Examples illustrating ineffective conversational writing on the Internet

We cover the importance of precise conversational writing on the Internet, suggesting practices like careful reading of other's messages, responding to specific requests, meeting commitments one makes, and quoting previous messages when necessary to retain context.

To illustrate these principles, I have posted two examples of ineffective conversational Internet writing. They are example 1 and example 2.

Can you find places in these examples where each of the above practices was ignored?

Writing very short documents -- Twitter posts

Writing short documents is one of our Internet content creation skills. Twitter posts are an extreme form of short document, and they are unique to the Internet (well ... perhaps fortune cookies too).

By spending a couple of minutes on a Twitter post, one can get two or three points across. My posts have gotten longer, approaching the 140 character limit over time.

Using Twitter and a wiki in a collaborative writing assignment -- student evaluation

Last semester, I used Twitter and a wiki to illustrate collaborative writing and the writing of short documents in a Network News assignment. The student response was positive, so I will repeat the experience.

I started a class Twitter stream for links to current events relevant to our class, and told the students to follow the feed. I posted about 125 items during the semester.

The writing assignment was near the end of the term. Each student selected a particularly interesting post, and summarized it and its relevance to the class in a short document. Once the summary documents were polished, the students added them to a wiki page, creating a collaboratively authored Network News report for the term.

After the term, I asked the students to complete a short questionnaire on these assignments. Thirty three students responded. A summary of their responses follows.

They checked the class Twitter feed an average of 2.4 times a week and, on the average, followed the links in a tweet to learn more 3.2 times during the term. However, ten of the 33 students admitted they checked the feed less than once per week. Dropping them, the averages increased to 3.4 and 3.8. (We have a heterogeneous student body, and I run the class primarily for the benefit of the involved students).

I also asked whether they agreed or disagreed with this statement:

I found several of the articles interesting and useful - I am glad we had the Twitter stream for our class.

Overall, 23 students agreed with this statement. That fell to 19 (in parenthesis) when I ignored the ten who reported checking the feed less than once per week.

• Agree: 23 (19)
• Disagree: 3 (1)
• No opinion: 7 (3)

The next question was: will you continue following the Twitter feed after the class ends, and their responses were:

• Yes, regularly: 7 (7)
• No: 11 (4)
• I will check it from time to time: 15 (12)

I also asked for comments, criticisms or suggestions on the use of Twitter in class, and the replies were:

• Since I am a CIS Major. I think it good to keep up with what is happening with Technology and IT which is why I like the twitter feed. The Twitter feed has many interesting articles related to IT. I plan to follow the Twitter feed after this class ends.
• The questions did not mention TinyURL, which to me seemed like one of the most useful tools for Twitter.
• It really helps... to know what's going on as far as what's new in the PC world.
• It was fun to learn.
• I learned more about information technology from the links provided on the class twitter. I also shared a lot of the information with friends and family through facebook.
• Yes. It's great! Could you post (and write it on the board during class) when each tweet goes up, and, what each 'tweet' is entitled. Then you could just tell the class 'it's there if you are interested in reading it'. Maybe this can keep the audience for the posts. They (the class) then can't say you didn't let them know when you've tweeted. Please keep including this assignment requirement.
• The ABC's of Twitter: Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity.
• Yes have Suggest use twitter to the Professor.
• I was kind of disappointed, I think the use of Twitter in this class should be abolished. I really don't think its the revolutionary communication medium that the media tries to make it out to be. I mean, i know that the programming or whatever behind the service is impressive but that doesn't justify our class's involvement with the site. Our first time using it was cool, as people do sometimes need the practice just using things like that on the internet, but it shouldn't be as big a part of the class as it was.
• More in class usage.
• It's easy to view its just a little tedious.
• I would have appreciated any number of Twitter feeds posted on the site from other Networking professionals.
• Its okay but I would have preferred more interaction in class.

I also asked for feedback on the writing of the short document. We had covered several "tips" during the class, and I asked which ones they used for this assignment. The number who used each tip is shown below:

• Set a draft aside to let it "cool off" then revise it: 15
• Read a draft aloud then revise it: 17
• Have someone else read and comment on a draft then revise it: 14
• Spell check it: 26
• Grammar check it: 26
• Think about who your reader was and their interest in the topic: 18
• Write a meaningful title to help the reader decide whether or not to follow the link: 19
• Run it through PaperRater: 21
• Include a statement as to why the tweet interested you and how it fit into our class: 21
• None: 3

Findings from the Pew survey on Writing, Technology and Teens

I just posted a note on an online survey on writing that was completed during spring 2009 by children between 9 and 16 in England and Scotland. The post listed some of the statistical findings.

