Reading and comments

I have added all of your blogs to my blog's sidebar as a "blogroll." You can use that to quickly get to each others' blog sites.

Please read your fellow students' blogs and offer comments. I have commented on each of your most recent blog posts, and have tried to match my comments to your posts. If your post was short,  my comment was short; if long and complex, my comment was long and complex. That's one of the unofficial "rules" of the internet etiquette - measured response.

As a blog author, you control who is allowed to comment and how. If you prefer, you can "moderate" comments, meaning you must approve them before allowing them to be posted. Is that a good idea? Why or why not?

Keep posting! Just making yourself do it on a regular basis is a good habit to build. Eventually it will become part of you and you'll find yourself posting to your blog almost effortlessly.

So, what are you reading???

One of the more common uses for blogs is to let others know what you're reading, and often it's other blogs.

Some of my favorite blogs I read are:

Neurologica, by Dr. Stephen Novella.

NeuroLogica Blog

Maybe the best, most prolific columnist on topics of skepticism and rational thinking. Dr. Novella regularly fillets magical thinking, sloppy logic and pseudoscience.

Weblog-ed by Will Richardson

Weblogg-ed

Will is an educator who has taken the horns of this whole "read-write web" thing. He's seeing amazing things at the elementary and high school level, and this has implications for higher ed and for web designers in general. Probably not of interest if you're not an educator, but he does have links to lots of cool stuff.

Fatal Exception by Neil McAllister

Fatal Exception | Neil McAllister | InfoWorld

McAllister is a columnist for InfoWorld. He writes about trends in web programming and development. For anyone considering a career in web development or programming, McAllister is a must-read.

So, what are YOU reading?

Post a blog entry with some of your favorite information sites on the web.

--Brad

Welcome to the Class Blog!

Welcome to the blog site for NET115 Writing for Electronic Media. You will create your own blog sites and you will be using these to write, post, read and comment on your classmates' blogs.

I'm creating a "blog roll" - a list of other blogs that I read - and I will include your blog addresses so you can find each others'. I encourage you to add your own favorite blogs to your blog roll.

Sound Portraits - the process

In preparation for your own interview projects, I'd like you to listen to an interview with Geneva Tinsdale, who worked as a waitress at a Greensboro, N.C., Woolworth's lunch counter in 1960 when the management refused to serve four young Black men.

Her story about that day - and the day six months later when protests forced the company to change its policy - are told in her own words.

Listen to the story. It was done as an interview, but you don't hear the interviewer's questions - that was edited out. He introduces the subject and provides context by narration, but does not "converse" with Geneva.

You may also read the transcript. Note the style changes when the speaker goes from David Isay to Geneva Tinsdale. Look carefully at her answers, and how Isay must provide the context for many of them. What challenges do you suppose he faced in doing this story? How do you think you might anticipate those kinds of challenges?

Voice

One of the characteristics of writing for electronic media is voice. Voice is a combination of particular "speech" patterns (in writing, what is often called a conversational tone), point of view, and attitude - are you being funny, sarcastic, serious, nostalgic?

A particular advantage writing for electronic media has over traditional media is that the author's voice can literally be heard - that is, sound files can be attached to the blog or article and the audience may listen to the author in addition to reading.

I was unable to find an "official" version of this essay online, but someone posted the full text as a comment to a blog post, so we'll go with that. David Sedaris is a humorist who has made his fame and fortune on his readings. Read the text first - what do you hear? What do you imagine the author's "voice" to be?

AFTER reading the text, listen to the author reading the same work. Here's David Sedaris on "Late Night With David Letterman" reading one of his essays.

How is it different? Which has more impact? Are they better together, or does one interfere with the other? What techniques does Sedaris use to inject "voice" into his writing? Post a short critique to your blog site.

Non-Sequential Writing

One of the differences between writing for electronic media and writing for print is that many forms of electronic media support non-sequential writing. Sequential writing is the more familiar, with an order imposed upon the content 1) by the linear nature of print, or 2) by the dependencies of argument, order or other structure.

In non-sequential writing, information is presented in discreet chunks, without dependency on any other chunks. Chunks can be linked, of course, and packaged together, but each chunk should be able to stand on its own, as far as understanding by the audience.

For this exercise, practice writing in chunks. Use the "Today's Front Pages" website at the Newseum. Pick a newspaper from four different time zones in the United States, and write a short summary of the news presented on the front page. Each front page (one from each time zone) should be a discreet chunk. Post each chunk as a separate post to your blog. If you want to try it, try inserting a hot link to the other chunks (we'll get into this more later).

Focusing questions
What other forms of writing are non-sequential? What does the writer need to consider when writing non-sequentially?