An Audience and Style Transition: From Paper Writing to Online Presentation

by Kamaljeet Sanghera, Applied Information Technology

In IT 103, students learn that writing for the Web is different than writing on paper. Web readers scan for information on websites; they do not read every single word posted on a web page, so the writing and presentation style must change when the audience is accessing information online. The goal of our course project is to teach students the difference between web writing and more conventional writing.

In IT 103, a general education course offered by the Applied Information Technology department, students are assigned one large project, which is divided into two parts: part I is a research paper and part II is a website for the research paper. Students first write four to six pages on any new development in the information technology field that they find interesting or potentially beneficial. They include a title page with the GMU Honor Code statement indicating that it is the student’s original work, newly created for this semester. A bibliography page includes at least four references relevant to research, three of which must be from different source types. The paper is graded on quality of resources, analysis, integration and conclusion, citation, mechanics / style, and organization and structure.

For part II of the project, students publish the research paper on the Web. The presentation format and audience must now change. Students learn to make decisions relevant to their writing and their content as their class instructors are no longer their only audience. The content will now be publically available on their websites i.e. http://mason.gmu.edu/ ~username. These websites may be viewed by their friends, parents, and anyone interested in their topics. Although students are required to incorporate into the websites their instructor’s feedback, part II is not designed to expand on the research but to modify/revise content as appropriate for a web audience.

Even though the Internet, the World Wide Web, copyrighted text/images, and browsers are discussed in many lectures, these topics are specifically targeted in XHTML lectures and labs. Students learn how to code in the XHTML markup language and publish papers on the Mason website.

The requirements for Part II of this project include:

Homepage

The title page of the research paper becomes the homepage. Students who have created a homepage for another class usually create a link to their IT 103 title page.

Web pages

The research paper is not presented in one long document on the web site. Instead, students effectively organize their content into relevant web pages that are easy to read and navigate, using hyperlinks to access details. Students rearrange the content so that the first sentence of a paragraph summarizes the entire paragraph. Students also have to create appropriate headings for these web pages. The headings must be detailed enough so the web page reader knows what to expect from the page. Users should be able to access any page and start reading from anywhere on any page.

List

This requirement involves reading the research paper and chunking significant ideas into ordered or unordered lists.

Navigation Menu

For the navigation menu, students insert a table at the top or along the left side of each page. The table contains links to other web pages. The navigation menu effectively enhances the accessibility of the website. This requirement also teaches students the importance of a consistent layout, as they must ensure that the navigation menu can be found in the same location on every page.

Images

A web page without an image is visually unappealing. However, an image which is not relevant to the content is meaningless. In IT 103, students are required to have at least one relevant image on one of the content pages. The image can be created using Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, MS Paint, or other graphics software, and it can be a digital picture taken by a student or clipart downloaded from a public domain. If the clipart is copyrighted, students must get permission from the copyright holder and must indicate that “the permission is received” in their bibliography page. Bibliography page – The bibliography page contains all references cited in the research paper. In addition, it includes the clipart references and original artwork references.

Other than these basic requirements, the student’s overall grade depends on his/her website layout, the effective use of space, consistent format, navigation scheme, and the appropriate use of colors, backgrounds, and fonts. Sometimes students take their websites to the next level: applying cascading style sheets, creating forms, and making wikis and weblogs. Students are evaluated on how successfully they have met all of these assignment objectives and the appropriateness of the page for the intended audience.

As writers, students learn to write succinctly for the web while making sure that each page is complete in and of itself. Because each page must be its own entity, redundancy may occur. Students learn to use more action words, to include subheadings, to avoid over-subdividing the content, and to use the inverted pyramid style for paragraphs. They break up text into bullets, include relevant images to support their research, and organize text into tables. Finally, students must pay close attention to their grammar and spelling to maintain the credibility of their websites.