During the spring 2008, the Pew Research Center conducted a more scientific telephone survey on Writing, Technology and Teens. Some of their findings are listed below.

The methodologies were different, but they covered many of the same issues.

If you are a student, what are your answers to the questions these surveys asked? If you are a teacher, how might these statistics influence your curriculum?

• 85% of teens ages 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending email or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites.
• 60% of teens do not think of these electronic texts as “writing.”
• 50% of teens say they sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation in their school assignments;
• 38% say they have used text shortcuts in school work such as “LOL” (which stands for “laugh out loud”);
• 25% have used emoticons (symbols like smiley faces :-) ) in school work.
• 83% of parents of teens feel there is a greater need to write well today than there was 20 years ago.
• 86% of teens believe good writing is important to success in life – some 56% describe it as essential and another 30% describe it as important.
• 48% of teenagers’ parents believe that their child is writing more than the parent did during their teen years; 31% say their child is writing less; and 20% believe it is about the same now as in the past.
• 94% of black parents say that good writing skills are more important now than in the past, compared with 82% of white parents and 79% of English-speaking Hispanic parents.
• 88% of parents with a high school degree or less say that writing is more important in today’s world, compared with 80% of parents with at least some college experience.
• 50% of teens say their school work requires writing every day; 35% say they write several times a week. The remaining 15% of teens write less often for school.
• 82% of teens report that their typical school writing assignment is a paragraph to one page in length.
• White teens are significantly more likely than English-speaking Hispanic teens (but not blacks) to create presentations for school (72% of whites and 58% of Hispanics do this).
• 82% of teens feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities and 78% feel the same way about their teachers using computer-based writing tools.
• 47% of black teens write in a journal, compared with 31% of white teens.
• 37% of black teens write music or lyrics, while 23% of white teens do.
• 49% of girls keep a journal; 20% of boys do.
• 26% of boys say they never write for personal enjoyment outside of school.
• 47% of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more compared to 33% of teens without blogs.
• 65% of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53% of non-bloggers say the same.
• 72% of teens say they usually (but not exclusively) write the material they are composing for their personal enjoyment outside of school by hand; 65% say they usually write their school assignments by hand.
• 15% of teens say their internet-based writing of materials such as emails and instant messages has helped improve their overall writing while 11% say it has harmed their writing. Some 73% of teens say this kind of writing makes no difference to their school writing.
• 17% of teens say their internet-based writing has helped the personal writing they do that is not for school, while 6% say it has made their personal writing worse. Some 77% believe this kind of writing makes no difference to their personal writing.
• 57% of teens belive that when they use computers to write, they are more inclined to edit and revise their texts.
• 27% of parents think the internet writing their teen does makes their teen child a better writer, and 27% think it makes the teen a poorer writer. Some 40% say it makes no difference.
• 93% of those ages 12-17 say they have done some writing outside of school in the past year and more than a third of them write consistently and regularly.
• 49% of all teens say they enjoy the writing they do outside of school “a great deal,” compared with just 17% who enjoy the writing they do for school with a similar intensity.
• 81% of teens who enjoy their school writing engage in creative writing at school.

Many UK children write on the Internet, and those who do consider themselves better writers than those who do not

The UK-based National Literacy Trust has done a survey on Young people's writing: Attitudes, behaviour and the role of technology.

The report, which is available online, outlines findings from 3001 pupils aged 9-16 from England and Scotland, who completed an online survey in May 2009. It explores the link between writing and gender and age differences, socio-economic background, mobile phone ownership, having a blog, and having a social network profile. It concludes with practical and policy implications.

A few of the findings:

• 75% of young people said they write regularly -- online and off.
• 56% of young people said they had a profile on a social networking site, such as Bebo or Facebook. 24% said that they have their own blog.
• Young people who write on a blog were much more likely than young people who do not write on a blog to enjoy writing in general (57% vs. 40%) and to enjoy writing for family/friends in particular (79% vs. 55%).
• Young people with a blog (61%) as well as young people with a profile on a social networking site (56%) also displayed greater confidence, believing themselves to be good writers.
• Owning a mobile phone does not appear to alter young people’s enjoyment of writing, their writing behaviour or their attitudes towards writing.
• Most young people said they used computers regularly and believed that computers are beneficial to their writing
• Nearly 60% of young people believe computers allow them to be more creative, concentrate more and encourage them to write more often.
• Just under 9 in 10 young people see writing as an important skill to succeed in life
• In line with governmental figures, which show that girls outperform boys in writing.
• There was a dip in enjoyment of writing, writing behaviour and attitudes towards writing at ages 11-14, but they recover again in pupils aged 14-16.
• There was not a relationship between economic status (receiving free school meals) and enjoyment of writing, writing behaviour, or attitudes towards writing; however pupils who do not receive; howver, students who recieved free meals lacked confidence, rating themselves as worse writers.

