Writing for the Dynamic Online Audience

I joined the Midorea staff team in 2008, which introduced me to online writing. While I was familiar with forums, emails, instant messaging, and so on, I never thought about what it meant to write for a real audience online before. But, that job required me to do everything between writing rule lists to writing site announcements, and I had to change my style if I wanted to perform my job well.

I’ve been writing for an online audience for a long time now, but seeing a writing for the web class inspired me to re-examine the way that I look at it. Now, as we’re reaching the end of the semester, I have the opportunity to reflect upon what I’ve learned.

The first rule of writing for the web that I learned, even before registering for this class, was “keep it simple.” An online audience doesn’t want to read through walls of text, so points need to be made quickly and concisely. While I’ve caught myself rambling a few times in this class (particularly in forum discussions and blog posts), I’ve tried to stick to this rule. In my infographic, I cut main points down to single sentences. I also physically divided them up into separate bubbles, and arranged them in a way to keep the eye flowing from one to the next. In my Prezi, I utilized lists to outline main points that I made, so that viewers could reach over them as they listened to me make the full argument.

When I couldn't keep it simple, I broke things up. As I said before: an online audience will not read a wall of text. Mostly in my blog posts, I made sure to insert images and make plenty of line to break up my writing. This technique is particularly useful when I make forum posts for Midorea.

As we have discussed many times in this class, online writing is multimodal. Size and color are two general concepts that I did not consider before. Specifically with infographics, the size of the text and text boxes, as well as the overall color scheme, were much more important than I had previously thought. I also had to consider the size of infographics in relation to the screens that they were being read on: if they are too large and require a lot of moving and scrolling, then they are less appealing. This is certainly not something that I have to consider in academic writing, where I simple have to follow a very specific outline.

I also learned to consider how wide an online audience is. The audience of an academic paper is quite clear and narrow, but you can never guarantee what the audience of your online writing will be like. You need to consider the many different backgrounds, education levels, and dispositions that are presented by an online audience. While this may seem like a simple thing to consider, it's very important when you're writing about complex subjects, which may include a lot of jargon, or require critical thinking of your audience. "Keep it simple" is applied in a different way here: you need to keep your argument/subject simple, as well as its structure.

Writing for the web is challenging, but it has given me unique learning experiences. More than anything, though, I think I’ve realized how dynamic an online audience is – and how dynamic online writing has to be to accommodate that. Rather than strictly adhering to rules and guidelines, like I do with my academic writing, I think that I’ll continue to look critically at online writing, and adapt my style to the new trends and technologies that I see. While these general rules that I’ve learned will probably always be useful, being dynamic is certainly an important lesson that I will take away from this course.