Readercentric Writing for Digital Media: Theory and Practice 9780895038166, 9780895038142

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READERCENTRIC WRITING FOR DIGITAL MEDIA Theory and Practice

David Hailey Utah State University

Baywood’s Technical Communications Series Series Editor: Charles H. Sides

BAYWOOD PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. AMITYVILLE, NEW YORK

Copyright © 2014 by Baywood Publishing Company, Inc., Amityville, New York

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo-copying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free recycled paper.

Baywood Publishing Company, Inc. 26 Austin Avenue P.O. Box 337 Amityville, NY 11701 (800) 638-7819 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: baywood.com

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2013027928 ISBN: 978-0-89503-813-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN: 978-0-89503-814-2 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-89503-815-9 (e-pub) ISBN: 978-0-89503-816-6 (e-pdf) http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/RCW Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hailey, David, 1943Readercentric writing for digital media : theory and practice / David Hailey, Utah State University. pages cm. -- (Baywood’s technical communications series) Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-89503-813-5 (cloth) -- ISBN 978-0-89503-814-2 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-89503-815-9 (e-pub) -- ISBN 978-0-89503-816-6 (e-pdf) 1. Online authorship. 2. Digital media. 3. Technical writing. I. Title. PN171.055H34 2013 808’.042--dc23 2013027928

By permission. Image credits: Hubble: NASA, ESA, and Q.D. Wang (University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Spitzer: NASA, JPL, and s. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/Ca;tech). The image is a composit of many images put together by a NASA team.

Table of Contents Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Introduction

SECTION I: Theory CHAPTER 1 — Why is It So Hard to Write and Evaluate Writing on the Internet? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CHAPTER 2 — Anything Can Be a Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CHAPTER 3 — A Tool Called Genre . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CHAPTER 4 — What Does It Mean to Publish? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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CHAPTER 5 — Theory Behind Usability Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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SECTION II: Application CHAPTER 6 — Proposing a New Approach to Content Evaluation . . . . . 115 CHAPTER 7 — Writing Persuasion-Centric Content . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 CHAPTER 8 — Writing Quality-Centric Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 CHAPTER 9 — Writing User-Centric Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213

SECTION III: Practice CHAPTER 10 — Professional Writer in an Agile Environment . . . . . . . 235 CHAPTER 11 — The Future—If There Be Such . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

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Dedication For my wife Christine who has been my pillar for as long as I have known her.

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Introduction What might this book contribute to the many excellent (and already written) works dedicated to reading and writing for digital media? Perhaps it can provide solutions to some of the apparent paradoxes I find in the profession. Over the past five years, I have surveyed more than one hundred working technical writers and editors, seeking to understand how well they grasped the processes for evaluating written texts in digital environments. As one part of the study, I have the participants evaluate a very simple website with four pages manifesting several egregious writing errors. In only a few cases did any professional writers recognize that any of the pages had any writing problems. Four writers recognized there were problems on the pages, but only one was able to explain any of them. The rest were unable to produce a vocabulary that permitted them to discuss the problems in any meaningful way. In short, with the exception of one person, 100% of the professionals I have tested so far have been unable to both identify and explain simple, but highly visible writing problems. How is it that even professionals with years of experience seem unable to successfully evaluate content in the simplest of websites? The purpose of this book is to explain common problems in technical writing for digital media and present a few possible solutions. PROBLEMS The difficulty in evaluating quality of writing in digital media seems to stem from a collection of both subtle and serious conditions. Together, these conditions make it hard for us to see past structural distractions found in digital media and into the heart of the written texts. A text might look well-written but be for the wrong audience, or it might be mechanically sound but serve the wrong purpose, or it might ramble on and on without going anywhere but be on the right topic, or it might have an inappropriate rhetorical stance (all subtle but serious problems). There are great opportunities for good writers, editors, and developers to evaluate the writing in digital media and not only make it better but make the writing more persuasive as well, while simultaneously improving their value as writers in the workplace. For example, one nagging problem in current web 1

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design is the commonly held assumption that anybody can write and evaluate web content, and the text can be written for a universal audience. This assumption is incorrect, but only writers, editors, and developers with a strong understanding of rhetorical processes can disprove it, and even then only if they can see through the endemic distractions that reside in digital environments. The First Problem When we read a traditional document, we read it through a set of filters or expectations that might include an understanding of the document’s genre, its author, our grammatical and other mechanical expectations, design impact, and so forth. A handwritten love poem on a Post-it note would receive a completely different set of filters from a typewritten, legal letter. Our filters for a traditional mystery are different from the ones we use on a Steinbeck novel. We read Shakespeare in facsimile format and enjoy the odd, archaic artifacts that come from Elizabethan printing, but in contemporary printing, even small print errors distract. These filters are critical for evaluating a document’s quality and purpose, but we often leave the filters behind when we evaluate or write texts in digital media. For a while, after the advent of email, academics marveled at how casual email documents immediately became. This casualness is in part because email writers often seem unable to connect the genres of their emails with the genres’ analog models. For example, a formal letter might begin with “Dear Professor Mcafee,” but the same message in an email will typically begin with “Hi Bob.” I personally know English teachers who ignore the standard mechanics of writing and write completely in lower case or with careless use of spelling and grammar, even when writing professionally to peers. I suggest that the casualness of the email, even in exceptionally formal environments, is an example of traditional filters not transferring to these digital documents. I suggest this is part of the reason the professional writers I poll are consistently unable to evaluate the writing samples I give them. They are attempting to evaluate them in the absence of filters they would have no trouble using on traditional, analog documents. The Second Problem Professional communicators have limited vocabulary for discussing writing problems in digital media. Rhetoricians have developed a sophisticated language with theories, tested or being tested, that explain how communication (and especially persuasion) works. Unfortunately for writers–even writers with degrees in writing–the majority of these ideas are taught at the graduate level. Writers are left with a limited vocabulary for justifying a rhetorical need or explaining a problem. They might know about identifying the audience, but they might not know why that is so critical, and they are unlikely to grasp the importance of the exigencies and purposes behind creation of a text.

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Worse, in an environment where “anybody can write,” engineers, IT professionals, programmers, secretaries, artists and (more recently) computers can all become technical writers and publications managers. Many base their writing models on assumptions that have no rhetorical foundation whatsoever. I have seen professional editors conclude that an effective approach to single-sourcing is to write for a single, universal audience—not to bother with audience analysis. For a person with little rhetorical grounding, this might seem like an excellent idea. For anybody who understands writing theory, it is a disastrous idea. Still, lacking a vocabulary, writers have difficulty explaining why the idea of writing to a universal audience is such a mistake. The Third Problem Digital media is a pastiche of cut-and-pasted segments that are typically on topic but are often directed at the wrong audience or purpose. This has become even more evident with the advent of “chunking.” Because they are usually on topic, we often miss the fact that these chunks may address the wrong purpose or audience, or be rhetorically inappropriate. Authors often take cut-and-paste shortcuts when writing new material for websites, often at the urging of their stakeholders, especially when websites are first being built. It is easy to cut a segment from an already existing document and paste it into the new web document. Typically, when a segment is pasted into a website, it is on topic, but that is often the only positive thing we can say about it. The Fourth Problem Current testing methodologies tend to distract us from our best opportunities for analyzing the text. When content evaluators look at online help, they have no difficulty recognizing that online help is a document with a genre. However, when these same evaluators look at a website (a whole collection of different genres), they see a place (e.g., a site), or an object (e.g., an online store). Then, when they evaluate the site, they use those place metaphors to guide them. For them, those meaningless metaphors become their “genres.” Even when evaluation experts introduce the idea of studying the text, they consistently evaluate the structure of the text or only superficially examine the content. For example, when discussing statements about evaluating text, Carol Barnum (2002) suggests that examiners: Identify unfamiliar words, or words that are used incorrectly; identify sentences/paragraphs that are unnecessarily complex; provide examples of te[x]t that is misunderstood on the first reading; identify where there are too many/few headings or an overly complex organizational system; identify any information you couldn’t find easily in the table of contents, index, or other aids.

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In no usability study heuristics I have ever seen has anybody asked, “Is the text on topic? Is the rhetorical stance appropriate for the audience? Does the text actually meet its intended purpose?” While it might be self-evident that these things should be examined, it takes only a short tour of the Internet to see they are not. Instead, recommendations are superficial: “Identify unfamiliar words,” or structural: “Identify where there are too many/few headings or overly complex organizational systems.” In this book I will claim that although the metaphor for websites might be “place,” a large website is still a document that is made up of countless different genres, and we cannot effectively evaluate it without knowing those genres. The Fifth Problem This is not so much a new problem as an exacerbation of problems I have already pointed out. In the new realm of chunking texts for use in single-sourcing and multi-sourcing, interactive relational databases, and automated information management systems, IT professionals increasingly design pages to pull the content from other pages, so a segment of a safety bulletin, meant to be printed and hung on a bulletin board, might become a paragraph in an interactive module designed for safety training and might also be imported into a proposal ultimately designed for submission to the National Science Foundation (NSF). As information systems become more complex, managing their content becomes increasingly difficult. Imagine an XML page containing the names of all corporate members with all of their contact information and a short résumé for each of them. You could create a page that simply listed all of the members by name on a webpage, or you could include contact information and biographies of each of them and paste that in a database, or you could make any of the information available for PDAs or cell phones or for printing—all mining information from that one XML page. Obviously, this can be a powerful tool. But it can also be very dangerous. In discussions with IT managers I often hear the complaint that the singlemost difficult problem as they develop information management systems is inappropriate content being automatically loaded into documents. For example, imagine the short biographies I mention above being loaded into a proposal. Biographies, even short ones, serve a variety of purposes, and they need to be written in different styles for these purposes. A biography designed to show the collegiality of the workforce could be inappropriate for showing how professional someone is. The Sixth Problem Testers who discuss the World Wide Web (WWW) discuss writing as if there were only one kind: “user-centric.” In describing writing for the Internet,

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an author might say, “Users want to get in, find a piece of information or buy something, and get out.” This accurately describes “users.” There are others on the Internet, however, who are not “users.” I have identified what I believe represents three distinctly different kinds of content: user-centric, persuasioncentric, and quality-centric. Important Writing Styles In this book I will discuss three important writing styles—user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric. These styles are parts of an overall approach to writing I call ReaderCentric writing. They become the backbone of this book. User-Centric Sites Amazon.com is an excellent example of a user-centric site, where a user can go in knowing she needs a new camera and in only a few moments have bought one. I almost never go to Amazon.com without having a sense of what I want. I go there, get it, and leave. Help files and online dictionaries also make good examples of user-centric content. Persuasion-Centric Sites Although Amazon.com is user-centric, however, much of the content within the site is persuasion-centric. The best of the persuasion-centric content is produced by large corporations such as Canon. Some of Canon’s copy in Amazon.com would go floor to ceiling if printed out on a single sheet. This is completely counter to common prescriptions in usability, but appropriate nonetheless, in my opinion. The Salt Lick Bar-B-Que House in Driftwood, Texas, does not want you to find what you want and leave their site. They would like you to hang around a while—linger. They can sell you things online, but what they really want to do is make you really hungry. If you ever go to the Salt Lick website, there is a very good chance you will pencil the place in for the next time you are in Austin. There are testimonials from satisfied customers (all of them famous) and video reviews from the Travel and Food Channels—including two episodes of The Best Thing I Ever Ate! The point of the site is not to get you in and get you out; it is to get you to linger. Quality-Centric Sites A third kind of content also encourages you to linger. On NASA.gov, you can browse through interesting articles, view spectacular videos and images, and play dozens of different games. It is possible to read logs of the Mars rovers’ adventures describing almost every day since they were launched all those years ago.

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The Disney.com site is also designed to get you to linger. Designed more for children than their parents, the site offers purchasing opportunities, but mostly it offers games and puzzles, coloring book pages, posters, and certificates children can download to print out and paste on their walls. The longer the children stay on the site, the more money it makes. Usability guru Jared Spool has named the Disney site a worst site in terms of navigation. I suggest navigation has never been at the top of Disney’s priorities. They want readers to come on the site and stay a while. In persuasion-centric and quality-centric sites, readers are engaged by quality of content and not necessarily quality of navigation. As you will see in Chapter 5, “Theory Behind Usability Studies,” virtually all analysis of online information evaluates quality of navigation, and the few who do evaluate content, evaluate the content in terms of how it impacts navigation. SUMMARY OF SECTION I Most books of this nature describe their audience in the first few paragraphs. As you will see in the book, I suggest that if you want to describe your audience, you should always begin by describing the purpose of a text; that leads to an understanding of the audience, and, together, these elements lead to an understanding of the optimal structures of the final publication, which all add up to a description of the genre. These ideas evolve out of contemporary genre theories. The purpose of the first section of this book is to do three things: (1) dispel common misconceptions about writing in digital media; (2) explain a number of theoretical problems in depth; and (3) present solutions to these problems. Along the way, I hope to lay a theoretical foundation that permits professional writers and their supervisors to make informed decisions workplace relevant and provide a vocabulary that permits them to defend the decisions. Although theoretical foundation might seem like something alien to professional writing, it makes the difference between informed, strategic decisions and the more common and unimportant tactical decisions we tend to make in the day-to-day workplace. To make informed decisions about complicated texts, you need a theoretical foundation that you can use when working outside the step-by-step recipes provided by so much undergraduate education and by so many books. So, as I introduce the problems, we will explore rhetorical theories that explain why the problems exist, and we will explore solutions to these problems. Finally, we will explore how to discuss those solutions. Importance of these Theories to the Profession An ongoing battle between professionals—even professionals who teach at universities—and theorists is the claim that altogether too often the theorists’ theories do not apply in the workplace. The professional writer may well ask, “What does all that rhetorical mumbo-jumbo have to do with me?” As one of those professionals who also teaches at a university, I suggest that question

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is valid and is too seldom properly addressed. Genre theorists, for example, present academic ideas that seem to explain at the core how genres work. They talk about the idea that genres occur as the result of communicative activities and are not well described using their structures. But how is a professional writer supposed to take that idea to the workplace? In contrast, Steve Krug says, “Don’t make me think!” Now, that’s an idea you can get your mind around! Moreover, it has practical application. On the other hand, as ideas go, it is cute and simplistic and only approximately useful. It would be an error to apply “Don’t make me think” to everything you do. I think genre theorists’ arguments are sound and I subscribe to their theories, but how do those theories help a professional writer who is producing a proposal? All of the theorists’ talk about activity and interactivity might seem of little value to someone who grinds out pages of boilerplate every day. I suggest the disconnect between theorists and practitioners comes from the theorists not taking the step of tying the theories to the real world. Why is that a problem? If you need to make tactical decisions, you can get by with an idea as simple as “Don’t make me think!” You need to produce a webpage, you need that webpage to be usable, and you need to do it soon. You have neither the time nor the need to think about the bigger issues. But what if you are the one making the strategic decisions? What if you are the one deciding how the site will be divided up? What if the purpose of the site is to present the company in its best light and not particularly to sell something or provide a service? Krug’s prescription applies to a sales or service or information page, but not necessarily to the greatest share of your site’s content. Just as you would write differently for an NSF proposal and a sales brochure, you would write sales pages differently from marketing pages on a website. Although one-size-fits-all prescriptions often sound good (and they are often easily done), they seldom universally apply in practice. There are always exceptions, and if you do not know that, you step into the traps set by the exceptions. If you only know recipes (or prescriptions), you can only cook by the recipes, and you end up with the same pie every time even if you need a roast. If you understand at a fundamental (theoretical) level how food tastes interact, you can build and use your own recipes. Similarly, if you understand at a theoretical level how communication works, you can invent your own recipes for effective writing in different environments. Understanding relevant theories is critical for informed, strategic decision making. These first five chapters explain what the theories have to do with the real world. SUMMARY OF SECTION II The second part of the book introduces three approaches to writing in a digital venue: user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric, while presenting an approach for evaluating writing in these three styles. As I have proposed above,

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these writing styles are different from each other, include different genres and follow different rules. Recognizing the differences will make it easy to identify problems in content and recommend improvements but, perhaps more importantly, it will help you write (or otherwise produce) better original content. How Writing Can be Like Cooking Ribs Here is how I make really great ribs. I wash two or three racks of baby back ribs and pat them dry. I remove the tough skin from the underside of the ribs. I sprinkle half-an-ounce of salt and a similar amount of black pepper over the top of the ribs and I completely cover them with a layer of dry, ground, mild, Hatch chile. Finally, I place the ribs in a charcoal smoker using mesquite (post oak when I can get it) charcoal, cover them and cook for six or more hours at 150 to 200 degrees. I know they are done when approximately a quarter-inch of bone sticks out of the meat and the meat falls away from the bone when I bite into a sample. This is a simple recipe that I have used for years, and have always received great reviews from guests. This is also a recipe that can be automated so that anybody can produce the same quality ribs, and more than a few restaurants do exactly that with their own recipes. The Salt Lick Bar-B-Que restaurant, for example, produces more than three million pounds of smoked brisket, ribs, and sausage per year to feed countless people. Yet, their food is so good, they have been rated “Tastiest BBQ in America” by the Travel Channel and “Best Barbeque” by the Austin Chronicle (2011). As good as their barbecue is, they can only meet that demand with significant automation that meticulously follows a recipe. Chili is Different I also make a chili that receives similarly good reviews from my guests. This, however, is completely different. I have no recipe. I simply strive for specific tastes, and I add the things that move the chili toward that taste. If I am making a big batch for my students (I do that once a year), I go for a taste entirely different from what I would make for myself or my New Mexican friends. I think this cannot be automated. If it could, canned chili would not look and taste so bad. Writing is much more like making chili than smoking ribs. Under most circumstances, it cannot be automated. Instead, the author is looking for a certain combination of elements and the work will not be done until they come together optimally. Maybe that combination adds up to a kind of sound or tone or pattern that just feels right. Whatever it is the writer is looking for, he simply cannot get it by following a recipe. He will feel his way to his solutions word by word, or, more appropriately, genre by genre.