Presentation on writing for the Internet

I gave a talk on teaching Internet writing at an online teaching conference at Cal State Los Angeles last week. The talk put Internet writing in the context of the concept of IT literacy, then covered three types of Internet writing:

• Conversational writing
• Writing short documents
• Collaborative writing

The presentation includes links to full presentations and teaching exercises on each of these types of writing.

(Click on the "writing" label for other writing posts on this blog)

Research on writing for the Internet

Stanford professor Andrea Lunsford headed a five-year longitudinal study of student writing. She and her colleagues followed the writing -- in and out of class -- of 189 students during their four years at Stanford and their first year after graduation (about 15,000 pieces of writing). Some of the findings were:

• Students are writing more than ever
• Some of their “life writing” is profound
• Their writing is done to achieve some purpose or goal

A recent account of student blog posts in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings supports the idea that life writing can be profound. We should not underestimate our students.

You will find two videos on this study and related work here:

• Interview of Lunsford on the study, 12 min. 18 sec. (left tab)
• Moderated discussion among four professors, including Lunsford, on digital literacy, 39 min. 30 sec. (right tab)

You may also be interested in following the research at the Center for Writing in Digital Environments at Michigan State University.

Internet writing is important

A recent report on Writing, Teens and Technology found that 83% of parents of teens feel there is a greater need to write well today than there was 20 years ago. Eight six percent of teens ages 12-17 believe good writing is important to success in life -- some 56% describe it as essential and another 30% describe it as important.

Employers confirm the importance of writing on the job. Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals, a leading software company lists five characteristics he looks for in a prospective employee:

• have a positive outlook
• be well rounded and flexible
• be a quick learner
• be trustworthy -- will find a solution to a problem
• be a good writer

Fried considers being a good writer most important, stating "Probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers."

Joel Spolsky, well known programmer and author on the importance of writing to a software developer is also looking for good writers. He says "Being able to write clearly, to write English clearly is more important to developing useful software than almost anything else and that's something you're more likely to learn in the English department than in the computer science department."

The Fried and Spolsky quotes are from talks they gave. You will find links to the talks here.

Collaborative writing by small and very large groups

Wikis are perhaps the simplest collaborative writing tool, but they are best suited to compiled and simple co-authored documents.

For more complex co-authored documents we use network-based word processors. While they are limited and slow today, they will improve as technology like JavaScript interpreters, development tools and network speed improve.

For massively co-authored documents, documents with many authors, we need to add structure and social networking features. This class note discusses two sites for creating massively co-authored documents, PublicMarkup and WePC.

Writing for Internet readers

Writing must be tailored to the medium. You would not publish an essay on a billboard or a short slogan as a newspaper article. Writing for the Internet must be compatible with Internet reading style, and, if we are writing for students, their characteristics.

Jakob Nielsen asks the question How Little do Users Read? in a recent column. Nielsen describes a study by Harald Weinreich and his colleagues. They instrumented the Web browsers of 25 users and collected data on their browsing habits, as shown here:


Even for first time visits to a site, half of the page-stay times were 12 seconds or less.

Nielsen analyzed the same data further. He removed very short pages (probably error messages) and very long views (probably unattended browsers) and found the following correlation between the number of words on a page and the time spent reading it:

Next he asked what percent of the words on a page could have been read by someone reading at 250 words per minute:

As we see, a user might be able to read most of a very short page, but will not typically take the time to read more than a portion of a longer page.

Of course, different users have different reading habits. The posts on this blog may seem long, but they are written for a somewhat scholarly reader. But, as educators, we should probably keep things short and teach our students to write concisely for the Internet.

Does Internet style reading change our brains?

We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.
Marshall McLuhan

Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.
Friedrich Nietzsche


Nicholas Carr published an article entitled Is Google Making Us Stupid? in which he discusses his and other's inability to patiently read long, complex articles and books. Web documents are typically short and linked to other documents, and we often jump away from an article after skimming or partially reading it.

