The real world—this is a term we writing teachers like to use. We like to use real-world scenarios in our writing assignments. We say that these writing skills have real-world application. Understanding sophisticated writing theory makes us more informed actors in the real world.
And a basic one I’ve been forgetting to remind students: writing in the real world is hard.
In the classroom we abstract writing from the real world, placing it apart from us an object of study. But this abstraction can make us forget about the lived experience of writing. It takes important questions off the table like How does your medical condition affect your writing? What’s it like to write when you’re short on cash? How does fear affect writing? How do your surroundings affect the way you write? We tend to minimize the nitty gritty nature of writing.
To be fair, many writing classrooms talk about the material conditions of writing. And many writing classrooms do a good job of preparing students for the real world. But I wonder how true this is when it comes to teaching writing for the web.
In my writing classes, my eyes light up when teaching students about the importance of building digital literacies and digital writing skills. I love when they consider the many rhetorical strategies available when writing online. Allusions to rhetorical velocity. Talk of diverse audiences, machine audiences. The ascendance of visual rhetoric. The importance of style. The importance of design and usability. The reclaimed status of rhetorical delivery.
They build websites and blogs, they post comments, they respond to those comments. They design visual arguments. I become pleased with the look and content of many of their sites. They reflect on their project: How many comments did you get? What was the quality of the discussions? In the future, what steps might you take to spread your message? What content might you repurpose? What strategies would you use to increase your reach and change more minds? What relationships might you cultivate to increase your ethos and gain new audiences? What economic issues will you have to overcome to grow your online platform?
Overall I am happy with the assignment I have mechanically named Blog Project. I have made my students more aware of what writing entails in the digital age. I’ve avoided the trap of making them use digital tools for the sake of using digital tools. They’ve been given a context, been made aware that writing online is an economic activity, a battle for attention in a large and noisy room. And I’ve encouraged them to use their blooming writing skills to pursue an important cause. I’ve done a good job.
But I wonder if I’ve been completely honest about how difficult it is to write persuasively online. In the classroom, where writing is crystallized into defined writing assignments, it’s easy to think of persuasive writing as a one-time event, based primarily on the oration model. A single student makes a single speech (essay) to a given audience, hoping to have persuaded them by the end of the argument. But being a persuasive writer online is not like being a speaker on stage at a one-time event. It is more like being a politician on the campaign trail.
On the campaign trail, the single speech is only part of a broader rhetorical strategy that involves gaining support gradually, using various media, genres, and styles, moving from place to place to reach new audiences and build new allies. This is grunt work.
So is building an online platform. And I guess I wonder whether anything I do in the classroom actually prepares students for this long haul. I also wonder if I’m being too idealistic and too optimistic about their chances to engage with important issues online. It’s likely they will never return to the websites they’ve built. Likely their sites will join the millions of other abandoned blogs and websites, floating debris on the outskirts of an ever expanding digital universe.
Maybe it’s misplaced to encourage them all to run blogs and websites. Maybe it’s enough that they become more equipped to participate in democratic exchanges online. It certainly isn’t every person’s calling to run a blog, to grow a list of followers who consistently await their messages. But it’s also not the case that students should feel satisfied engaging in important debates from the comment sections of other writers’ posts or waiting passively for their message to go viral. There’s only so much persuading you can do from the sidelines.
In fact, it may be misplaced not to encourage students to build their own platforms. When students do not look at the broader context of writing online they become susceptible to the view that writing creates isolated products or artifacts. They fail to analyze how a persuasive blog post works with or against other posts on their site, with their site’s images and design, and with other content they’ve posted across social media. In short, they fail to see persuasive writing as a series of ongoing, interconnected activities.
When writers look at persuasive writing from a platform perspective, they are less likely to neglect important persuasive strategies like creating content that attracts new audiences, creating personal connections with those audiences, and building relationships with other online writers to help further their cause.
I want my students to see the broader context of writing online because even though they may never return to the blogs they created for my course, it’s possible that later in their careers or personal lives they will decide to become more invested in a cause, and perhaps will be better prepared to take on the challenges of planning and executing a rhetorical strategy online.
It’s a modest hope, but it’s one that gives me energy and makes me feel good about teaching, which is something that also takes place in the real world.