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Writing Digital Genres is Even More Difficult Just as I cannot provide a recipe for writing well in a traditional or analog environment, I cannot provide a recipe for writing effectively in a digital environment. Moreover, writing in a digital environment can be more difficult. If we return one more time to my chili metaphor, when writing in a traditional environment, writers know they are “making chili.” In a digital environment, they often do not know what they are making. Caught in a tradition of recognizing genres in terms of their structures, writers often don’t know the genres of the content they are producing in a digital environment—particularly since many digital genres cannot be reproduced in analog media. Moreover, many web designers do not realize they are even dealing with genres. This problem becomes particularly difficult if they are told there is only one kind of audience on the Internet: the “user.” In Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen (2000) demonstrates how to improve a segment of text. He uses an example of marketing prose from the state of Nebraska. Nebraska is filled with internationally recognized attractions that draw large crowds of people every year, without fail. In 1996, some of the most popular places were Fort Robinson State Park (355,000 visitors), Scotts Bluff National Monument (132,166), Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum (100,000), Carhenge (86,598), Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (60,002), and Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (28,446).

After making several possible modifications, he suggests the following text is 124% better. In 1996, six of the most-visited places in Nebraska were: • Fort Robinson State Park • Scotts Bluff National Monument • Arbor Lodge State Historical Park & Museum • Carhenge • Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer • Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park (p. 105).

The new text is absolutely concise, but if numbers are important, the new version eliminates them. Nielsen’s 124% assumes the purpose of the text was solely to list all the state parks visited in Nebraska. It only improves navigation, and does so at the expense of information that might actually be the subject of the text. More importantly, there is a chance the text on the site was poorly written marketing copy, produced to encourage people to join the thousands of others who visit the parks. Rather than improve the writing, Nielsen exchanges that possibility for a significant reduction in information. In the end, we cannot know whether Nielsen’s new copy is better, because we do not know what the

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text was supposed to do in the first place. It is more than necessary to understand the relevant genres before evaluating or writing; it is critical. Writing Begins with Understanding the Why and the Purpose of the Text I break this section on writing into four chapters: “Proposing a New Approach to Content Evaluation,” “Writing Persuasion-Centric Content,” “Writing Quality-Centric Content,” and “Writing User-Centric Content.” Each of these chapters introduces a relatively specific set of heuristics. “Proposing a New Approach . . .” explains how to evaluate different texts in digital media. The other chapters describe three different writing styles you will find on the Internet— user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric. In the early days of the WWW, sites were designed to facilitate information transfer, but with growing bandwidth and improved resolution, more and more sites have been developed to take advantage of the new, content-rich environment—arguably YouTube, by itself, has more quality-centric content than all user-centric content on the Internet. The final two chapters in this section describe writing in quality-centric and persuasion-centric environments. SUMMARY OF SECTION III The purpose of the third section is to suggest approaches to applying the information I present in this book to the real world. In this section, I discuss the building process for sites being rebuilt and new sites being built, and I discuss the “real world” future of the profession. Chapter 10 describes a process for developing a team approach to building a site. I advise that you use an agile approach to design and develop a site, with a team that will include a visual designer, an IT professional, subject matter experts, and a stakeholder representative. In Chapter 11, I speculate on how the evolution of technologies will impact our professional futures. For example, as bizarre as it sounds, we may see computers writing content from scratch. Currently, we are seeing computers assemble and publish content (e.g., Amazon.com). Much of the content we currently produce is of limited scope and has little or no creative content. We are close to a day where computers could easily produce that content. This chapter speculates on what may happen, what new careers may develop and what skills 21st-century writers might need. THE BOOK’S AUDIENCE So . . . who are you in my mind’s eye? This book is written for professional writers who need to write for a digital environment. Lead writers, editors,

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managing editors, communications directors, publication coordinators and the like will find this useful. However, I do not assume you are one of those. Rather I assume you would like to be one in the reasonably near future. Maybe you are currently a student, a technical writer or copy writer, or maybe a designer or an information technologist who wouldn’t mind running the whole system one day. So, although toward the end of the book, I will present information as if you were directing projects, I recognize that you may not be directing them . . . at least not yet. FINALLY, THE TITLE In The Elements of User Experience, Jesse James Garrett (2002) says, “The practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences is called user-centered design . . . every step of the way, you take the user into account as you develop your product” (p. 19). In contrast, ReaderCentric Writing focuses on the reader’s experience. ReaderCentric writing focuses on creating engaging, efficient texts. And every step of the way, you take your needs and your readers’ needs into account as you develop your documents. ReaderCentric writing takes into account the many different approaches to writing that can be found in user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric genres. The term ReaderCentric writing turns user-centric on its head by saying this book is about readers and writers and, for the most part, not users and usability. There are lots of books about users. This one is different . . . it is about readers. REFERENCES Barnum, C. (2002). Usability testing and research, New York, NY: Allen & Bacon Series in Technical Communication. Garrett, J. J. (2002). The elements of the user experience: User-centered design for the web. New York, NY: New Riders. Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Salt Lick Bar-B-Que. (2011). Award winning barbeque at the Salt Lick. Retrieved May 7, 2011 from http://www.saltlickbbq.com/about_awards.html

SECTION I

Theory

CHAPTER 1

Why Is It So Hard To Write and Evaluate Writing on the Internet? As professional writers, we may see ourselves as craftspeople (wordsmithing) or mechanics (fixing the text) or sculptors (molding the text) or researchers (collecting information and documenting it) or even translators (making difficult material available to a lay population). In each case, we are seeing ourselves through filters we construct of metacognitive metaphors. Often unique to the individual, these metaphors give us different vocabularies for understanding and discussing our writing processes. Typically, we do not actually notice our metaphors until others point them out or we take the time to carefully explore our writing processes. Think about your own different writing processes. How would you describe them? To develop a vocabulary, you will necessarily construct descriptions based on metaphors you have internalized, usually subconsciously. You may be aware of the processes in your writing, although you might never have considered them in detail, and you no doubt have different processes for producing different genres or modes of writing. For what it’s worth, I see my theoretical and fiction writing as exploration. I seldom know, when I sit down to write, where my ideas will go. As I write about a subject, I come to know it better. In a sense, the more I rewrite, the better I understand my topic. For computer documentation, my metaphor changes completely. I become a watchmaker, polishing, tinkering, and repairing until the text is (hopefully) flawless. Please do not misunderstand; I am not saying that when I write I am thinking I am a watchmaker. Instead, some of the time, I write in a manner that I would describe as watchmaker if forced to use some kind of metaphor. METACOGNITIVE METAPHORS DRIVE HOW WE WRITE Not only do we all have writing processes that can be described in terms of metacognitive metaphors, but those processes drive our writing to such a degree that one can tell, to some extent, which metacognitive metaphors were 15

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used while the text was being produced. In “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision,” Barbara Tomlinson (1988) argued, “Such patterns of figurative expression are an important part of our socially shared knowledge of composing . . . and may well influence our composing behavior” (p. 58). In her research, Tomlinson examined more than 2,000 texts where writers described their writing process, consolidating the writers’ descriptions into a list of eight metacognitive metaphors. One of Tomlinson’s eight metaphors is “sculpting [wet clay].” In this metaphor the writer is attempting to take something basic, perhaps not very good but containing a lumpy resemblance to an excellent topic, and convert it into a well-formed and interesting finished product. Obviously, at the core of the process is recursive writing. This sculptor might choose words that communicate well, but she may also be looking for elegance or surprise or grace or texture. In brief, while the “mechanic,” writing the very best he can, may produce an excellent document, the “sculptor,” writing the very best she can, will also produce an excellent document, but the definition of “excellence” for the two documents will probably be different, as will the reading experiences. WHEN THESE METAPHORS FAIL The metaphor we use can lead us in ineffective directions, however. Suppose a writer’s metaphor is more linear. Perhaps the writer sees himself as something akin to a conduit, spilling out the text in a singular and unaltered process— teachers often see this metaphor in the “midnight specials” they receive from their students, usually turned in with a mumbled apology. This year, I looked at a high school science essay written by a nephew. He had written ten pages about the impact of Copernicus, Galileo, and Einstein on astronomy, and he received a D. As I talked to him about his process, I realized he saw himself as a funnel of sorts. He poured a variety of resources into his mind and dribbled them one by one onto the page. He didn’t even filter the material through his own opinions. He simply poured it out with never a thought for rewriting. Needless to say, the work was D quality, or worse. Fortunately for my nephew, the teacher asked for a rewrite for a final grade, and he ultimately got a B. I am not suggesting my nephew was thinking, “I am a funnel.” He saw himself as simply writing. But he saw writing as finding material on one page and moving it to a new page—basically, nothing more than cutting and pasting. Had he seen himself as working within a metaphor that involved digesting the material, responding to it, and polishing his product with recursive writing, things would have been completely different from the beginning. The end product of any metaphor can be flawed. The conduit and funnel metaphors will lead to defective writing if the topic has any complexity at all. Other metacognitive metaphors direct their authors similarly, sometimes with effect and sometimes in inappropriate directions.

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DIFFERENT GENRES DEMAND DIFFERENT METAPHORS The “mechanic” who sees herself as fixing problems has a definition of perfection that involves elimination of all errors. Part of being flawless for the “mechanic” is selecting vocabulary for maximum readability and effective reception, making certain all statements are complete and accurate, and making certain there are no mechanical problems in the text. Imagine writing a NSF grant proposal. In this environment, you meet severe style and formatting restrictions; it is critical that everything be mechanically correct and accurate. The NSF receives thousands of proposals every year. Often, the first thing reviewers look for is any stylistic or structural justification for rejecting the proposal. Missing or misnaming a topic can be enough to get a proposal thrown out. Moreover, if the vocabulary is surprising or the mechanics are faulty, reviewers will characterize the author as unprofessional and/or outside the discourse community. The demands of documentation and NSF grant proposals shout, “Be a mechanic!” Such a metaphor can lead to competent work that communicates well. Still, the metaphor itself may keep the “mechanic” from seeing, or valuing, the possibility of going beyond a document that is correct or accurate to a document that could be called “aesthetically exceptional.” For example, sonnets, plays, and works of creative nonfiction should be something more than just correct and accurate. This is not to imply the metaphor of “mechanic” is flawed or that computer documentation should be sublime. The “mechanic” metaphor is perfectly appropriate for the right documents, but it (as do all metacognitive metaphors) establishes a relatively specific vision for what an excellent document should look like—a vision that will never meet the needs of all documents. In short, as we write, the processes we choose can be described using a variety of metaphors that can help us understand the processes. The different processes we choose, and the metaphors we use to describe them, can lead to excellent works, but if we limit ourselves to one writing style or fail to see the style demanded by some new project, by definition some of our writing will be faulty. WHY WE HAVE SO MUCH TROUBLE WITH EVALUATION Just as we write using metacognitive metaphors as our filters, we also read with similar metaphorical filters. These, however, are genre-based filters. When we read a genre, we know what its purpose is—what it is supposed to be doing for us and to us. We know what the social interactions are. We know what the structures should be. Even if we cannot name the genre, we know what to expect from it, and we have no trouble seeing when it fails to do what we expect. But what if we cannot identify the genre? What if all of the metaphors

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lead us in wrong directions? What if we are evaluating a text, but think we are evaluating a place? If, when we design a website, our metaphor is “place,” we may fail to notice we are designing a document. If, when we evaluate a website, our metaphor is “place,” we may pay attention to navigation and atmosphere and forget that we are also evaluating a multitude of genres. We have so much trouble evaluating content on websites because we have so much trouble seeing that we are evaluating genres. PEOPLE WHO VISIT WEBSITES AND CONTRACTORS WHO CONSTRUCT THEM While computer documentation and NSF grants might demand we “be a mechanic,” sometimes documents are wrong when they seem to shout about how we should approach their publication. The common metaphor used in web navigation, design, development, evaluation, and discussion is “site,” a “place” metaphor. We go to distant sites and navigate them, and we evaluate sites based on the quality of their navigation and our sense of the design of the place. When we have tested these sites over the past ten or so years, we have used usability studies. In these studies we look for breakdowns in navigation and failure to bring the users to whatever they need. We might ask test subjects to look for a particular piece of information or ask them to perform a task. What we will be measuring is how well they can do that. Designing a website with this tool is called user-centered design. Writing Theory Evolving Out of Usability Theory Within the metaphor of “place,” and in the tradition of usability theory, when we describe appropriate writing, our descriptions tend to be based on usability prescriptions: “keep it short,” “chunk it,” “use bullets,” “try not to write below the window,” “use subheads.” The list of prescriptions is quite long; it almost always involves structural terms and virtually never includes descriptions of style or rhetoric. Janice Redish’s book (2007) Letting Go of the Words describes writing for the Internet. The book begins with the following questions: “What did you do on the web yesterday? Were you just browsing around . . . or were you looking for something specific?” Redish answers, “Most people say ‘something specific’” (p. 1). Of course, she is absolutely right. Most people look for specific things on the Internet. But Redish moves from that statement to a claim right out of usability theory: “Most people skim and scan a lot on the web,” and “Most web users are very busy people who want to read only as much as they need to satisfy the goal that brought them to the web” (p. 2). She also describes her own habits when using the WWW: “Yesterday I downloaded a file,

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ordered a book, compared prices on new cameras, read a few of my favorite blogs, checked the Wikipedia entry for usability, looked for information on a health topic for my elderly aunt” (p. 1). These statements describe the processes of a huge number of Internet users, so it is reasonable for her to ask, “What makes writing for the web work well?” and answer, “Good web writing is like a conversation, answers people’s questions, lets people grab and go,” and, “Think of your web content as your part of a conversation—not a rambling dialogue but a focused conversation started by a very busy person” (p. 4). This is good advice, but only for one community of WWW users. The truth is actually much more complicated. The WWW is made up of a huge number of genres, and good writing is always writing that is appropriate for its genre. It is carefully considered and crafted by its author, and it meets the needs of its exigency. Good writing is not some prescriptive, one-size-fits-all (brief and friendly) style. In Contrast, How I Use the Internet The descriptions of metacognitive metaphors and genre filters I provided above lead to results completely counter to the advice suggested by Janice Redish. Ironically, I also did many of the things she described. But I also did things she did not mention. I read an essay about Tiger Woods. I went to ABCNews.com and read several news stories and the reader comments that followed. I went to CBSNews.com and watched 60 Minutes in its entirety. I went to YouTube.com and watched a number of video reviews of video cameras. I marked up several student papers in an online class, using Microsoft Word’s remote editing tools. I also spent time reading comments from students in that online class. I read several of the latest reviews on the new BMW 330 diesel. I read all of the research I could find on biofuels. And I read a twenty-five-page scholarly paper about genres. Moreover, I downloaded a good book onto a computer (a Kindle) and took it to bed. In other words, I treated the web exactly as I would a library. I read a variety of different things written in a variety of different genres and in a variety of different styles—some casual, some exceedingly dense, some short, some very long. Throughout my activities, I read from three large categories of writing: user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric. Redish and the other web experts are describing only one audience—“the user.” I suggest there are many purposes for web content for a large variety of different audiences. Redish and other usability gurus discuss only the first type of writing. She is right that many, perhaps even most, people on the WWW are users. Even so, we still have to write and evaluate content for the others, and the usability model does not work for that. Persuasion-Centric Content Let’s consider tourist sites. Of course you can do an information “smash and grab” on the site, but the state of New Mexico, for example, would rather see