Carr feels that reading this way has altered his brain structure, which explains his impatience when reading long documents. If Carr's hypothesis is true, today's students, who have grown up using the Internet and Web, will not learn well from conventional books and journal articles.

Carr's article spurred quite a bit of online debate and commentary. For example, this Salon article with several pages of comments.

Are our students reading habits really different than their parent's generation? Is this due to the Web or to other media like fast-cutting, MTV-style video? If we are becoming hard-wired skimmers instead of careful readers, what is gained and what is lost?

Role-based collaborative writing using a wiki

The following is an excerpt from an interview of Stewart Mader, who describes his use of a wiki for chemistry lab reports at Brown University. The role-based collaborative writing exercises benefited both students and teachers.

When I taught a chemistry lab years ago, I used a wiki to have students write collaborative lab reports. [Before the wiki, I had] 30 students in a lab where each student does an experiment and writes a report. You get 30 reports and 30 introductions and 30 methods and materials and 30 conclusions and so forth. Grading and evaluating that work becomes more about just getting through the pile on your desk than about really providing students in-depth feedback.

And for the students, I don't think they learn as much that way because they're focused on getting the thing done and turned in on time, and they're just repeating the same process over and over.

So one of the ways I used the wiki was to take a group of 30 students, split them up into six groups of five, and as they did an experiment, have each of those groups work much more like they would in the professional world. Teams would work on research projects, and when they wrote their report, each student was responsible for a different section. Student A would write the Abstract, Student B would write the Materials and Methods, and so on. For Experiment 2, roles changed, and Student B wrote the Abstract, and Student A wrote Materials and Methods.

The outcome for me was instead of getting 30 reports, I was now getting six reports, so I was able to spend much more time on those reports, reading what the students had written and giving them a lot more constructive, substantive feedback. For the students, they weren't slogging through with these repetitions every week. They were now trying out writing different parts of the report. Obviously, you're going to be stronger with some sections than another, so that means one week it might be a little easier you and that's fine because next week, you're going to work on the section that's a little more difficult and you are going to be able to really focus and refine your technique on that.

That's just one example, but that's the kind of thing a wiki can do in teaching. It can really allow instructors to focus on fewer, more in-depth assignments or products that are results of highly collaborative work by students.

The other benefit that comes out of that, especially with group work, is you can see what students are doing as they are doing it.... You can help students to keep a project on course towards success, versus derailing because there are problems in the group that you don't know about until the end of the project, when they come to you with a substandard result and start complaining about how members didn't pull their own weights.

Instead, you know what is going on, and you can see from the interaction they are having and the contribution of material in the wiki. If you see one person is noticeably absent from any contribution, you can talk to that person and say "Hey, are you having trouble with the tool, or are you having trouble with the assignment?" You can fix something like that in the first or second week, versus the twelfth week of the semester, when hope is lost.

This excerpt is from the The Power of Wikis in Higher Ed by Linda L Briggs.

Finding the community of faculty interested in new literacy

I recently met Carol Holder, a specialist in teaching writing, who wrote an an article on New Media and New Literacies. I'd recommend reading the article, and following the links in it.

Holder worries that faculty, courses and academic programs are stuck in the past while new media and new modes of communication are rapidly evolving. She wonders what it will take to see new media, multi modal literacies, and curriculum and instructional change at colleges and universities, and goes on to give examples of people using and talking about new media and literacies.

She begins with the use of tools like email, wikis and shared documents in traditional writing classes. Next she describes Calibrated Peer Review, a highly structured writing service developed by the UCLA chemistry faculty. (I think it is too complex and structured, but you should check it out).

The second half of the article describes journals, Web sites and blogs, which serve the community of faculty in composition, rhetoric, and communication who are exploring new literacies in their scholarship and teaching. I will cover them in future posts, but if I were you, I would check them out now -- don't wait for me.

Teaching Internet writing in a recreation and tourism managment course

One of the skills we might consider as part of computer literacy 3.0 is writing for the Internet.

We have also asked whether computer literacy should be spread throughout the curriculum or taught in one or more dedicated core courses

Larry Beck's course Wilderness and the Leisure Experience provides a good example of teaching Internet writing skills as part of a non-dedicated course. Beck provides small groups of students with the rough outline of a report, and they research and write it using a wiki. In doing so, they practice organizing themselves for collaborative writing and learn the mechanics of wiki and image processing software. Beck describes his course here, and you can see examples of student work here.

Beck spends a little time on a simple overview of the mechanics of using the wiki, and the students figure out the rest on their own. Someone in the group can usually help the others with the technology if need be. He gives them general instructions on the report outline and writing process, and requires periodic progress-check meetings with them.

