about the public domain And if you significantly trans form the work you then have copyright on the new version yourself Even when works are covered by copyright sometimes creators want
97. tive page title includes the topic of the page and the name of the blog or website It makes complete sense doesn t it You could look at this page title in any context and know where the page was from and why you would visit About the only information this page title doesn t provide is that you should pronounce the e at the end of Krause Many blogging platforms such as Wordpress automatically add the name of a site to a page title making your life easier but if you are creating web pages from scratch or if you are working with blog ging software that is not as page title friendly as Wordpress be sure to include in your page titles both your major headline and the name of your site Every Page Should Have a Major Headline Yes Every One I have already written a page title Do I really need a headline too Yes Yes you do It may seem redundant but a page title is not visible on the page it self It appears at the top of the window or in other contexts like search engine results Your major headline however is part of the page and 32 Web Writing Style Guide should appear at the top or near the top of that page A good major headline should give information hunters and gatherers a clear sense of why they should stop on your page Say you are working on an audio essay for a first year writing class and you are searching for information on how to use Audacity the open source audio software You do a google search
98. to join in Or imagine yourself in a Shakespeare class You know there will be a big final exam at the end with questions from all the lectures and readings throughout the semester You could get together with your classmates to build a wiki study guide The idea here is that while no body is likely to know all the potential questions and their answers everybody should know or check some of them A wiki like this can help you pool your resources and quickly write a comprehensive docu ment and probably end up with a much better study guide than any one student could complete by herself Bear in mind that most people who use wikis read them but do not contribute Those who do are very special and should be treated with respect and gratitude Don t act like you re doing them a favor by providing the wiki for them Instead do everything possible to make it easy and fun for them to work on your wiki Don t be heavy handed with administration and don t try to micromanage every page Try not to ever criticize someone else s work even if it s bad Instead focus on praising good work and making sure people who do it know you re aware and grateful for it Send out personal notes to your contributors thanking them for their work and pointing out good things about their contributions You can also encourage your community to talk to each other by setting up discussion pages and don t get upset if the discussion isn t always strictly on t
99. to read Another easy way to gain a larger readership is to tweet often When others see you have good comments and posts they ll want to follow you Balanced with this you should also have a profile that re flects your posting and your identity as the writer of the tweets So having a username like Hotbabe4u probably won t get a lot of atten tion from a gender studies group People like Twitter because the posts are short and to the point It takes time and practice to get good at it but you can learn a lot from studying other Twitter fans How are they structuring their tweets What types of tweets get the best response And what ones don t Fig ure out why Think of a tweet kind of like the chorus to a song or a breath in a rap remember you only have 140 characters to make your statement position your argument in context AND make the argu ment maybe relate it to others by using replies direct messages and hashtags See the screenshot below for an example of a mention and a hashtag The culturecat is a mention Figure 4 This means that when the owner of that Twitter account clicks her mentions button she ll see this Tweet in the list c8w2011 is a hashtag A hashtag is a con venient way for people to make sure their Tweets are listed together If you re at a conference or responding to a trendy topic a hashtag can ensure you aren t lost in the shuffle Most of us have heard how
100. ttributes in the HTML code For instance if a web designer wanted all of his or her text to use the Times New Roman typeface she would place font tags around each and every bit of text using a tag like lt font face Times New Roman Georgia serif size 2 gt Hello World lt font gt This font face tag was all about appearance A major shift in HTML coding was to move all appearance information out of the HTML tags and into cascading style sheets Using CSS a modern designer can change the look of all of the text in all of her pages by editing a single style rule Separating the styling of a web page s content from the page s HTML tags that structure that content result in more compact pages that are easier to revise and that can be easily adapted for delivery to a variety of devices from large screen desktop comptuers to smart phones Using CSS rules you ll be able to change all kinds of visual Rhetorics of Web Pages 67 characteristics of your web writing such as modifying the font color or size and adding margins and borders around parts of your page To understand how truly powerful CSS can be visit CSS Zen Gar den an extensive portfolio of design themes each created by a differ ent professional web designer Using the links through the side navigation menu view the different designs In each instance if you view the Page Source to see the underlying HTML code that code will be exactly the same Only the CSS rul