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you linger on its site. They hang out bait, and the longer you stay on the site, the more likely you are to take the bait. They have contests, and if you win, you get to go to New Mexico on an amazing ski vacation. They hold events: “New Mexico restaurant week returns for second helping” (New Mexico Tourism Department, n.d., n.p.). You will not likely buy anything on the New Mexico tourism site, but if they can put an idea in your head about how they can give you whatever it is you hold most dear (skiing, art, camping, history, birding, fishing, the list goes on and on), the site will have met its purpose. Maybe you will choose not to go to New Mexico right away. Instead, if the site stays in the back of your mind, you might be in a meeting where you are considering a company retreat, and say, “I wonder if we could time the retreat with New Mexico’s restaurant week.” The point of this site, and thousands like it, is to get you to linger. This is a persuasion-centric site, and its task is not accomplished by efficient navigation, but by quality of content. Quality-Centric Content In a different environment, readers are encouraged to linger and learn. Lynda.com offers a good example. This site offers instruction by subscription. You can spend hours learning from any one of hundreds of instruction sets. As with the tourism sites, the more time you linger at Lynda.com, the better it is for the site—and for you. The same thing applies for NASA.gov. You can find thousands of pages of games, videos, instructions, descriptions of planets, moons, stars, galaxies, descriptions all the way to the furthest object ever found. For years I have tracked the adventures and misadventures of the Mars rovers until they have anthropomorphized and seem to have personalities, Spirit being the unlucky one. Again, quality of content and not navigation is the critical key (see Figure 1). In Figure 1, it is possible to see three distinct classes of content. These classes will overlap to some extent. For example, at the center of the diagram, all classes overlap. The content is expected to sell a product, and might be quite long—Canon sells its cameras on Amazon.com with content that would run for pages if printed out. Still, the content needs to be navigable. In contrast, an online help file will be extremely navigable and made up of short segments—appropriately user-centric. On the other hand, a site’s content might consist of a table that offers the nomenclatures of a variety of solar panels using few descriptions and a click-to-buy button. These tables are also extremely user-centric, but can often be counterproductive when considering their sales potential because they make no effort to sell. Tables are useful if customers know what they want, but if they are looking for information, the tables offer nothing they can use.

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Figure 1. A diagram presenting the relationships between user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric texts.

On pages designed to entertain, length is not a problem and navigation is of little importance. For example, the Disney website is largely dedicated to entertaining children. The longer the children stay on the site, the better it is for Disney, because Disney is sponsored by companies that manufacture printer inks. The Disney site is designed to be explored. Another site largely dedicated to entertainment is YouTube. The videos on YouTube are also sponsored, and the more click-throughs they get, the better it is for the site. NASA.gov is similarly designed to inform, but it is also designed to entertain. NASA.gov’s articles are commonly published in various news venues, which should not be surprising since news venues are also designed to inform and entertain. In short, if the audience is expected to go to a page and pick up a piece of information or do something, the page is user-centric. If the audience is expected to linger and learn, the page is quality-centric. If the reader is expected to linger in the face of persuasion, the page is persuasion-centric. I will discuss these all in great detail in the second section of this book.

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DIFFERENT DIGITAL GENRES DEMAND DIFFERENT APPROACHES Within each of the three categories I describe are a variety of genres. Many of the genres were exported out of analog media, but many more could never exist outside a digital environment. I suggest the writer should fully understand the genres (exigency, purpose, audience and author expectations, in addition to structure), and write texts based on that understanding. In other words, I suggest that genre, not medium (even on the Internet), defines writing style and quality. User-Centric Texts In Letting Go, Redish continued a tradition begun by Jakob Nielsen in the early ’90s. He did a series of studies on how people read on computers, beginning before the web even existed, and accurately concluded that people tend to scan rather than read. Based on that, he devised a series of important and valuable design rubrics. These rubrics have become the standard for web evaluation, because in the beginning they seemed to work. But he and others extended those rubrics to describing the act of writing and evaluating writing properly, creating a one-size-fits-all approach that is proposed to this day by him and the others: “Don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text,” they say. “Instead, use short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted lists.” In a nod to rhetorical traditions, they also sometimes suggest, “Know your audience.” INCORRECT GENRE METAPHORS INTERFERE WITH EVALUATION OF INTERACTIVE MEDIA I have already suggested that “place” is the first big problem with evaluating websites. Just as we write with metaphorical filters, we also evaluate with metaphorical filters. When we read, we read through filters designed to help us evaluate the text—honesty, quality of writing, quality of mechanics, design, etc. When we visit a place, we use completely different filters—ease of navigation, ambience, design, lighting, odor, background sound, etc. The two metaphorical environments (published documents and remote places) only overlap in the sense that they are designed. But even “design” means something completely different for each environment. “Visitors” Tour Websites Suppose you build hotrods. You can go to Chevroletperformance.com and shop the Performance Parts store to buy your new engine. Or you can go to WhiteHouse.gov and do a White House tour of the West Wing (White House, 2011). The metaphor for the site is “you as a guest of the President in the White

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House.” Although these sites are different, and are developed for significantly different purposes, the common metaphor of both is they are distant places we can visit. You can also go to any number of airlines’ web sites and purchase tickets. Usability studies guru Jakob Nielsen points out that some early airline sites imitated the ticketing desk, giving purchasers the ability to click on virtual objects on the desk for information. The trend continues unchecked. Virtually all sites selling a product call themselves stores and have shopping carts. These, of course, are all valuable metaphors for the users of the sites, but because they distract authors and evaluators from the publication process, they are not so valuable for them. The publisher needs to recognize that while it is perfectly appropriate for the reader to see the site as a location, the publisher must publish the site as a document that only looks like a location, a complicated popup book of sorts. Usability Studies as the Tool for Evaluating Websites For the past ten or so years, the preeminent tool for evaluating website quality has been the usability study. The usability study can be a powerful tool for identifying structural problems in a hyper-document, but it is less effective when applied to some of the other reader experiences—reader cognition and reader preference, for example. Knowing exactly what the reader takes away from a marketing document in terms of attitude, knowledge, and intent can be very valuable. Knowing how much the reader enjoys the site is also valuable. Usability studies have few tools and no vocabulary for evaluating reader preferences or changes in the readers’ cognitive condition. This is not to imply that a usability study is a problematic way to evaluate websites. It is a perfectly acceptable tool, but we should keep in mind it is only one evaluative tool in a place where many evaluative tools are needed. Usability Really is Useful, But There are Other Important Tests I suggest that the justification for Nielsen’s usability studies for evaluating quality of websites is valid, but only in evaluating quality of navigation, structure, and user-centric content. That said, usability is but one of many tests we should use for evaluating quality on a website. Others include: • Delphi studies for identifying what tests need to be run and what questions need to be asked; • reader cognition for identifying what readers take away in terms of information and attitude; • reader preference for identifying what readers like and dislike about the design;

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• code quality studies for efficient maintenance of the site; • search engine optimization for making certain the site is easily found; • text quality evaluation for identifying how accurate and relevant the text is; • rhetorical quality evaluation for identifying how persuasive the text is; and • web analytics for tracking users through websites (of which usability is but a small part). Combined, these tests make it possible to evaluate more than user-centric content. It is also possible to evaluate persuasion-centric and quality-centric content. In effect, user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric content combine to create the larger idea of “reader-centric” content. In short, in my experience, authors who develop interactive media within the metaphor of place (and evaluators who test them) have trouble seeing the sites as documents. They design, construct, evaluate, and discuss their sites as if the sites were structures or remote places. Because authors see the sites as structures, they lose sight of the purposes of the texts and write in a unique style prescribed by usability studies experts, and because evaluators see the sites as structures, they tend to evaluate structures and environments, not texts. On the other hand, authors see some sites as documents with perfectly clear genres (e.g., portfolios and online help), and have no comparable problem with them. Recognizing that all websites are documents containing at least three major writing styles makes it easier to move away from user-centric design toward reader-centric writing. THE NATURE AND ORIGINS OF THE STRUCTURE METAPHOR USED IN INTERACTIVE MEDIA People who build places tend to be contractors or assemblers. As a consequence, the cognitive metaphor for producing websites tends to involve something akin to “assembly” or “construction” or “manufacture,” or even “putting together Chinese puzzles.” This structural metaphor has not always been the case, however. Early scholars who examined the new, interactive genres being developed in the late ’80s and early ’90s saw them as textual—documents written with interesting new formats in interesting new ways offering us interesting new possibilities for, and freedoms in, communication. Online help and websites have evolved together pretty much throughout the history of interactive media. Although they are fundamentally the same structure (particularly with the advent of server-centered online help), no one has a problem seeing a help file as a document. This is largely because help file production has traditionally been under the control of documentation specialists. Major websites, on the other hand, were initially seen as programs developed by programmers; and so, although online help and the WWW are structurally the same thing at the fundamental level and although they evolved together, they took diverging metaphorical paths.

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Early Scholars Saw Interactive Texts as Documents In a groundbreaking article, Stephen Bernhardt (1993) described the natures and possible futures of texts in interactive media, effectively predicting what a webpage would look like today: Situationally Embedded: The text doesn’t stand alone, but is bound up within the context of the situation—the ongoing activities that make the text part of the action. Interactive: The text invites readers to actively engage with it—both mentally and physically—rather than passively absorb information. Functionally Mapped: The text displays itself in ways that cue readers as to what can be done with it. Modular: The text is composed and presented in self-contained chunks, fragments, blocks. Navigable: The text supports reader movement across large pools of information in different directions for different purposes. Hierarchically Embedded: The text has different levels or layers of embedding; text contains other texts. Spacious: The text is open, unconstrained by physicality. Customizable and Publishable: The text is fluid, changing, dynamic, the new tools of the text make every writer a publisher. (p. 2) Note that he refers to the product in every case as “the text,” and he concludes by making “every writer a publisher.” Well before there was a WWW (in computer years, where a year is a generation), Jay Bolter (1991) also described the potentials of hypermedia as communication.

Once video and sound are taken into the computer . . . they too become topical elements. Writers can fashion these elements into a structure. They can write with images, because they can direct one topical image to refer to another and join visual and verbal topics in the same network. (p. 27)

Bolter and Bernhardt voiced the opinions of many others of the day (including me), who all suggested that hypertext or, later, hypermedia documents, contained all of the various possible tools for communication, including video, animation, and interactivity. They recognized that the world was receiving new, complicated documents that would enhance the democracy of publishing and open writing up to unimaginable vistas in the future. They were correct.

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Devolution of Digital Documents Over time, the recognition that interactive media is a text has devolved (except for online help and a few genres on the Internet), and it is not difficult to see why. The original webpages were difficult to create. Only people who bothered to learn “tagging” in SGML and, later, HTML could do it, and the vast majority of these people were programmers. While Bernhardt and Bolter were describing what these documents could be, programmers such as Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau were creating them on the Internet. Although the early websites were produced in a markup language and not a programming language, the early websites were developed by programmers who used the common programming mindset of the time. Most programming in the early ’90s was done with procedural (line by line) programs such as Basic, Fortran, and Pascal. By far the best approach to using these programs was to carefully predesign the entire project before putting down a single character of code. Steven Mandell (1986) explained the need this way: To use the computer effectively as a problem-solving tool, you must perform several steps, which together are commonly called the Programming Process: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Define and document the problem. Design and document a solution. Write and document the program. Submit the program to the computer. Test and debug the program and revise the documentation if necessary. (p. 18)

If we look at the first two steps, we see how much went into the process before beginning with the actual programming process. It is virtually impossible to get somewhere if you do not know where you are going. Likewise, programming, a clear and precise statement of the problem must be given before anything else is done. . . . The programmer must understand the problem thoroughly, and must also write the statement of the problem in a clear, concise style. Documenting the problem makes it apparent whether or not the problem is clearly understood. (pp. 18-19)

Once the problem has been clearly defined, the solution must be defined. Once the programming problem is thoroughly understood and the necessary input and output have been determined, it is time to write the steps needed to obtain the correct output from the input. The sequence of steps needed to solve a problem is called an algorithm. In an algorithm, every step needs to solve a problem must be listed. (p. 19)

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David Budgen (1994) described it somewhat differently in Software Design. He suggested that the design process includes: (1) Requirements analysis, which is concerned with identifying what is needed from a system. (2) Specification, in which the objective is to state precisely and in an unambiguous manner what the system is to do in order to meet the overall requirements. (3) Design, which is concerned with describing how the system is to perform its task so as to meet the specification. (4) Implementation, which elaborates upon the design and translates this into a form that can be used on a computer system. (5) Testing, which is concerned with performing a validation of the implementation, in order to demonstrate how well it complies with the original requirements, the specification and the design. (p. 15) Programmers would pore over requirements, design specification documents, and design flow charts again and again until everything seemed ready and they were convinced they could produce the program as a complete and bug-free product. Only then did they begin programming. It was called “the waterfall model” (Budgen, 1994, p. 15). The complete model assumed programmers would do one thing at a time: identify requirements, establish specifications, design the product, program the product, test the product, and maintain it once it is released—five or six clearly defined steps (depending on who’s defining), each step completed before falling to the next one. These same programmers created the first hypertexts, and at that time their descriptions of the best method for creating these documents fit within this waterfall model. The model is now out of date, and I don’t know of anybody who advocates it, but in many respects it is still the model applied to adding content to websites. Rapid Prototyping, Extreme Programming, Rugby, and Agile Software Development Over time (and with the advent of object-oriented programming), the waterfall model fell into disuse, largely replaced by variations of rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping involves creating the product (the website, for example) in simple form and improving it in iterations. The process exactly parallels rewriting as it is taught in pretty much any high school or college. A more contemporary term with a more specific meaning is agile software development. As agile software development implies, in this model the programmers (usually a small group) develop the program, changing things on the fly in iterations as the needs arise. There are a variety of agile software development models, including extreme programming, scrum (hence the rugby allusion above), and spiral programming.

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Although agile programming parallels the writing process in many respects, no form of programming privileges writing to any degree, nor do programmers use any of the writing or publishing metaphors I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Instead, programmers see themselves as constructing a finished product. Waterfall programmers view the process much like construction— they figure out what they need, then design a structure very carefully, build it, test it, and sell it. Object-oriented programmers view the process as assembling the components (not unlike Lego building blocks) into a completed product, moving them around and modifying them as necessary until finished (although a common tenet of agile programming is the assumption that the project is never actually finished). In short, programmers do not see hypermedia elements as texts; they have never seen hypermedia elements as texts, and so they established production metaphors compatible with construction and assembly. At an early point in the evolution of digital communication, technical communicators bought into the programmers’ structural metaphors. Although writers were among the ones who saw the opportunities of hypermedia very early on, they were not the ones who selected the names of genres or working metaphors. So although Amazon.com, Cabelas.com, and chevroletperformance.com are all actually interactive, online catalogs, they are all presented as stores (e.g., book store, historical site, information center). The New York Times describes its customers as “readers”—implying that even online it still sees itself as a text—but CBSNews.com, Newsweek Online (http://www.thedailybeast.com), and ABCNews.com all describe their customers as “users.” Users are not readers. The word “user” has no connotation that implies “reader.”

USING METAPHORS TO CONTROL AND EVALUATE WRITING QUALITY Earlier, I suggested that even on the Internet the metaphors we use affect (even effect) the quality of what we write. The best authors use the best metacognitive metaphors; the metaphors that lead them to the most carefully polished texts. Naturally, the best writers have more than their metaphors going for them. Some writers are so good with words they can produce excellent documents whatever their metaphor (or perhaps they consistently find the best metaphors). For the rest of us, however, even with the best metaphors, the most we can hope for is excellence. But I think excellence is a worthy goal. Writers who write and rewrite and craft and sculpt and polish and do whatever else they have to do to produce excellent texts produce the best documents. But a writer who doesn’t even know he is writing has no chance of producing good texts by any measure.