See this presentation for an assessment Beck's experiments. (The writing portion begins with slide 23).

Writing for the Internet: conversations, short documents, and collaborative writing

I will write 42 pages for class this semester ... and over 500 pages of email. Student quote, 2008.

Probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers, Jason Fried, 2005.

Being able to write clearly, to write English clearly is more important to developing useful software than almost anything else and that's something you’re more likely to learn in the English department than in the computer science department, Joel Spolsky, 2009.

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter, Pascal, letter, 1656.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written, Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

---

Students often wonder what potential employers are looking for. Jason Fried of 37Signals lists his five hiring criteria in this short audio. He singles out good writing as the most important criteria:

And finally, and probably the most important thing and probably one of the surprises is you have to work with people who are good writers. Everybody has to be a good writer. The programmer has to be a good writer. The designer has to be a good writer. The business guy has to be a good writer That's how people communicate now. People don't talk as much as they used to. They IM all the time. They email all the time. They're hopefully posting messages to Basecamp all the time. And you have to find people who can communicate by writing. Its very very important. If there is any miscommunication going on, its just a chink in the armor and you're going to have a real problem with that. You have to make sure that people can write.

Fried is not referring to people who can write excellent essays or term papers with properly formatted bibliographies, but to people who can read and write in the concise, unambiguous, focused, conversational style used on the Internet. Much Internet writing takes the form of a conversation, for example, a blog post with comments, a response to an email or listserve post with quoted snippets, or posts to a threaded discussion.

Over twenty years ago, Terry Winograd defined a four-category taxonomy for conversations that seems to cover much of today's Internet writing:

• Conversations for action: a request or offer which is subsequently confirmed or dropped
• Conversations for clarification: obtaining more information about something said earlier or in a prior conversation
• Conversations for possibilities: creating ideas and selecting one or more for future discussion
• Conversations for orientation: exchanging information about themselves or a situation (bilateral or unilateral)

The possibilities for the unfolding of a conversation for action are illustrated in the following figure from Winograd and Flores (page 65).



Party A makes a request Party B. B can accept, decline, or make a counter offer. Each of these in turn has follow-on possibilities until the conversation ends in one of the bold face end points. If, for example, the conversation reaches node 5, B has asserted that their agreed upon action is complete and A confirms that.

Winograd and his colleagues developed a software product called The Coordinator which imposed the formal structure illustrated above on top of email. With The Coordinator, one did not merely send an unstructured email message, one initiated a formal conversation with a request, and the recipient either accepted, rejected or negotiated a commitment with a date. Once a commitment was made, the system generated messages to keep the action on track.

The Coordinator failed commercially because it was overly complex and rigid, and users could do much the same thing using email with to-do lists and milestones as found today in a program like 37Signal's Basecamp. However, The Coordinator foreshadowed the sort of writing we do today on the Internet -- the sort of writing our students need to practice.

Our students should also learn to write (and read) short documents like Web pages and blog posts. Students often ask how long a term paper or other written assignment must be, hoping it will not be too long. But Google, large fonts and wide margins make it easy to pad and lengthen a paper. Given the short attention span of people reading from a screen, today's students should learn to write short, focused documents. User interface consultant and researcher Jakob Nielsen offers guidelines for writing for blogs and the Web on his usability blog.

Nielsen's guidelines are based on research showing that people scan Web pages, taking time to read about 20 percent of the words. The problem is exacerbated by the ease with which students can "multi-task" while online. But, careful reading, not scanning, is required for online conversation and concise, link-filled documents. Our students must learn to read carefully, in the manner of Thoreau.

Today's student will also be expected to write collaboratively on the Internet, typically using a wiki or shared document. The simplest form of collaborative writing is creating a compiled document, where each author's contribution is independent of the others. A good way to introduce compiled writing is to have students build a list of something -- a class roster, recommended restaurants near campus, recommended Web sites, etc.

With a co-authored document, the division of labor is less clear. A lead author may begin with an outline and invite others to flesh the content out. Another possibility is that the lead author writes a first draft, then invites others to modify it. Perhaps the authors can meet face-to-face to plan their work before writing, perhaps not. Regardless, all authors are free to edit any portion of the evolving document. The Wikipedia includes a page on writing better articles.

There is a gray area between compiling and co-authoring -- one person may revise another person's contribution to a compilation. One thing all collaborative writing has in common -- when one edits a common document, their goal should be to improve it.