101. u are using the latest version of Rhetorics of Web Pages 65 HTML HTML5 As you study and learn new HTML tags be sure that you are learning the ones supported in HTML5 Using older tags can result in strange and difficult to diagnose problems The content in the lt head gt lt head gt is metadata about your web page that provides information to the browser Right now all we have specified is the document title but there is other metadata that could be useful to specify once you become more advanced at coding For example you might want to use the lt meta gt tag to add a description for your website Google will use the description you provide there when displaying your main website home page in search results Between the lt body gt lt body gt tag goes the content that will be displayed to your readers In other words the main content that you write goes here So copy this code over to your webpage html file and then move the content you have created in between the lt body gt tags like so lt Doctype html gt lt html gt lt head gt lt title gt Untitled Document lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt lt hl gt My First Web Page lt h1 gt lt p gt Hello World lt p gt lt p gt This is my first web page Once I m done creating it PH be able to brag to everyone that I know how to code HTML and CSS and before long I ll be creating my very own stu pendous website lt p gt lt body gt
102. ussion and commenting on documents For example Users can hoki ongoing threaded conversations within a document using time stamps and profile pictures and mentions similar to Facebook They can casty add people to the conversation and ultimately remove the conversation from view on the document by resolving the issue The new apps are being pushed out to users over the next few days The features will not be available on existing documents only new ones just tned it and it worked for me Maybe it s already available for you too Learn more from Googie s promotional video Discussions in Google Docs Figure 20 It s pretty easy to embed a YouTube video in your blog http kairosnews org Even if you have your own domain name and server space you will probably find it easier and more efficient to use a video hosting service than to store your videos on your server 50 Web Writing Style Guide There are a few different ways to include video on your website Perhaps the easiest way is simply to include the link to the video you want to show Many websites will recognize the URL and automati cally link it this can easily be seen on Facebook The problem with including only a link is getting the audience back to your page or not having them ever leave it Thus it is more effective to embed video and most video hosting sites will generate the embed code for you which you can simply paste into your webpage You oft
103. ut using important keyword phrases in headlines Best advice Make your titles and headings catchy AND informative if you are trying to attract attention Don t Forget about Your Other Audience The Search Engine There s a computer reader that ll be important for your website Search engines How often do you use a search engine to find new content Most web surfers use them all the time When you use a search engine you aren t actually searching the Web you are searching a database of website content information se lected and maintained by the search engine provider Search engine companies employ computer programs known as bots to surf the Web and gather that information They then employ a ranking algo rithm that uses various factors to determine where and if a web page should show up in a search for specific keywords The good news is that generally the advice for writing good titles and headings for human readers will work well for search engines In formative titles and headings help search engines to index your content Rhetorics of Web Pages 37 Like your readers search engines predict that the titles and headings reveal the main content of your web page and they use the keywords from within them in indexing your content better titles and headings equals better search engine ranking results for your web pages Incidentally the practice of writing for search engines is known as search engine optimization SE
104. version 5 continues to be the tagging language that drives the web Separating Content from Presentation One of the hardest and most important concepts to learn for new HTML coders and new content strategists alike is that content should always be separated from presentation While this principle can be very hard to grasp it is critical to contemporary web design When you are writing with a word processor you can highlight text and click bold You do not have to think about the relationship of the appear 60 Web Writing Style Guide ance of the text to the structure of the text You just click and keep writing When you are creating content on the web however you use one set of rules HTML to define the structure of your content e g a heading a list a link and a second set of rules CSS to define how that content will appear e g bold text double line spacing blue background You will find this process of separating structure from appearance difficult when you begin but the more your work with HTML and CSS the easier it will become You will also find that as your websites get bigger separating struc ture from appearance makes your websites much easier to manage For example if you decide that your body typeface is too large you do not have to go through each and every page of your website selecting text and changing the font size setting by hand over and over and over again instead you edit a single style rule and a
105. y other kind of Internet activity Facebook Notes are great so long as you are primarily interested in your friends seeing them and not worried about keeping your Notes private One big advantage they have is that since everyone is already Genres of the Web 9 on Facebook you might get a lot more of your friends reading your Notes than you would if you posted them on Twitter or a blog The downside is that people who are not on Facebook or not your friends on it won t be able to see your Notes and search engines won t help people find your writing It s a trade off facebook seo Descriptive English Grammar final out takes SP write a Note 2011 edition by Dennis Baron on Wednesday May 11 2011 at 3 09pm Sometimes I wonder if I was the one who was absent or busy on Facebook when I taught these topics Ipse dixit I do not mean to say that as a future English teacher I plan to exclusively drill my poor students on the tenants of prescriptivist pedagogy However as a future English teacher I believe I should care about many rules of the English language and that my students should as well And as a future landlord will you drill your tenets m A J Dennis s Notes C Notes About Dennis the Internet has been accused of ruining the langauge I think it had some help Browse Notes a Friends Notes as an educator he should form an RSO Teachers against the Passive Voice with his o

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