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Using an Assembly and Manufacturer Metaphor Using “assembly” or “manufacturer” as their mental image for their publication process, developers tend to construct excellent navigation and design, but the content is viewed as a component, or basically a module (like a window or door) that is added once the structure is done—usually later, and often much later. But if, as I suggest, a website, any website, is a document, then all of its component parts are texts (I discuss this in great detail in the next chapter). The texts are not added to the site; they are the site. Assembly and Manufacture and Evaluation One of the best-known usability experts, Jakob Nielsen, describes sites in terms of location and navigation. Although he suggests that “content” is critical, he describes good content in terms of its structure. In Designing Web Usability (2000), he suggested the following for good writing for the web: • Be succinct. Write no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used to cover the same material in a print publication. • Write for scannability. Don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text; instead, use short paragraphs, subheadings, and bulleted lists. • Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages. (p. 101) Nielsen (2009) “Ten usability heuristics,” suggested using plain language: “Because users don’t take time to read through a lot of material, it is important to start each page with the conclusion” (p. 111), and in his “10 Heuristics for User Interface Design” (2005), he suggested that “the system should speak the user’s language, with words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than system-oriented tools.” But as I search through Nielsen’s many texts on the topic, I see two important things. First, Nielsen sees websites as places to visit, and so he discusses effective design in terms of place and navigation. Secondly, he sees “text” as designed to do one thing: facilitate the user’s need to do something or extract some piece of information. An Even Narrower Focus Jared Spool, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder, and Terri DeAngelo (1997) also examined effective writing for the web in Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide. They used Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kincaid’s readability studies and concluded that “the less readable a site was, the more the users were successful with the site” (p. 68). In short, Spool et al. used readability heuristics, and nothing more, to evaluate writing on the Internet, using that to prescribe how documents should be written—and the less readable the better.

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In terms of other texts, Spool et al. suggested that graphic design has no impact on website usability. Third Point of View Of all the books available on the topic of evaluating websites, Carol Barnum’s (2002) Usability Testing and Research is my first choice. Barnum is a technical communications professor, and her approach to evaluating websites is much more comprehensive and expansive than most other usability studies experts. In Usability Testing and Research, Barnum effectively consolidated and updated the work of her predecessors in the field. She not only discussed many methods for how to do usability studies, she also comprehensively detailed many processes for designing and developing sites. But Barnum said little about writing style. For example, in her list of the top ten mistakes of web design, she named the following: Slow download times Non-standard link colors Long scrolling navigation pages Scrolling text or looping animation Frames Orphan pages Bleeding-edge technology Complex URLs Lack of navigation support Outdated information (p. 375) In terms of writing, I believe there are far worse mistakes. In the cut-and-paste pastiche of the Internet, there are thousands of pages torn from original documents and pasted on websites. Many of these pages are on topic, but written for wrong audiences or purpose. This, in my opinion, is the most dangerous mistake authors make when publishing a website. And in an examination of more than one hundred books and articles on the subject of evaluating websites, I have found only one that has discussed this problem. In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson (2010) explained (tongue placed firmly in cheek), With all that content, surely we don’t need to worry about creating more, right? We can just go get some. I mean, it’s probably already on our site, even. Somewhere. It just needs freshening up. Or else we think that maybe, just maybe, other people are out there generating content that might be of interest to our audiences. We can aggregate it. Filter it. Republish it. For free. (p. 22)

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Halvorson implied that the trend to copy-paste has become a problem based on flawed logic. Web developers suggest, “Why write things, when you can simply download them?” Copy-Pasting and Even More Complication Copy-pasting has become an addiction for website publishers. Moving beyond simple copy-pasting, publishers have developed a taste for single-sourcing and server-side publication. These are important contributions to publishing. None of the significant sites—for example, CBSNews.com, MSNBC.com, NASA.gov, ComedyCentral.com—could exist without server-side content delivery and single-sourcing content. On the other hand, for writers, things in these server side environments are becoming much more complicated. Moreover, in such environments, evaluating texts can approach impossible. Examples It is possible to look at several sites and see how publishers fall into this trap. The first two examples are from a collection of pages meant to attract sophomores into a technical communications program. The example page from the first site offers an overview of the careers technical writing graduates might enjoy (Anonymous, 2001a). CAREERS Students thinking about majoring in English inevitably confront the question: “What are you going to do with an English major?” Contrary to popular belief, however, career opportunities for English majors are quite favorable because English majors are adaptable. They have the critical thinking skills to adjust to a variety of different career paths, and in a world where workers can expect to make major career changes more than five times during a lifetime, adaptability is no small asset. English majors have found job opportunities in financial institutions, insurance companies, federal and state government agencies, the hospitality industry, universities, museums, and service organizations. They are employed as personnel and planning directors, administrative associates, marketing directors, technical librarians, wage and salary representatives, service correspondents, claims adjustors, and insurance agents. The English major is also an excellent undergraduate major for those who wish to enter law, medical, or dental school; complete post-graduate work in literature, film, creative writing or library science; or enter sales, management, and marketing programs in large organizations. [Emphasis added]

The title of the segment promises to be about careers, and so the text discusses careers—it is on topic. But insurance companies? The hospitality industry? Planning directors? Marketing directors? Sales, management, and marketing?

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These are indeed job possibilities for English majors, but jobs for technical communication graduates? Technical communication graduates typically get jobs as technical communicators. The paragraphs were written by an unknown person who wrote them for the university’s general bulletin years (perhaps even decades) ago. In 2001 someone who knew nothing about technical communications pulled them from the online general bulletin and pasted them into the undergraduate technical communication website. They are on topic in the sense that they are obviously meant to attract students to the English program, but they are written for literature majors and not technical communication majors. A Second Example A single sentence from a different page on the same site reads like an academician writing to another academician (Anonymous, 2001b). MISSION Students take classes in two areas: first, they build a theoretical foundation in rhetoric so that they can assess any writing situation and adapt their writing to the context as audience-aware, self-aware, self-confident writers; and, second, they learn about writing in a variety of contexts using the most up-to-date tools of technology so that they know both how to write and why they are writing, thus preparing them for the ever-changing job markets of the twenty-first century.

This is a single sentence that goes on and on and is an example of something being used for both a wrong audience and a wrong purpose. Originally, it was written to explain to Northwest Accreditation evaluators how the technical communication program worked. Its original purpose was not to recruit students but to impress highly educated evaluators. Later, it was copy-pasted onto a page in the site meant to explain the philosophy of the program to sophomores considering their options vis-à-vis choosing a major. A recruiting page describing the philosophy of the program to sophomores would present a different voice, with a different vocabulary, and a different philosophy (if, indeed, a philosophy page is actually appropriate). This and the previous example were designed and produced as user-centric texts, and so they are written to provide information, which is what they do. The purpose of the texts, however, should have been persuasive. They should have aimed to be more like persuasion-centric texts I alluded to earlier. If the purpose of the texts had been carefully considered, someone would have considered the audience and how that audience might have been persuaded. Had someone done that, it would have been immediately clear the texts on both pages fail entirely.

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Texts That Were Subject to Many Usability Studies Ironically, the texts above have been through numerous usability studies with faculty leading students through the process. Neither faculty nor student ever noticed that although the site is usable, the content is ineffective. That is because the page meets all of the relevant demands listed by usability studies gurus. Furthermore, the copy meets the content demands of Redish. It downloads quickly, a reader can scan it relatively easily, it is chunked, and the tone of voice is friendly. So for three years this page occupied its place on the site, undergoing examinations by annual usability studies classes and their teachers, with nobody ever noticing it was written for the wrong audience. More importantly, this is one of the pages I have had scores of professional writers and advanced students examine (more than one hundred subjects at this writing), and with only four exceptions, they failed to identify the problems with either page. Another Example of the Same Problem I can identify the mindset of those who developed this third example, because it suffers from the exact symptoms exhibited by the first two. A bookstore is selling the first publication of Lewis and Clark’s epic journey across the West. The book is priced at $350,000, and the copy reads like this (Powell’s Books, 2009): Two volumes octavo (228 × 149 mm) pp. xxviii, 470; pp. ix, (1), 522. Large folding engraved map (70 × 30.2 cm). Folding map lightly foxed with a tear repair (6mm) in crease located in east Mississippi. Map was drawn by Samuel Lewis from Clark’s original and engraved by Samuel Harrison (1789-1818) who may also be the engraver of the plates. 5 engraved plates, foxed: “Fortification” facing p. 63, Vol.1; “Falls & Portage” facing p.261, Vol.1; “Great Falls of Columbia River” facing p.31, Vol.2; “Great Shoot or Rapid” facing p. 52, Vol. 2; and “Mouth of Columbia River” facing p. 62, Vol. 2. Some foxing and soiling throughout both volumes, some marginal worming in Volume 1, filled in on a few leaves, marginal tape repair on Ee2 in Volume 2. Original printed boards entirely uncut with the map as issued, rebacked. Boards rubbed and soiled. Handsomely housed in a morocco slipcase with a chemise for each volume.

The text begins with a section that describes the quality of the book, then moves to a description of the book’s importance: Remarkable narrative of the most famous and significant American land expedition in history. 1,417 copies were printed in 1814. Approximately 23 copies remain extant with very few in private hands.

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The next section is an odd and ambiguous paragraph that may or may not apply to these volumes. The question becomes, why is there a segment about books being published one hundred years later, and what does Thwaites have to do with these volumes? Nicholas Biddle transformed the journal entries of Captains Lewis and Clark into an artful narrative. Biddle was the rare combination of genius coupled with financial solvency giving him the talent and the freedom to render the narrative highly readable and take no credit. Mr. Biddle chose Paul Allen to complete the publication process hence the name “Biddle—Allen edition.” The Journals (as they were originally written) were not published in their entirety until one hundred years after the expedition. That definitive edition was brought to press by Reuben Thwaites in 1904.

Finally, there is a strong marketing paragraph that explains how important these books are. It is apparently made up of quotes by a whole collection of people, though it is hard to know who might have written what after the Coues quote. “This is our national epic of exploration, conceived by Thomas Jefferson, wrought out by Lewis and Clark, and given to the world by Nicholas Biddle.” (Coues, History, I, v-vi.) Every aspect of this set is testament to the sheer determination of those involved. The turbulence of time has decimated the number of copies remaining. This set is, in every way, a remarkable piece of Americana. Wagner-Camp 13.1; Tweney 89: 44; Streeter Sale Vol. 3: 1777; Sabin 40820; Howes L317; Graff 2477.

Like the careers page, the above quote is properly on topic, but the comments are a pastiche of physical bibliography and cut-and-pasted texts from elsewhere, paragraphs from different writers, written in different times and for different audiences. Only the final two paragraphs make meaningful rhetorical statements, and one paragraph is so ambiguous it may not even be about these books. Evidence that the copy is not based on informed rhetorical decisions is reinforced by a variety of other rare books on this site that are supported by nothing more than a physical bibliography and a request for reviews by customers: “Be the first to comment on this book for a chance to win a prize.” This “Be the first . . .” is a real irony. The book is one of perhaps one hundred copies in existence. Who is going to be able to comment on it? Is Rhetoric Needed? It might be suggested that anybody interested in a book of such rarity and value needn’t be sold on the book’s importance and value. That is somewhat like saying BMW need not bother marketing its $115,000 M5, because anybody who is interested in it will know all there is to know about it and will willingly buy it with no sales effort from BMW. But this book, like the M5, has

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competitors. The question BMW has to answer is, “Why not Mercedes or the new four-door Porsche?” Other books are also important and valuable; why buy this specific book? I suggest a purchaser will buy the book or car with the most persuasive narrative (provenance). These paragraphs, like the previous two examples, should have been persuasion-centric. Later we will see that what they are trying to persuade (and whom) might be ambiguous, but there can be no doubt that the point of the page is to persuade, and I suggest that it does not succeed. Final, More Positive Example If we examine the homepage of ParrishBooks.com (a rare-book competitor), we see what looks for all the world like a page in a catalog of books. It has links to other pages, and although the directory for the site uses the name “store,” the homepage could as easily be found in a traditional catalog. ParrishBooks.com sells rare books online, and the fundamental design principle of the site is rhetorical. Although the company presents their site as a place (store), the site was designed as a publication. The authors of the site also present their marketing pages as pages from a catalog, so their content is rhetorically sound, solving the correct needs, directed at the appropriate audience, doing what it is supposed to do rhetorically. On the other hand, their text is dense, and usability testers would find it in desperate need of chunking—so for our purposes, I have chunked it so we can focus on writing quality and not usability. In their presentation of author Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Parrish Books says (2011), JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL By Richard Bach Book No. 3772 Macmillan, 1970. A scarce signed first printing with dustjacket. First Edition, First Printing, Signed by Author. Binding: Cloth. Book Condition: Near Fine. Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Size: 8vo - over 7.75" - 9.75" tall. A lovely First Edition, First Printing (so stated) signed for Parrish Books by the author on the half-title page at a 2009 signing in Beaverton, Oregon at the launching of “Hypnotizing Maria.” Mr. Bach signed it with an additional squiggle and sun on the page. The book is complete with the four tissue pages following page 55 and in quite nice condition but for the customary touches of fading on the edges of the covers and light foxing on the endpapers. Also there is a previous owner’s neat bookplate on the front endpaper and a contemporary inscription “To Our Mom, 12/2/70 Happy Birthday. Hope enjoy Jonathan Seagull” on the page opposite the half-title page, inscribed in the year of publication.

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The dustjacket is price-clipped but has “50454" on the rear panel which matches the “50454” on the back cover of the book. The dustjacket shows spots of wear primarily at the edges of the creases and spine but overall is quite nice compared to others of its age. Signed first printings of Richard Bach’s most well-known book are getting quite scarce and Parrish Books is lucky to live in the same area as Richard Bach so we see our favorite author from time to time. Parrish Books guarantees all signatures as authentic. This book includes a Certificate of Authenticity from Parrish Books.

The writing is on topic, directed to the right audience, and meets the needs of the purpose of the text. It is a unified block of copy written specifically to sell this book. The value of the book is found not in its content but in its history, so the purpose of the message is not to tell readers what the book is about but to tell them why it is valuable. The content was written specifically for this book and specifically to the appropriate audience. Comparing Bookstores The description from Powell’s Books is cut and pasted from a variety of places, so has no unified message, and any attempts at persuasion are spotty at best (may even have been accidental). Moreover, it has no discernible purpose or audience. Powell’s Books clearly sees its website as a place and its homepage as the door. As a consequence, Powell’s seems to have no working metaphor for its design and no filters to use for evaluating the writing. Parrish Books also see its site as a place, but within that metaphor, it recognizes its purpose is to sell books through persuasive copy. Parrish Books clearly recognizes its purpose and audience. In short, properly done, the texts lead to a gestalt where the total of the page is worth more than its parts. The best websites will be written/edited/published because the writer/editor/publisher will make certain the navigation is excellent and make certain the design is elegant (to the degree that elegance is rhetorically important in a specific site), but will also make certain that all of the component parts go together in a rhetorically sound manner to fulfill a definable purpose. Evaluating these texts becomes possible when writers realize they are constructing documents, not shopping centers. DIGRESSION: WHAT IS “RHETORIC?” I keep using the word rhetoric, a word technical communicators tend to hate because it conjures up images of slippery language used for inappropriate purposes and because it is that “soft and fuzzy” part of language that technical communicators tend to think is irrelevant to their writing.

