Writing with the Reader: How Blogging Creates a New Online - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Writing with the Reader: How Blogging Creates a New Online Conversation A N G E L I C A B O T L O

Blogs — Blogs: ¡ Specific group of people ¡ Comments and hyperlinks ¡ Success measured in audience participation/feedback ¡ Creates a relationship between author and reader over the Internet

Other Information Pools — Examples: Search Engines (Google, Bing) Dictionaries (OED, Merriam Webster) ¡ Consolidate information on an automatic program ¡ Do not allow for discussion or information transmission between users ¡ Success measured in simple the number of hits on site, regardless of user satisfaction

Audience to “Community Building” — Miller and Shepard state that the importance of audience interaction is necessary to build a community from the blog ¡ “…Blogs are also intended to be read. Maintaining traffic and link statistics seems important to bloggers, and many provide readers the opportunity to provide feedback wither by posting comments directly on the blog or through email” ¡ “Many bloggers see blogging as a way of developing relationships, via linking back, with an online community: ‘the linking that happens through blogging creates the connections that bind us.’” (Hourihan, 2002)

Way Bloggers Engage Readers and Spread Information — Format ¡ Easy to use and search ¡ Organized posts ¡ Interest articles dependent on readership ¡ Comments section ¡ Hyperlinks

Way Bloggers Engage Readers and Spread Information — Writing conventions: ¡ Ethos à appeals from character ¡ Pathos à appeals to emotion ¡ Logos à appeals to reason ÷ Source: Greene and Lidinsky, Chapter 8

Example 1: UVA’s HerCampus Blog — http://www.hercampus.com/school/uva — Small and tailored audience for a community of women at UVA — Writers from UVA — Interest articles — Comments section — Links to other social media sights — Short-coming: minimal amount of comments

Example 2: Mesquite Citizen — http://mesquitecitizen.com/index.php? id=32&switch=m&t=About+Us — Citizen journal blog — Small and specific audience — Easy to use — Interest articles that appeal to readers — Linked to other social media sights — Active comments section

Conclusion — These two blogs are written to appeal to specific audiences and are successful, as shown by the amount of traffic on their sites and in their comments sections. These blogs show how blogging has become a new form of reading and writing in which both the author and the audience engage in an information feedback loop amongst themselves and across the globe by using “the flood” unleashed by the Internet.

Discussion — Please think about a blog you have analyzed for your own project. Has this blog successfully appealed to its audience? Why or why not? If so, does it accomplish this task through blog formatting and content or through the use of writing conventions and persuasions? If it does not appeal to readers effectively enough, how do you think the blog can improve?