Writing in an Everywhere Space

Like my students, I have had to transition into blog writing from a more "traditional" academic space of masters and doctoral English classes. I am fairly skilled at MLA style, argumentative structures, Toulmin's model for Argumentation, and the like. But what about writing in a 3-D space, one that invites dialogue, disagreement, and what I would like to call "live" writing (writing that has not ended because its potential through a blog and through continued potential audience interaction allows it to continue to "breathe" on the Internet)? What can students learn from blog writing that will benefit their academic life? And what from their academic life can benefit the blogosphere?

Take the advice of master fictioneer Stephen King. In his Second Foreword in On Writing, he suggests that On Writing is short ecause "most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do--nor why it works when it's good, nor why it doesn't when it goes bad" (11). I think that King could be talking about nonfiction writers in academia, too. I remember most of my work back in the day, up to and including the very recent present with my final dissertation defense. I know what environment I set to write that text (Centreville Library cubicles, laptop, a heavy bag full of books and a Diet Coke, and T-minus three hours until I was back on baby duty). But I don't know how I did what I did, really. I cannot look in on my brain and decipher step-by-step actions in the writing of academic texts. Really, all I can do is share a feeling that I was setting the stage in an appropriate way. I worked with feedback from my director, and went back to the library. I would research and read mostly at night, in bed before I fell asleep; and I would write in the mornings and during the quiet afternoons when my daughter was asleep. Sometimes at home I'd work on it with a big glass of Cabernet Sauvignon. In the end it worked out.

That text said a lot about how students writing blogs was a good thing; that students created "artifacts" that continue to speak to those who interact with those artifacts. So now I encourage students to write blogs in my ENG 112 classroom. I tell them to choose a newsworthy and researchable topic (as the best topics I've found are those that the authors are interested in but aren't experts--not yet).

So what works with these online artifacts? 

1. They can absolutely be academic. By the very nature of topics chosen, students can quickly link to current trends in IT, in neuroscience, in healthcare policy, in the environment. 
2. Students can write conventionally; they can choose academic phrasing and structure, making their texts more like academic papers than newspapers or social blogs/social media Twitter responses.
3. Blog discussion can fuel an edit and an enhancement of text, which mirrors peer-to-peer or instructor-to-peer classroom feedback on early drafts of academic papers.
4. Blog writers can learn burgeoning Web technologies that will help transition them to real-world writing experiences (because, really, not all student writers will land careers in academia).
5. Blog writing is the great equalizer: there is no peer-review, and fresh ideas can be published by anyone with access to the Internet.

Of course, there are issues with online writing, too:

1. Students can adopt the writing of the personal on the Web. Slang, misspellings, fragmented sentences, and a lack of clarity of argument can fill the spaces of a blog post. Student writers can forget audience and imagine that they are writing an online diary and not an academic text.
2. Freedom in blog design can support some students but throw other students off (those without an "eye" for pleasing design. Strange blog layouts, color combinations, small fonts (all the creative, visual things an academic paper strips from students' work are available on blogs) can distract from even the best argument.
3. When students don't research well (the first few hits on a Google search is quite different from a real in-depth research of Lexis-Nexis or other a college's educational databases), their arguments can seem trite, "too safe," or just plain ill-informed.
4. Student blog writers can find argumentative blogs to emulate that have no real substance, creating a never-ending loop of false support. 
5. While blog writing is the great equalizer, a lack of peer-review can affect not just the quality but the quantity of texts one has to wade through. Making quality works more difficult to find in a saturated blogosphere.

I'm confident that students blogging can overcome these negatives and come up with a series of texts that dig deeply enough on a topic that they will have gained benefit from their research and writing. I don't know if I can tell a student how to write a blog any better than I can tell them how to write an academic essay. Each student has to grapple with context: What is the topic they chose? What position do they take on the issue? Why? What don't they know about the issue? What can an audience be educated about so that they can be persuaded ethically? These are the questions writing professors can and should ask. But it doesn't really change when writing for the Web. Those questions are still important. The benefit, though, is that students get an audience with potential, much wider than that of a 16-week college classroom. The benefits of those online audience members, and of the potential academic artifact, expand into possibility.

Work Cited

King, Stephen. On Writing. New York: Scribner, 2000.