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I would slip past the word, except (as we shall see) it is critical to excellent writing and content evaluation. For the purposes of this discussion (and somewhat simplistically put), rhetoric is the part of communication that persuades, and even the most technical documents are rhetorical to the extent they persuade. This is a simple sentence, but it contains a great deal of theory and a number of terms that need defining. So what do I mean by persuade? Imagine a help file. How rhetorical would you expect online help to be? Surely there is no place for pathos there—no need for emotion. After all, online help is all about ethos (accuracy in this case) and logos (logic). But that isn’t true. When a reader approaches a help file, some system has already broken down. The excellent help file author deals with the assumption that she has an anxious, perhaps even angry, reader. The best online help is written with ameliorating reader anxiety as one of its components. This is but one rhetorical component perhaps occurring at a subliminal level. Other rhetorical components that are similarly subliminal might include font selection, colors, shape, interface design, and more. Rhetoric occurs at all levels in all documents. Writing on a Post-it note is a rhetorical choice. The choice of pen or pencil (assuming such a choice is available) is a rhetorical choice. Cursive or roman or italic is rhetorical. Red or black or blue ink is rhetorical. There can be no document produced by humans that does not contain rhetorical choices. An Ancient Way of Arguing Rhetoric as a discipline has a long history. Aristotle suggested that it is the counterpart of dialectic (logical part of the discourse). If knowledge is a doorway, it has two doors: dialectic and rhetoric. Originally, rhetoric was described only in terms of oration, but over time it has come to mean more. Now rhetoric is recognized as the force in our arguments. It is not empty; nor is it political. It has become much more. Everything We Write, Say, or Do Has a Rhetorical Component When you design a page, you might choose a font that looks more professional (perhaps for a résumé) or more friendly (a letter to a friend) or more silly (comic strip); these are rhetorical decisions. You might feel like your pages are too daunting, so you chunk your copy and insert more white space to make them friendlier—a rhetorical decision. You choose to use gray on an IBM website instead of pink-paisley. You choose to write documentation in a carefully crafted voice, as professional as you can make it—rhetorical decisions and more rhetorical decisions. The font you choose is rhetorical; the colors you choose are rhetorical; the page shape is rhetorical; the photo choices are rhetorical; the decision to use animation rather than an illustration is rhetorical. The entire website is a complicated combination of rhetorical decisions. People who do

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not understand this have difficulty producing effective websites—websites that “talk” to their readers. Imagine you are helping design a website that sells a Harley Davidson Motorcycle tour across the Southwest. How different would your language be if you were selling a BMW tour in Bavaria, or if you were selling flowers or collectable guns? Suppose you were attempting to sell bird watchers on the idea of going to New Mexico to look at the cranes in Bosque del Apache. How would that be different from selling Western history buffs on a trip to Fort Sumner to see Billy the Kid’s stomping grounds? New Mexico needs to attract tourists from both groups and many more—many different audiences with many different rhetorical problems for a single site. The author for this site must identify the purpose of each page (perhaps even each section of each page), its preferred audiences, and write (or evaluate) with that information in mind. Applying Rhetoric to Technical Content The need to apply rhetoric to different purposes and audiences applies to even the most technical content. It is one thing to point out that a $350,000 book needs to be sold; technical content also needs to be sold, perhaps more subtly, but sold nonetheless. As I have already mentioned, the best online help documents defuse stress as their readers solve their problems. Readers often see comments such as, “You can solve that problem by. . . .” But there are even more subtle rhetorical tricks. Space is designed so not to intimidate readers. Colors are chosen to enhance the ethos of the document. For example, you would never put an orange background in a help file designed to support legal software, although you might put a pink-paisley background in an online cookbook. To use a clean white or pale gray background in online help is a rhetorical decision. On the other hand, Microsoft uses pale yellow as a background for its online help—a different rhetorical decision. Moreover, great information pages often end with, “Was this helpful?” This provides feedback to the web managers, but it also acts to demonstrate that they care whether you are getting what you need. IBM’s Application of Rhetoric to Even More Technical Content The same rules apply to even the most complicated informational pages. IBM’s (2009) discussion of XSLT, a tutorial, is exceptionally professional. It recognizes that the person who reads it is likely a beginner at XML, and it writes in an accessible language but avoids the attempts at humor or “baby talk” often common to such efforts. You can see such language in publications that begin with “A Dummies Guide . . . .” I am not implying that these publications are incorrect to use “fun” language, but that, in this case, it would be inappropriate for IBM to use it.

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Describing Rhetorical Stance Well-crafted documents will contain a rhetorical stance. Your rhetorical stance combines your need with your audience’s needs and expectations. You recognize your audience and establish a stance that is appropriate for that audience and the conditions. It may include your exigency (the need or requirement driving your writing) but if it is well done, it will certainly include a crafted voice. For example, it may include (or specifically exclude) humor. It may exclude (or specifically include) contractions. The logic may be point by point, with each point carefully spelled out and discussed, or it may be made up of enthymemes. However it is crafted, the rhetorical stance will change with virtually every genre. The preacher’s stance will be different from the teacher’s stance or the conference presenter’s stance or the angry father’s stance, although all of those stances would be variations of lecturing. In short, all writing is infused with rhetoric to some degree. Uninformed writers are unaware of its presence and do not know how to use it, but the best writers work hard to make sure their rhetoric is under control and well groomed— even if they do not necessarily know they are dealing with it. NATURE AND STRUCTURE OF WEBSITES, AND WHY A WEBSITE IS A DOCUMENT We all intuitively see websites as places we visit, but the claim that websites are documents is not difficult to demonstrate. First, one need only look at the source code. What we see when we “visit” a website is a façade. If you look under that façade, you will see the reality of the website. Although the code may be obtuse for the uninitiated, it will all translate into plain English. Change the font size to 2 (no longer used). Strongly emphasize the following text. Go and get the photo file called “banner_english.jpg” from a folder called “IMAGES” and put it here. . . . src=“../IMAGES/AutoEngine.swf”> Go out one folder and into a folder called “IMAGES,” get the animation “AutoEngine.swf” and put it here.

The code shows us what is really going on. We (users) do not “go” to Amazon.com; we download these source-code pages into our own computers and they combine all of the different resources and display them. After that initial page comes in, our computer requests such art as photos, flash files, movies, or whatever else did not show up with the file. In effect, we order a text, receive it, order supplemental texts, and receive them. I recognize I am not saying

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anything new. In the depths of our logic, we all know we are not really going to remote places. But once we begin designing sites, we are of two minds: while we are placing our texts onto the site, we are thinking in terms of how well the texts will load on remote computers, but when we think of how the readers will access the material, we think, talk, and write in terms of a remote place with users and navigation problems. The Difference between Writing and Constructing is Important Here is where we see the difference between writing and constructing. We see and evaluate all writing through unique sets of filters. If I send my wife a little love letter on a flowery Post-it note, she will probably not check my spelling or grammar (in fact, she might see sloppy penmanship and misused grammar as cute), but she is also an NSF grant proposal reviewer. As she reads these proposals, she sees nothing cute about mechanical problems, poor vocabulary, sloppy organization, and the like. We all typically evaluate any discourse as we experience it. Our filters are always in place, and to the extent we have the skills, we switch to the correct filters as we move from one genre to the other. The filters we use to evaluate texts go well beyond my abilities to identify them all, but a short list of them will include things such as: • conventions we have accepted for writing formal and informal texts; • personal bias; • individual expectations applied to different genres; • recognition of purpose of the text and its audience; • understanding of the age, sex, and experience of the author and audience; • appropriate level of style; • audience knowledge of the subject being discussed; and • expected level of verisimilitude. Of course, this is a tiny fraction of the complete list, but each of these plays a role in our evaluation of a text. For example, verisimilitude is driven by the author’s (and reader’s) knowledge of the subject matter of her story. But we also change our expectations as we change genres. In the movie (1987) Throw Mama from the Train, there is a delightful scene where an elderly lady is writing a novel about a submarine. She calls the periscope “the thing the captain looks through to see out,” and she calls the intercom “the thing the captain uses to talk to the crew.” Verisimilitude is not to be found in her novel. On the other hand, we see Harry Potter wave a magic wand to light a candle or drive off dementors or summon a flying broom and we don’t bat an eye (well, most of us don’t).

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Because we conceptually visualize a website as a remote place, the filters we naturally use to evaluate texts seem not easily transferred. As a consequence, what we read on the Internet can be wrong, illogical, even irrelevant, and we may well not even notice. Sometimes we expect verisimilitude and sometimes we do not. We seldom know the age, sex, or experience of the author. Authors often create pages without considering their purposes or audience (which can easily all be different). The thing I have noticed in sixteen years of doing and teaching web design is that when people see web design as assembly or construction, they tend to see the text as an added component, often as an afterthought (this tendency even applies to writers). When they can, they will grab previously written texts and paste them into their sites. In fact, a current trend is to write texts (chunks) designed specifically for cutting and pasting in different places for different audiences and different purposes. I have no problem with chunking. It can be an efficient way to manage content in a constantly changing environment. But people who are “assembling” their sites, instead of “publishing” them, tend to pay only superficial attention to the texts they are pasting, and so we find ourselves reading content that is on topic but for the wrong audience, or is on topic but was written for a completely different rhetorical purpose, or is on topic but the information is irrelevant for the purpose of the site. For example, the text below comes from Amazon.com. Later in this text, I will discuss many of Amazon’s amazing errors, almost all of them caused by careless copy/pasting, and left there for years on end because Amazon apparently does not monitor its text for quality. From the Manufacturer The DMC-GF1 has large, high-resolution LCD but Panasonic made Live View Finder (DMW-LVF1) for finder-enthusiasts. The DMW-LVF1 displays the same information as the LCD when you equip the DMC-GF1 with it. It is effectively used in situations where the LCD is difficult to see, such as under bright sunlight. And it is also handy for low-angle shots because it can be tilted vertically from 0 to 90 degrees. . . . Product Description The Photo Basics 5-in-1 Collapsible Reflector Kit is versatile in the field and in the studio, providing shadow-lightening detail in your subject, using available, or studio lighting. It contains a translucent white disc, which is perfect for softening direct sunlight, or lights without diffusion. Use the removable, reversible zippered slipcover to reflect light into shadow areas of your subject. The cover consists of the following colors: silver, gold, white and black. This 42" reflector is perfect for ¾ length portraits, and medium still-life setups. It folds down to 1/3 its open size, and comes with a carry case. We suggest the purchase of a pivoting arm and stand, to hold the disc where needed—especially if you are working without an assistant.

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This sample begins by describing a range finder that works on certain Panasonic and Leica cameras. The entire text goes on for about a page, and ends with a completely irrelevant product description of a reflector kit used for outdoor photography. The store that forwarded this content to Amazon obviously sells both. Most likely the product description was in place, and an operator added the Panasonic description without removing the description of the collapsible reflector kit. Pasted texts such as this will always be on topic or nearly on topic, and so they look right, but they are often wrong nonetheless. In a different example, a simple weed puller with no strength is described as a house demolition device. Difference between Readers and Authors For readers, viewing the site as a place is not a problem. Good sites can easily be designed to create a virtual reality, of sorts, where readers tour through the many “rooms” of the site. But for professional writers, seeing the site as a place causes a serious blindness to many components of the site. Professional developers and evaluators who see websites as places tend to focus their evaluations in terms of structure and navigation. They perform usability studies and consider the usability studies their measure of quality. If users can quickly “navigate” through the site, it is an effective site. Returning to Evaluation Problems Earlier in the chapter, I introduced a page designed to describe careers graduating technical communicators might aspire to. Every year, I offer a graduate course where early in the course we evaluate the defective pages on that site. The students’ inability to identify problems on the page seldom changes. First, students begin discussing design issues. Student A. “I don’t like the use of this color.” Student B. “I like the use of the colors.” Student C. “There is too much white.” Student D. “I like the white space.” Student A. “I don’t like the page metaphor.” Student D. “I like the page metaphor.”

At this stage, the students are discussing aesthetic issues, using no logical or rational justification for their comments. “I like (or do not like) this.”

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Next, students typically begin evaluating navigation on the site. The site is small and uncomplicated, so navigation is not much of a problem. We use text-based links and the other accepted processes, so there is seldom much argument about navigation. About this time in the process, I suggest they examine the text for quality of writing. Typically, they will find a mechanical problem or two but usually suggest that the site (including the texts already discussed) is generally well-written. When I tell them that there are egregious errors on all of the pages, they go back and review everything more carefully, but virtually never find anything more. Only in a few cases has anybody felt there might be a problem, but with one exception, they have always been unable to explain why it was a problem. I invariably have to point out the specific problems and explain why they are problems. Once I point to them, I get a big, “AHA!” “But these are students,” you say. “They cannot be expected to already know this.” These are indeed students. But they are also all working technical communicators. They include editors, lead writers, web designers, even communications directors. None of them are beginners, yet seldom do any ever recognize the problems in writing until I point them out.

COMPLEX INFORMATION SYSTEMS: THE WORST IS YET TO COME Relational databases, XML documents mining information from other XML documents and inserting that information into XHTML documents, and Darwin Information Typing Architecture are among the new systems that presage the evolution of knowledge management in our immediate future. For the past fifteen years, we have been cutting and pasting ill-considered texts all over the Internet. Imagine what it will be like when the cutting and pasting becomes automated. For example, on one Amazon.com (2011a) page, you can see Fullriver Battery specializes in the manufacture of AGM batteries. Controlling the entire process from grid casting to final assembly, quality is assured with a 5-year Solar PV Application Warranty, subject to terms and conditions. Deep Cycle batteries by Fullriver are designed to be discharged and recharged hundreds of times. They are built differently than car batteries. A VRLA (valve-regulated lead-acid battery) is a sealed lead acid rechargable battery. They do not require water or any maintenance during their lifetime. VRLA batteries are AGM (absorbed glass mat battery) and Gel (gel cel) batteries. Fullriver deep cell batteries are used to store electricity and provide power for solar, wind turbines, boats, RVs and electric golf carts.* FULLY RECYCLABLE AND SAFE TO TRANSPORT. Certifications include UL, ISO9001, JIS, CE, TUV. Safe for air, sea and ground transportation. Approvals DOT, IATA, IMDG, ICAO. (n.p.)

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The copy is not too bad, but the block of text with no breaks could easily have been fixed if only a human had taken the time to look at it. On the other hand, on a different page the content looks like: AGM Electrolyte Suspension System Custom Built Military Grade Alloys Maintenance free Operation Fast Charge Delivery Capabilities Extremely Low Self Discharge Rate Extreme Vibrations, Heat and Weather resistant Sealed Non-Spillable Non Hazardous Construction Maximum Power Density and Deep Cycle Capabilities. (Amazon.com, 2011a)

This comes from the section of the Amazon page specifically meant to sell a product. Instead, we see a string of words with a single (apparently irrelevant) punctuation. But you can see worse. Another description meant to sell a battery line says only this (Amazon.com, 2011b): “UPG D5745 Sealed Lead Acid Batteries (12V; 18 AH; UB12180).” In this marketing segment, the copy is simply repeating the title of the page. On the other hand, it doesn’t make me think, so it is usable. The problem with the second two examples is that the process is managed entirely by computers. Computers collect information from a variety of resources and recombine it into automated pages using what Amazon calls artificial intelligence. Like Amazon, computers all across the Internet are regularly publishing documents unaided by human intervention. In the near future, this process could well become the rule and not the exception. I recently had a conversation with an IT manager for Lockheed Martin whose job is information management in an environment where information mining is a key component. Her greatest complaint is that documents are often a mish-mash of voices and rhetorical stances that dissolve into gibberish (24 November 2006, in conversation). In response to this problem, some information managers suggest that all documents be written for a universal audience. I suggest that a document written for everybody is written for nobody. Typically, the automation of relational databases is built around metadata. Metadata is fast becoming a critical tool for managing and mining ideas, but I have never seen metadata that lists genres, rhetorical stances, purpose, audience, or any of the other critical components of human discourse, although all of those could easily be integrated into the metadata. Communication is moving in exciting new directions, but to be effective it should remain communication and not database transfer. To make this happen, we need to remember that we are dealing with documents made up of complicated new texts in new combinations, and we need to remember that texts are made up of purpose, audience awareness, rhetorical stance, exigency, and much more that should not be left behind. In short, to effectively move into the future of communication, we must expand our definitions of text and genre and rhetoric so that we have no difficulty

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seeing that interactive media is communication, not construction. This is necessary for effective writing and evaluating of interactive media, and is critical in a future that includes automated document publication. CONCLUSIONS We seem to be simultaneously facing two problems: As professional writers, surprisingly few of us can effectively evaluate the quality of writing. At the same time, writing is becoming more complicated, automated, and more difficult to evaluate. The problem with having difficulty assigning quality to texts is easily overcome. Once writers see the problems with texts, they quickly find solutions. The problem with texts becoming increasingly complicated will never be overcome. Complex and complicated information systems (CCISs) are replacing simple websites in every market. The trend in these systems is single-sourcing, where one text (or one part of a text) can be used in multiple documents for multiple audiences. Being unable to identify the purpose and audience of a text being used in a new environment makes it impossible to know if that text is being used for the right purpose or audience. I suggest there are two solutions to this problem. The first solution is to develop a set of tools that can be applied to help identify the purpose and audience of a text in each new environment. The second is to develop a set of theories that can be used to better understand the tools. The first part of this book deals with identifying ways to use rhetorical theories as tools. The second two parts of the book demonstrate how to apply these new tools in digital media in general, and in web publishing in particular. REFERENCES Amazon.com. (2011a). AGM solar battery: Product description. Retrieved February 15, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/Solar-Battery-AGM-110AH-12V/dp/ B003E21GQ8/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1297782890&sr=8-7 Amazon.com. (2011b). UB 12180 sealed lead-acid batteries: Product description. Retrieved February 15, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/UB12180-SealedLead-Acid-Batteries/dp/B001DL7D1O/ref=pd_sbs_hpc_3 Anonymous. (2001a). Careers in undergraduate technical communications. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from http://imrl.usu.edu/techcomm/undergrad/index.htm Anonymous. (2001b). Mission and philosophy. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from http://imrl.usu.edu/techcomm/undergrad/philosophy.htm Barnum, C. (2002). Usability testing and research. New York, NY: Longman. Bernhardt, S. A. (1993). The shape of text to come: The texture of print on the screen. College Composition and Communication, 44, 151-175. Bolter, J. D. (1991). The computer as a new writing space. In Writing space: The computer, hypertext, and the history of writing (pp. 15-31). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Budgen, D. (1994). Software Design. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley. Halvorson, K. (2010). Content strategy for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. IBM. (2009). What kind of language is XSLT? DeveloperWorks. Retrieved January 8, 2009, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt/ Mandell, S. (1986). Basic programming today: A structured approach. New York, NY: West. New Mexico Tourism Department. (n.d.). New Mexico: Land of enchantment. Retrieved February 7, 2011, from http://www.newmexico.org/ Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders Press. Nielsen, J. (2005). 10 heuristics for user interface design. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html Nielsen, J. (2009). Ten usability heuristics. Retrieved January 8, 2009, from http://www. useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html, current in 2009 Parrish Books. (n.d.). Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach [Marketing page]. Retrieved February 7, 2011, from http://www.parrishbooks.com/prostores/servlet/ -strse-3384/Jonathan-Livingston-Seagull-,/Detail Powell’s Books. (2009). History of the expedition under the command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the sources of the Missouri, thence across the Rocky Mountains and down the river Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Retrieved January 8, 2009, from http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9781135459321-0 Redish, J. (2007). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. New York, NY: New Riders. Silver. S. (1987). Throw mama from the train [Motion picture]. Director, D. Devito. United States: Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Spool, J., Scanlon, T., Schroeder, W., Snyder, C., & DeAngelo, T. (1997). Website usability: A designer’s guide. North Andover, MA: User Interface Engineering. Tomlinson, B. (1988). Tuning, tying, and training texts: Metaphors for revision. Written Communication, 5, 58-81. White House. (2011). White House interactive tour. Retrieved February 14, 2011, from http://www.whitehouse.gov/about/interactive-tour

CHAPTER 2

Anything Can Be a Text What is a text? I suspect you are presently visualizing something alphanumeric. Most people to whom I have asked this question describe text in terms of the alphabet or a book or some other body of print. I argue that is a very narrow definition. There is a broader one that makes working with interactive media much more exciting. One thing we need to be able to do as we create and evaluate content is recognize that everything on the page is a text. So when we evaluate a web page we have to look at all genres, even genres we would never have recognized as genres. This chapter is dedicated to persuading you that everything you can see and much more is a text. I went to a Blue Man Group show a few weeks ago. They often begin their shows by shooting marshmallows at the audience. One of the marshmallows bounced off my shoulder and into my lap. Another practice of the Blue Man Group is to stand in the foyer autographing copies of their program. Because there are actually quite a few different members of the group, the individuals are anonymous, and they autograph by touching their thumb to their faces (covered in blue greasepaint) and then pressing their blue thumbprint onto the program. In this case, I had a Blue Man autograph my program in the normal (thumbprint) manner, but I also had him autograph my marshmallow. He did that by touching the marshmallow to his forehead. The obvious question is, How can a blue marshmallow be called autographed? I have another question. Workmen painting the walls and handrails of a flight of stairs were preparing to leave for the evening when they discovered they had no WET PAINT signs. Having no signs, they needed something that would persuade people not to touch the walls in the stairwell. Their solution came quickly enough: they simply stretched a band of two-inch masking tape across the entrance of the stairs. They wrote nothing on the tape; they simply stretched it from wall to wall across the entrance. The system worked perfectly. This raises the question, Why would such a simple system effectively prevent people from using the stairwell? There were no WET PAINT signs, or any signs for that matter. There was nothing written on the tape—no warning there—and the 47

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tape didn’t have the strength to stop an adult. Moreover, a child could have walked under it without ducking. I watched the tape off and on for all of the next day. Although the paint was long dried, nobody crossed the barrier; everybody used an alternate stairwell. Why? Simply stated, the tape was seen metaphorically by the would-be stairclimbers. Although I had never seen anybody use this approach to blocking a stairwell before, I still had no problem recognizing the statement (nor did anybody else): DO NOT ENTER. The tape was an extralinguistic metaphor (a metaphor existing outside of normal language) that made the workmen’s wishes perfectly clear. In a third example, whenever I use the last of something (coffee, milk, sugar), I leave the container on the counter next to the trash. By leaving it next to the trash, I am telling my wife I intentionally did not throw it away, and so it is a note to her. The note says, “We are out or nearly out of this.” We have an agreed-upon set of signs with agreed-upon meaning. This is fundamentally the nature of language—agreed-upon signs with agreed-upon meaning. The containers, in that context, are texts. TEXTS ARE NOT ALWAYS LINGUISTIC Generally, most people (even linguists) work on the assumption that texts are alphanumeric. That is to say that even linguists see texts as A, B, 3, 4, and maybe %. For example, in the introduction of What Writing Does and How It Does It, Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior (2004) said “text” is “any written inscription” (p. 7). A few critical theorists, however, have a broader view. According to some of them, there is no such thing as a non-text. For them, any pattern that can be separated from other patterns is by definition text. In “Signature Event Context,” Jacques Derrida (1977a) argued: Imagine a writing whose code would be so idiomatic as to be established and known, as a secret cipher, by only two “subjects.” Could we maintain that, following the death of the receiver, or even of both partners, the mark left by one of them is still writing? Yes, to the extent that, organized by a code, even an unknown and nonlinguistic one, as is constituted in its identity as a mark by its iterability, in absence of such and such a person, and hence ultimately of every empirically determined “subject.” (pp. 7-8)

Derrida argued that any code, even one known by only two people (or, for that matter, only one person), is still writing if its component parts are iterable. If both people die, it is still possible to decode the message or, using the same component parts, recreate the message. He said this is possible because the text does not simply end with the marks. It exists in a context. It has a history and an environment. In “Limited Inc a b c . . . ,” Derrida (1977b) clarified:

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The concept of text I propose is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere [emphasis added]. What I call “text” implies all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” “socioinstitutional,” in short: all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that “there is nothing outside the text . . . there is nothing outside of context.” (p. 136)

And later in the same article: The text is not the book, it is not confined in a volume itself confined to the library. It does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say history, of the world, of reality, that they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. (p. 137)

In short, to quote Derrida (1977b) yet again, “Il n’y a pas de hors-text”—“There is no outside-text.” Derrida suggested that anything (physical or conceptual) that can be contextualized and iterated can be a text. An empty cat food can in its context of sitting next to the trash (that code developed by my wife and me) becomes a note. Others probably use the same code in the same context—iterability. A piece of tape stretched across a door becomes a warning sign. And a marshmallow smeared with blue greasepaint becomes autographed. Ravings of an Ivory Tower Egghead? Initially, for many working professional writers, this may seem the ravings of an ivory tower egghead with nothing better to do than to make up erudite pronouncements that really have nothing to do with the profession of writing. Given the older traditions of writers, Derrida’s pronouncements are, in fact, not particularly important. But given the occurrence and complexity of interactive media, recognizing a broader definition of text is fundamental to evaluating and writing the many new texts we find on the Internet. Click a link and you get a transition. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, readers of websites typically visualize themselves traveling from one place to the other. Web developers, of course, recognize that the reader is actually importing and loading pages—the sense of strolling through a remote site is an illusion. Even so, when they discuss sites—planning sites and building sites—experts still think of them and discuss them in terms of traveling (navigating) through a place. Jakob Nielsen (2000), for example, said, “On the Web . . . the user fundamentally controls his or her navigation through the pages” (p. 25), and, “A

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website is like a house with a thousand doors” (p. 179). Users of a website will typically view the site as made up of a hierarchy of sorts; there is a homepage and subsequent pages existing deeper and deeper in the hierarchy. Nielsen made this point effectively: “Most sites have a hierarchical structure with progressively more detailed information. Other sites have a tabular structure” (p. 198). Those are effective ways to describe websites, but they are also illusions. These are metaphors the users create to remember where to expect certain components (texts) of information or navigation. The developer also sees the site as a different structure, as a (usually nested) collection of directories or folders on a hard drive in a server. In the end, this is also an illusion. There are no folders on the hard drive, only a file allocation table that tells where all the files are. Even the individual files are often not in one place; they are liable to be scattered all over the drive and, in some cases, across several drives. My point is this: Whenever we design or discuss websites, we invent nonexistent, purely conceptual structures—metaphors accepted by consensus. In fact, everything about the Internet is that way. Pages aren’t really pages, and text isn’t really text; what we see on the screen isn’t what’s really happening in the computer. Instead, the computer translates its impenetrable activities into something meaningful for us. The text we read is really nothing more than zeros and ones adding up to the command, “Put black here and put white here.” But in the end there are really no zeros or ones, there are circuits (transistors), active or inactive. We are down to the realization that everything we see in digital media is a metaphor, and text takes on a whole new meaning. More to the Point, Computers Speak Their Own Languages If we drill down to the very core of the computer we will find gates—AND gates, OR gates, NOT gates, NAND gates, and more. These are electronic devices that behave in specialized ways when electrified. They may turn on, turn off, or flip-flop on and off depending on the conditions. A typical Pentium chip contains billions of these gates. In fact, any chip in any computer, any diode, or transistor is made up of these gates. It’s how computers work, how they think, how they communicate. Suppose you have eight of these in a row connected to eight wires leading to eight diodes, and some are turned on while others are turned off. The resulting word might look something like “0100110.” This is why computers are binary; they are made up of gates, and the gates are always either on or off. If we look at the combination of diodes, “0100110,” it is easy enough to say it is a pattern we can recognize and can be designated as a character much as dit-dit-dit-dot can be characterized as a V in Morse code. It is difficult to say a computer can see the character at all. They are simply following their programming. Nevertheless, computers respond in a predictable way. We turn on our computers and an electrical signal travels to a chip that flip-flops on and off at

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more than a billion vibrations per second. These vibrations, called “the clock rate,” are then transmitted in waves throughout the processor with all of its different gates. The original signal is nothing more than a consistent frequency of pulses—010101010101—and exists for as long as the computer is on. At this point the signal provides no meaning other than that the fact that it exists at a predictable frequency. Pass the signal through a series of gates, however, and we get a meaningful pattern. Press the m key on your computer and the keyboard sends the signal “01101101” to the processor. Press z and you get “01111010.” When you press a key, it permits the signal to pass through a specialized series of gates that defines the final binary output. The processor does its thing and the characters mz appear on your monitor, although the computer still sees “01101101 01111010.” These characters, which you see on your monitor, are being held in a virtual space within the computer, existing more as digital potentialities than as the apparent objects you see. In fact, in the sense that a text on a screen is manifested by an absence of light, the apparent objects (characters) are actually the absence of object-hood—what appears to be a character is merely a hole in the light. The Monitor as Opposed to the Hard Drive Now suppose you save a site you are planning to publish. You might send it to your hard drive. Suppose your hard drive is nearly full and largely fragmented. The site will likely be broken in pieces, which are liable to wind up spread out across the drive. A file allocation table keeps track of where everything is. On the other hand, the components of the site could easily end up spread across a cloud of drives. If you could see the content on the hard drives, everything would be combinations of magnetic spots that match the ones and zeros that make up the second lowest level of machine language (the lowest level we can speak). It is important to keep in mind that computers do not talk to themselves and each other in terms of ones and zeros. They communicate using electric pulses. The ones and zeros are metaphors we apply to the pulses—one for the pulse and zero for its absence. In short, understanding how the texts work in interactive media requires recognizing a broader definition of text, and that broader understanding begins with trying to understand where the things we call text begin and end. For example, when we measure the 010101010 pulses from the clock, we draw meaning from the measurement. So, is it a text? Or is it a text only when we understand it? Understanding how the texts work and how users (and computers) interact with them gives us pause to consider that text needs to be redefined. If we consider that the whole website (and not just the written content) “talks” to the reader, we need a way to work with all of its component parts. I suggest that if we realize that each component (e.g., image, button,) in its particular context is a text, we are in a better position to understand the impact of all of the content as a whole.

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IT’S ALL IN THE METAPHOR I. A. Richards (1936) argued, “Thought is metaphoric and proceeds by comparison, and the metaphors of language derive therefrom” (p. 94). His argument proceeds from predecessors such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1992), who wrote, A nerve stimulus, first transformed into a percept! First metaphor! The percept again copied into a sound! Second metaphor! . . . When we talk about trees, snow, and flowers, we believe we know something about the things themselves, and yet we only possess metaphors of the things. (p. 1892)

If you look at the fruit of a lemon tree, you are imputing meaning to electrochemical signals in your brain. The electrochemical signals are not fruit; they are your physical response to reflections from fruit. You apply a sort of visual construction of a lemon inside your brain to make sense of those signals (this is Nietzsche’s first metaphor). When you say “lemon,” that word is a metaphor derived from the construction in your mind. If, instead, you painted a picture of the lemon, that would be a metaphor of a different kind, but a metaphor nonetheless. You might paint several oblong rocks yellow and put them in a bowl. Nobody would think they were lemons, but everybody who knows lemons understands the metaphor. In each case you will have created an artificial construct designed to transfer your knowledge of the lemons in your brain to another (note that I intentionally do not use “person” here; transfer of knowledge can occur between a variety of beings and even objects). If we expand these metaphors by stringing them together like beads, many of them become narratives. Eubanks (2004) explained in “Poetics and Narrativity,” “Many theorists distinguish between a story and a narrative this way: a story is what happened, and a narrative is the way what happened is recounted in words” (p. 34). In this, a third level of metaphor, the metaphors that are words combine to become the metaphor for an event. In the sentence, “This past weekend, I saw my dog dig up and gobble down a mouse,” I tell a narrative that has evolved from a physical experience of converting combinations of signals into meaning and then into words. I could as easily have described the process using a series of drawings. Conventions Make Metaphors Textual Something as simple as a painted rock, or even an unpainted one, can pass information from one person to another. Boy Scouts, for example, stack rocks to indicate a trail—a trailside signpost of sorts. Because metaphors are imputed by the reader, in many cases such texts have no human author but are still read by a reader. Rocks contain the history of the world; in Unearthing the Dragon: The Great Feathered Dinosaur Discovery, Mark Norell (2005) discussed finding “the smoking gun” for the hypothesis that

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carnivorous theropods (e.g., the Velociraptors of Jurassic Park fame) sported feathers. Some of these theropods apparently curled up in sleep with a head tucked under a wing; this implies a story of sorts, a narrative about the nature of their lives and transition into death. The rock narrates the nature of the dinosaur and the events leading to its death, but the original narrative is not recounted in words. Instead, paleontologists impute meaning to the rock: “These guys had died suddenly and were preserved sleeping like the Roman victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii. Yes, sleeping” (Norell, 2005, p.64). Norell went on with an analogy: “If you have ever seen birds asleep, you know they sit in a characteristic posture. Their wings lie on their sides and wrap around the body. The head is tucked in between the elbow and the torso.” Using fossils as his text, Norell read a brief story to us. If I may return to the computer, a definition of text may begin with the idea of patterns that contain or seem to contain meaning. The pattern “010101010” seems to contain meaning for the computer technologist and I suppose for the computer itself. The pattern of the rocks seems to contain meaning for the paleontologist, though a purist theorist might suggest the meaning is brought to the pattern by the reader rather than the pattern bringing meaning to the reader. In effect, to impute meaning to Norell’s rock, paleontologists apply a metaphor—birds asleep. Putting hundreds of the right rocks in a row makes a rock-bound codec describing the entire history and evolution of dinosaurs into the birds we see today—a narrative readable only to those who know and agree with the conventions of reading rocks. Since the publication of Norell’s book, even more persuasive bird/dinosaur narratives have been found. In a sense, the rock narrative is forever incomplete but is consistently updated. Metaphors applied to the rocks permit them to become texts. The Rocks are Metaphors and the Metaphors are Texts If anything can be a metaphor, anything can be a text. In “White Mythology,” Derrida (1982) argued that words are like coins with their exergue worn off (per the translator: exergue is the part of the coin where date and engraver’s marks are). According to Derrida, a word has a source, and in that source is an original metaphor that is usually long lost. For example, although many can point to the event where the computer mouse got its name, fewer know how the term calculus came to exist simultaneously in math and medicine, the same word with two completely different meanings. Today we calculate (originally meaning “work with pebbles”) to find solutions to math problems, and the term has an interesting history that effectively makes Derrida’s (and my) point that all things can be texts. The original word calculus evolved in two directions. In one case, it became calculate (as in solve a math problem), but in another case it became the kidney stone (as in renal calculus). The kidney stone dates back to the original meaning of calculi in

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Greece—pebbles or stones. Calculate, as a derivative of calculi, goes back to counting boards that were used to solve math problems in ancient Rome and, before that, ancient Greece. The people who calculated used pebbles or tokens (also called calculi) on these tables to solve their arithmetic problems. The tables were of different sorts and sizes, but the earliest were covered with sand. Lines could be scribed into the sand, and calculi could be placed on the lines—the mathematical process was not altogether unlike using a contemporary abacus. The sand offered the additional advantage of providing a place to note the solutions (among the ancients, notation and problem-solving used different processes). The ancient Greek word for sand table, by the way, is abax, a word that evolved into abacus. The word also came to mean tablet. You will usually find an abax on the top of a Greek or Roman column. Scholars suggest that the word abax may have had its roots in the Hebrew word abaq, meaning “dust.” In fact, one of the original meanings of abaq was sand used as a writing surface. The suggestion that abaq became abax is tentative, but the fact that much early counting and calculating was done using dusty abaci is not in dispute. In “Of Clay Pebbles, Hollow Clay Balls and Writing: A Sumerian View,” Schmandt-Besserat and Lieberman (1980) tracked the process to Babylon, and before that to Sumer at least 6,000 years ago (also see Shednge, 1983). Role of Calculi in Human Literacy Calculus is a good example of Derrida’s suggestion that words are nothing more than coins (tokens) with their surface worn smooth, but I want to point out that Derrida is more right than he may have realized. When he is talking about the worn coin in “white metaphor,” he is also talking about all of literacy. Along with the Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, and Mesoamericans, the Sumerians are among the inventors of writing. Some of writing’s inventors evolved the process from images to alphabet, but the Sumerians evolved it from physical objects (tokens or calculi) to alphabet. According to Malati Shednge (1983), the Sumerians developed pebble-shaped clay tokens, called an imna (see Figure 1). Ironically, as calculus translates into pebble, so does imna. The earliest tokens were probably blank, though their shapes (round, cone, disk, etc.) indicated numerical value. Eventually, however, the Sumerians added icons (ideographs) to the tokens. The icons might indicate sheep, hides, women, or baskets of barley. This represents what may be the first example of an adjective (a number) and a noun being written together (see Figure 2). In short, the earliest written text was a physical object, sometimes part of a contract, sometimes part of an inventory—technical documents of the day. The original contracts and inventories included these objects placed in hollow clay balls (bulles) with images of the tokens impressed onto the surface. Eventually, someone realized that if you had the contents drawn on the surface, you no longer

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Figure 1. Representative examples of Sumerian counting tokens and their shapes.

Figure 2. When combined with patterns, the tokens named the objects being counted and their number.

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needed the contents inside, and the clay balls were flattened out to become pages, and the shapes of the imna became icon shapes impressed into the pages. The first Sumerian text was a physical object, a token not unlike a coin, but the origin and nature of that coin is long worn away. As Derrida said, the exergue is long worn off. Origins of Literacy in Other Civilizations The Egyptians, Chinese, and the Mesoamericans took a somewhat different route to literacy. In all cases, their documentation began as pictographic drawings. Individual hieroglyphics served two purposes. In one context, the image stood for what it depicted (e.g., a drawing of the king depicted the king). In the other context, the hieroglyph stood for a sound, a phoneme that could be added to other phonemes to form words. For example, the sound attached to a hieroglyphic owl in hieroglyphics is the same sound attached to the M in the Roman alphabet (and is the same sound attached to the character “0110010” in binary). Where the Sumerians began writing by using physical icons, the Egyptians began writing with drawings that evolved into hieroglyphics. Eventually, the hieroglyphics were used only in formal and religious settings. The priests used a modified form of hieroglyphics for informal use (a hieratic alphabet), while scribes used demotic, a highly modified script that evolved from hieroglyphs, for normal communication. Today, as we look at our alphabet, we can trace it back to comparable pictographs. In short, what we typically call text is a coin, a metaphor with its original exergue worn away. The original tokens (calculi and imna) and glyphs that preceded the written word evolved into formalized strokes that meant agreedupon things within their conventions. Only the Chinese remained with a pictographic written word. Our texts are all stylized descendents of tokens and images. In time, we came to assume that the alphanumeric characters we call text represented all of text. Actually, those characters only represent one collection of patterns from which we can draw meaning. If we realize that text can come in many forms, it becomes easy to accept the argument that with the right conventions in place, an empty cat food can might be a text. So What Does a 6,000 or 7,000 Year Trip Get Us? I teach graduate courses to working professional writers every semester, and many semesters I invite them to discuss the meaning of text. They would never have trouble seeing the alphanumeric words you are reading as textual, but they always have a hard time seeing photographs, charts and graphs, even icons as also being textual. They even become surprisingly resistant to any attempts to expand their definitions. But alphanumeric texts represent only one component of the many we use to transfer meaning. By not recognizing the textuality of other elements on the page, examiners and writers of websites are at a disadvantage

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when attempting to evaluate the documents. We think of the process of reading webpages as touring. If we recognize that what we think of as touring is a form of reading, we come full circle to being able to evaluate pages that are “toured.” When we are touring a website, we are reading, but we are reading in a way that tends to go unidentified, in part because the website is a document constructed of new genres we often don’t recognize. The Nature of Expanded Text We went back 6,000 or 7,000 years to see the formation of alphanumeric texts. As some have said, there are no new ideas, and the invention of writing is no exception. It evolved out of previously existing texts—physical objects, icons, pictographs, hieroglyphs, and other things no longer commonly seen as texts. Normally in a book about evaluating writing, there would be no need for such a broad definition of text, because the texts in a book are static and easily isolated, but an evaluation of digital texts presents an exception. In a website, for example, we evaluate icons, rollover buttons, accordion menus, hyperlinked photographs, videos and animations, charts and graphs, illustrations, simulations, and the occasional short chunks of alphanumeric writing, not to mention the surrounding space and colors. It is helpful if we recognize that these are all different texts, all rhetorical and all require different approaches to their evaluation and creation. Some might suggest that if everything is a text, then the word text becomes meaningless. I suggest the opposite is true. If we recognize that all parts of any document are textual, meaningful (albeit complicated) questions arise every time we examine a webpage: “What kind of texts will make this page work?” and “What are these texts supposed to do?” and “How can we evaluate them?” Meaning in These Alternate Texts Suppose I write a job application for a programming position with IBM. Suppose every word on the résumé is carefully chosen, spell-checked, grammar checked, and flawless. Now suppose I print the résumé on hot pink paper and sign it next to my flamingo logo. What rhetorical message does that present the HR department at IBM? That I am dynamic or courageous or edgy? Or that I am weird . . . strange . . . rhetorically inept? What it does not suggest is that I am the kind of programmer IBM is inclined to hire. I use that example because we once had a person submit an application on hot pink paper for a comparable position—nobody who saw it ever forgot “the flamingo application.” We still talk about it. More recently, we had an applicant submit a résumé that looked like it came from an avant garde magazine. The text was in an unreadable, decorative font, entirely in caps. In the former case, the paper was rhetorically insensitive, while in the latter case, the whole document was. If we dissect the texts in something as simple as a résumé, we find that the written component is only a small part of the rhetoric. Just as important is how

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much content it is holding and not holding (a study in the rhetoric of silence looks at what absence of text communicates). In academic circles, a five-page résumé is short; in industry, a three-page résumé is long. Paper choice is important, as is paper size. The very pattern of the writing in a résumé has rhetorical value, as does the organization of the content. Font selection and size are also important. These various measures of quality occur at a variety of levels that range from physical and logical (mechanics and spelling, for example), to conceptual and aesthetic (use of whitespace). In short, an excellent writer will evaluate the rhetorical value of a huge variety of things besides the alphanumeric text as she writes, even in something as simple as a résumé. If we dissect a website, and we will later in this book, we discover infinitely more complicated texts and a need for much more careful evaluation. CODE SWITCHING IN SPEECH, WRITING, AND WEB DESIGN Code switching is usually described as combining words from different languages in the same utterance. New Mexico residents often use the phrase “bueno bye” in a friendly substitute for “goodbye,” Latin and English are continuously switched in Catholic Mass, and Greek and Latin are commonly introduced into scientific texts. Code switching can be intentional and effective, adding an air of friendliness or professionalism to a text, but it can also be accidental, demonstrating, for example, that the speaker is struggling with a new language. According to Marcia Buell (2004), in “Code Switching and Second Language Writing,” code switching also includes changes in style. For example, a person might switch between a Southern dialect and Italian accent while telling a story. Understanding how code switching works makes it possible to better evaluate the quality of a discourse. Code Switching of Another Sort I would like to suggest an example of another kind of code switching. Many documents offer examples of combinations of texts being organized to make a more salient point. A chart being used to illustrate a point in a segment of alphanumeric text is not unlike using Greek or Latin to reinforce a point in a work of scholarship. The intent and effect is the same: clarification. In evaluating traditional texts, code switching is not so important, but on the Internet, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of different rhetorical possibilities, based largely on all of the different nuances combinations of texts can generate. This makes evaluating digital texts a particularly complicated task, and writing them next to impossible. Imagine, for example, trying to write a safety segment that might end up being used in a training presentation, in a proposal, in a memo to management, on a marketing webpage, and as evidence in a legal dispute without

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a single word being changed. I am not sure it is possible to take the next technical/ rhetorical step of writing for complex and complicated information systems. The writer’s goal is to create a comprehensive and synergistic whole, not a collection of parts. Alphanumeric texts are no more or less valuable parts than all of the others, but in many respects, excellent writing becomes the glue that binds them all.

CONCLUSION An examination of some websites shows pages that effectively (or ineffectively) combine video, animation, illustrations, photographs, and live presentations, all coexisting with alphanumeric texts. It will be our task later in this book to examine some of them. All of these different texts create the complicated problem of forcing a redefinition of the term genre. When genres included “film noir” or “catalog” or “elevator talk,” defining and describing them was really pretty easy. Things have changed now. Many, if not most, digital genres simply cannot be named. It is easy to say, “Oh, this is a navigation page,” or “This is a content page,” but these terms are not useful for understanding the true purpose of the pages. Naturally, they are meant to get the reader to do something, but that is the only thing they hold in common. Worse, saying, “This is a content page,” is like saying, “This is a page in a book.” Knowing what these pages are supposed to do and for whom is critical to understanding whether they work. In the next chapter, we examine that problem—How do you know what the page is supposed to do and for whom?—and we will create a tool that will allow us to answer those questions.

REFERENCES Bazerman, C., & Prior, P. (2004). Introduction. In What writing does and how it does it (pp. 1-11). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Buell, M. (2004). Code switching and second language writing. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it (pp. 97-122). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Derrida, J. (1977a). Signature event context. In Limited inc (pp. 1-25). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1977b). Limited inc a b c . . . . In Limited inc (pp. 29-111). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Derrida, J. (1982). White mythology. In Margins of philosophy. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eubanks, P. (2004). Poetics and Narrativity. In C. Bazerman & P. Prior (Eds.), What writing does and how it does it. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders.

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Nietzsche, F. (1992). Truth and Falsity in an Ultramoral Sense (M. A. Mugge, Trans.). In H. Adams (Ed.), Critical theory since Plato. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Norell, M. (2005). Unearthing the dragon: The great feathered dinosaur discovery. New York, NY: PI Press. Richards, I. A. (1936). The philosophy of rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Schmandt-Besserat, D., & Lieberman, S. (1980). Of clay pebbles, hollow clay balls and writing: A Sumerian view. American Journal of Archaeology, 84, 339-358. Shednge, M. (1983). The use of seals and the invention of writing. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 26(2), 113-136.

CHAPTER 3

A Tool Called Genre As with most terms possessing both informal and formal meanings, genre is often used casually by people who see the term as having to do with recognizing families of texts with common plots and structures. This creates a problem for us. If we follow that traditional description of genres, we find ourselves with no rhetorical tools for describing them. If I say “mystery,” everybody might think they know what I am envisioning, but that is not possible. What they are doing is projecting their own visions onto my statement. The problem is that some people are imagining traditional mysteries, others are envisioning male-bonding stories, while others might have just read a horror story with a mysterious bent. If I attempt to define a good mystery, I am out of luck because the word mystery is simply too big. I can pare it down to “traditional mystery” or “sci-fi mystery,” but even these terms are too broad. Worse, if I am trying to describe a genre of one, this definition does not permit it to exist. If I name genres, I have very limited vocabulary for discussing them. As professionals, we need tools we can use, and that traditional definition of genre isn’t the right tool. If, instead, I can describe the genre in terms of what it is supposed to do and why it was created, I then have a vocabulary that reflects any specific document. To make this tool for evaluating and discussing content, I must necessarily embrace contemporary genre theorists . . . and even then I will need to redefine genre slightly. THE NATURE OF THE TRADITIONAL VIEW OF GENRES A traditional mystery, such as an Agatha Christie novel, has a plot that involves solving a crime. Structurally, it is typically a story slowly revealing a previous story—the crime—and it often involves an odd but exceptional detective tracking down some malicious character. This is what traditional genre theorists call its form. The structure of such a mystery can be described using a modification of Gustav Freytag’s pyramid for plot structure (see Figure 1). 61

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Figure 1. Structure of a traditional mystery.

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As you can see from the figure, the structure includes an introduction (exposition), rising action or tension, climax, falling action, and conclusion or denouement. But it also includes another story with its own rising action and climax. The stories perhaps share the same denouement. Originally designed by Freytag to describe tragedies, the pyramid is commonly used by literary scholars to help describe structures in a story’s plot. In a traditional Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, somebody would arrive at Holmes’s flat and describe a problem (exposition), Holmes would grapple with the problem for a significant portion of the book (rising tension), discover the culprit (climax), and everybody would stand around confused, wondering how he figured it out (falling action), until Holmes explained the methods in his madness (denouement). As I have pointed out, a unique characteristic of a mystery is an additional story (an additional pyramid) that usually, but not always, ends before the exposition begins. In fact, the point of the story is usually for the hero to figure out what happened in that earlier story, which then leads him or her to the perpetrator. Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, and Peter Marlowe all fit nicely into this description, but Spade and Marlowe have notably harder attitudes, and the ambiance of their literary world is very different from the more cerebral universe of Holmes and Poirot. Spade and Marlowe live in a universe of noir fiction mysteries, which are usually much bleaker. These mysteries (common in literature and movies since 1920) will often contain incomplete successes, unpleasant weather, alcoholism and drug abuse, grimy streets and grimier people, and an antihero as the protagonist. Because these detectives are so jaded (or “hardboiled”), their stories are called “hardboiled detective mysteries.” Yet another mystery (police procedural) often contains multiple plotlines with two or more unrelated mysteries and the protagonists attempting to solve them all simultaneously. Again, since they are mysteries, they contain the earlier stories the police try to unravel. For example, the television series Crime Scene Investigation often involves two or three unrelated deaths, and we watch the teams solve their cases and (when necessary or possible) discover and arrest the murderers. More recently, however, television police-procedural mysteries have had fewer complex stories in a single episode, substituting more complicated backstories. In any case, these mysteries are all relatively simply described in terms of their structures, which include plot structures in common. As a genre, a mystery can be said to include a detective (or detectives) attempting to identify a perpetrator by unraveling a previous story while the perpetrator is attempting to obstruct the investigation with lies, red herrings, and more than a little prestidigitation. The descriptions of any of the above stories will fit within my depiction of Freytag’s pyramid above. In Interpretation and Genre, Thomas Kent (1986) suggested the above approach to describing genres is “synchronic,” or rule-bound. But he also described a diachronic approach to describing genres. In this description, genres are culturally driven and constantly changing. Authors are forever testing the

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boundaries of genres, and as soon as the rules of a mystery (or any other) genre are established, they are broken. Testing Genre Boundaries Phillip K. Dick’s (1964) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has many of the characteristics of a hardboiled detective mystery but is also a science fiction novel. In effect, it is a science-fiction-hardboiled-detective-mystery with a noir twist, an antihero, and an unsatisfactory conclusion where the villain (as cruel as he might be) is the victim, and the hero is nothing more than a contract killer. In Stephen King’s (2001) Black House, the protagonist magically flits between parallel universes to stop a serial killer. The Amazon.com review (2011) described it as “a fantasy wrapped in a horror story inside a mystery, sporting a clever tangle of references to Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, jazz, baseball, and King’s own Dark Tower saga.” The prequel, The Talisman, is a coming-ofage-high-adventure-fantasy-horror-mystery. Frank Miller’s (n.d.) Sin City is a neo-noir collection of graphic short stories that includes action comic elements mixed with allusions to the hardboiled detective stories, produced in a format resembling medieval romances (made up of related short stories on different subjects but evolving toward a common conclusion—e.g., Le Morte d’Arthur). Not only are the plots of the Sin City stories complicated mixes of multiple genres, but the graphic presentation and the conceptual connection to the Vulgate Cycle introduces even more structural complexity. Such complexity might be difficult to effectively graph, and impossible to describe using synchronic rules. The theory that describes genres in this fashion is commonly called traditional genre theory. This theoretical framework goes all the way back to Aristotle, who made it a lifetime ambition to sort his world into taxa (taxonomies or genres). Aristotle believed that everything, including everything written by humankind, could be placed into categories where everything shared common features. While this is to some extent true, it should also be clear by now that the boundaries are elastic at the very least, and may actually be inventions—that there may really be no such boundaries. Traditional Genres in Nonfiction According to Sharon and Steven Gerson (2000), in Technical Writing: Process and Product, a proposal or report contains a title page, cover letter, table of contents, list of illustrations, executive summary, introduction, discussion, conclusion, recommendation, glossary, works cited page, and appendix. I should note that the Gersons are not specifically examining the two genres as genre theorists; they are simply describing their structures from their point of view as technical communication educators. They are explaining to students the elements they should have in their completed documents. Still, it becomes clear that their

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structure-based description makes it possible to simultaneously describe disparate genres using the same structural descriptions. Both the report and the proposal contain those same components. At the same time, their description of proposals describes only one kind of proposal. The proposal described by the Gersons suggests something like a formal NSF proposal. But a proposal can as easily be submitted informally by a contractor to a resident who wants a new roof or deck. In this case, the proposal might be presented over bacon and eggs at the local family restaurant. In short, it is easy to identify a simple work of fiction by its genre; identifying highly complex works is much more difficult. Structures become increasingly convoluted, often evolving out of literary genres from the distant past. In contrast to saying “mystery” or even “hardboiled detective story” to name one of these more advanced genres, we are reduced to complicated descriptions. Moreover, traditional genres can neither include all variations of a genre nor exclude all alternate genres. The genre “proposal” can have structures as varied as formally written to the NSF or a project pitched over breakfast, and although its purpose is entirely different, a report can share those same structures. Thinking about genres at this level is not useful to writers. This approach to describing genres creates a collection of pigeonholes that confines and misleads writers (and evaluators of writing). Traditionally, if someone needs to know whether a body of writing is any good, she will evaluate it within the context of its genre. A proposal does not look like a love letter. Each would be evaluated differently. But even different proposals are not alike. To evaluate a proposal, you must know what kind of proposal it is (e.g., formal, informal, internal, external), and you must know the proposal’s social situation. In simple terms, you need to know why the proposal is needed, what it is supposed to do, and to whom. Now introduce the complexity of the Internet. Proposals on the Internet might not look at all like analog proposals. Moreover, on the Internet, consecutive paragraphs manifest entirely different genres; it can be impossible to know what any paragraph is, much less how to evaluate it. For example, a typical Amazon.com page will contain as many as a dozen different genres, ranging through a whole variety of menus, lists, product descriptions, and reviews. The pages are designed to be user-centric, but, depending on its source, the quality of the content varies from exceptional to useless. To deal with the problem of multiple genres and varied quality, I will propose converting a more contemporary description of genre into a tool that can be used to identify the genres of the texts we are attempting to evaluate or write—a tool that can also be used for evaluating the quality of the content within these genres. The tool I will describe comes from theories advanced by the North American school of genre theory. Very briefly stated, the North American school advanced a theory that genres are recurrent actions in response to communicative situations and that those objects people call genres are really artifacts of the actions. In such a genre theory, the forms (structures) of the texts are no longer very

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important. Once they become unimportant, it becomes easy to see what is important and use that to parse and evaluate texts, in addition to using it in planning and writing new texts. AN ACTION-BASED DESCRIPTION OF GENRES In contrast to the Gersons’ description, in Technical Writing: A ReaderCentered Approach, Paul Anderson (1987) described proposals differently. He suggested that a proposal is an action. “In a proposal,” he said, “you make an offer. And you try to persuade your readers to accept that offer” (p. 704). He continued, “You say that, in exchange for money or time or some kind of support from your readers, you will give them something they want, make something they desire, or do something they desire” (p. 704). Anderson described proposals in terms of interactivity between author and audience, and within his description, a proposal can be as formal (NSF) or as informal (bacon and eggs) as needed and still meet his description of proposals. Moreover, no other genres can be defined as “you make an offer. And you try to persuade your readers to accept that offer.” Those genres that seem to fit within the description (e.g., providing coupons or price reductions—making an offer—to get customers to purchase products) can be carved out by more carefully describing the proposal in greater detail. Conversely, it can be demonstrated that they are in the same genre family even if they are called something else (e.g., “I’ll knock another 10% off if you’ll buy this car” is a proposal). A genre theory based on social interaction permits more detailed and accurate descriptions of the relevant genres than a structure-based description. “You say that, in exchange for money or time or some kind of support from your readers, you will give them something they want, make something they desire, or do something they desire,” introduces ideas of purpose, audience, and interaction or situation. As I mentioned earlier, the idea of recurring activities based on recurring interaction of the purpose, audience, and situation of a text comes from the North American school of genre theory. Although there are a number of different variations in their genre theories, generally speaking, Caroline Miller’s description is that a genre is a recurring social action. This implies that the structures people call genres (mysteries, science fictions, etc.) are actually artifacts of the actions, “social artifacts,” according to Miller (1994a). In an excellent description, she said, Genre we can understand specifically as that aspect of situated communication that is capable of reproduction, that can be manifested in more than one situation, more than one concrete space-time. The rules and resources of a genre provide reproducible speaker and addressee roles, social typification of recurrent social needs or exigencies, topical structures (or “moves” and “steps”), and ways of indexing an event to material conditions, turning them into constraints or resources. (p. 71)

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This description makes an important break from previous descriptions by her and others. In the past, theorists have called genre a recurring social action. But Miller now describes it as a social action that can reoccur. That concession will be important later in this chapter. But for now it may be sufficient to explain exactly what her description implies to me and how I intend to use it as a tool for evaluating and writing digital content. If we break her description into something akin to a heuristic describing what she calls genre, it might look like this: • A situation with a social need or exigency where a communication is required; • reproducible patterns of interactivity between the author and audience: • that can occur in different situations; - that can be identified and described; and - that can be used as constraints or resources So imagine a situation where a company has hired a new president with a tremendous background. There are exigencies or needs that demand communications: press releases, newsletters and memos to employees, writing a new official presidential biography, and so on. All of these different kinds of documents are driven by the exigencies generated by the president’s arrival. Press releases will be sent in a variety of forms to a variety of media and will have identifiable patterns of interactivity between the company and the press (e.g., the media should be warned the press release is coming, and the company should have a sense of what the media wants; if it is any good, the release will no doubt be followed by a variety of phone calls and interviews, and additional press releases may be issued as a result). The patterns around the writing of the biographies will be completely different and equally identifiable. Once you understand the appropriate interactions that are expected (constraints), you know how the writing should be cast, or if you are reviewing something someone else has written (evaluating), you should know how it should have been cast. Adding to Their Descriptions Forgive me if I twist Miller’s words even further. While the North American school does an excellent job of describing the nature of genres in a socially interactive setting, we need a more specific set of elements to be able to evaluate web texts. I suggest that for our purposes, genres of texts are defined by: • their exigencies, • their urgencies, • their purposes, • the social interaction and conventions between author and audience, and • the physical structures that result from that interaction.

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With those elements in mind, I repeat the genre theorists’ suggestion that every utterance begins with an exigency or need. The force that necessitates communication can be called the text’s exigency. This force will often demand several communications, each with different purposes and each leading to different audiences. Even if it is only created to fill a space, every text has a purpose. If we assume the role of professional writing is producing text for a client that is directed toward an identifiable audience, we can identify components that must always be in place before we can effectively evaluate content: exigency, urgency, purpose, rhetoric and structure, and results. These can be converted into questions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Why do we need this? How important is it? What is this supposed to do and to whom? What is the best approach to presenting the information? (Rhetoric and structure) 5. What is the structure of the interaction? 6. How well does the text do what is intended? These questions, combined with their answers, provide us with a description of the genre. The question, “Why do we need this?” leads to the description of the exigency. The question, “What is this supposed to do and to whom?” leads to a description of the purpose of the text and its audience (these are inextricable). “What is the structure of the interaction?” leads to an understanding of how the text is constructed, and how the author and audience interact. Finally, “How well does the text do what is intended?” provides us with our evaluation question. A GENRE THEORY FOR OUR PURPOSES Assume that professional writing is meant to accomplish something; in other words, it has a purpose. That purpose will evolve out of an exigency and urgency, which is to say some pressure or need drives each purpose. The purpose will typically be to get someone to do something or change in some way. Excellent authors know the exigency and purpose, because that knowledge is necessary for identifying the audience, and only by knowing the audience can the author produce a text that will affect it. But people evaluating existing texts may not know the exigency or purpose of the text and so can have little sense of the audience. Like the author, the evaluator must identify the audience to evaluate the text. With traditional genres (e.g., NSF grant proposal), determining what it is supposed to do, and whether it is successful may not be difficult, because the

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evaluator will have a good sense of the genre, which supplies some sense of exigency, purpose, and audience, based on traditional texts. Continuing with the proposal example, purpose and audience will be self-evident. With many new, interactive genres, however, identifying the genre, recognizing what it is supposed to do, and determining whether it fulfills its purpose can be more difficult. With the newer complex information systems (e.g., NASA), determining the genre can become very difficult, although it is no less important. To deal with the new paradigm of complex and complicated information systems, we must find a tool or heuristic to guide us through the process. I suggest that by reapplying the descriptions advanced by the North American school of genre theory, we can do that. On Confusing Medium and Genre I begin by suggesting that genre and medium often have very similar definitions. Arguably, they are opposite ends of the same continuum. If I say “ink and paper,” it is clear that I am talking about a medium, and if I say “hardboiled detective story,” it is clear I am naming a genre, but if I say “e-mail,” things are no longer so clear. A traditional book is a manifestation of ink and paper and is likely to be seen as a medium, but brochures and posters could well be seen as genres, although conceptually a brochure is not particularly different from a book—just a few hundred pages shorter. There seems to be a continuum connecting descriptions of media to descriptions of genres. On the one end, we find elements that are clearly mediums. On the other end, we see elements that are clearly genres. Although we might be comfortable calling brochures and e-mails genres, it is impossible to apply exigency, purpose, or audience to such broad terms. With proposal, things are somewhat better. We have more information, although we still do not have much. Like lecture, I suggest that proposal is a collection or class of related genres. With proposals we know that someone is offering to do something in exchange for something. But we still do not know nearly enough to evaluate the quality of any given proposal. An NSF proposal or a contractor’s bid is arguably a genre. We now have a sense of the exigencies, the purpose of the proposal or bid, and the approximate audiences, but we do not have a sense of the social structures surrounding everything. Saying “roofing contractor’s bid” gives us a lot more, and a “roofing contractor’s bid in writing” gives us even more. We do not have to ask the contractor what his exigency is; we can pretty well guess it. We know the audience is someone wanting to get her roof repaired or replaced. We have typically seen comparable documents, so we know what it should look like. We could probably evaluate this document because we know what it is supposed to do and what the social interaction looks like—in other words, we know the genre.

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Genres and Subgenres Suppose we look at the traditional description of lecture. We see that it is simple enough to define lecture as a condition with a structure involving an orator expounding to an audience. In such a simple case, there is an orator, an oration, and an audience. We know nothing else about any of them. I suggest that is because lecture is not a genre. I propose that lecture is, instead, a family of related genres. Once you look at the idea of lecture more carefully, my argument becomes clear. Consider the homily, a kind of lecture where the speaker addresses an audience from a pulpit and the audience typically never interrupts, in contrast to a disciplinary lecture (father/son, boss/employee) that might require a great deal of interaction with the audience. We now know more about the purpose and audience—not a lot, but some more nonetheless. With a classroom lecture in front of a white- or blackboard, the speaker presents information to students, but the nature and purpose of the information can be completely different from class to class. A history teacher might use chalk to fill a board with an order of events leading to a historical condition, and the students might be invited to interrupt often for clarification and discussion. An engineering teacher may well be demonstrating skills—modeling the universe with equations—to 200 or more students who are expected to interrupt only if necessary. These chalk talks can be reduced even further to more genres or subgenres. For example, some engineering teachers present the lecture, then, to make certain students understand, have their students do homework which they turn in for a grade. Other engineering teachers have the students do the homework before class, and the teacher and students work out the homework (and other) problems during the subsequent class period. In each case, the nature of the lecture will be different. Recently, teachers have been recording their chalk talks so the students can watch the lecture via video and then do their homework. Having had their students do both the lecture and homework before class, these teachers are able to move to more advanced and more theoretical information during class. For example, the late Frank Redd, a master teacher of orbital mechanics at Utah State University, had his students watch videos of his lectures, then do homework assignments. Having done that, they would attend his class, where they wrestled with the much more advanced quantum problems in orbital mechanics. On the other hand, some university departments are developing courses where the students see the chalk talk online and meet with a tutor or facilitator to ask questions and demonstrate an understanding of the material. These students may never actually meet the teacher of record. It seems as though anytime you identify a genre based on its structure and content, you can identify a subgenre, and that will have subgenres, and they will have subgenres, and so on and so on and so on. Closely examine the interior of the genre, and its structures will always deconstruct. On the other hand, I reasonably successfully described the above

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genres based on the interaction between teacher and students. Importantly, I feel no need to name them once I can describe them. The description of the interaction is enough information for knowing what I am looking at. The more complete the description, the better I understand the text and what it is supposed to do. In short, in the traditional structure-based paradigm, altogether different genres can be described by the same structure, and a single genre can be described in terms of a variety of different substructures. In contrast, an activity-based genre is described in terms of interaction between elements such as need, purpose, authorial intent, audience, etc. A Heuristic for Using Genres for Evaluating and Writing Digital Content Extending what the genre theorists have proposed, I offer a heuristic for identifying and describing the genres of texts in general, and web-based texts in particular, and a vocabulary that enhances discussion of content quality. I suggest that if you can accurately describe the genre’s various characteristics, you can effectively evaluate and parse the text, and you also have the language for discussing your results. There is no need to apply some kind of name to the text (e.g., mystery, grant proposal, sales brochure) because many of the new, digital genres are as yet unnamed and may even be unnamable. A good description is better in any case. The key is to begin by recognizing the characteristics of the genres you are evaluating. These can be distilled from theories advanced by the genre theorists and me earlier in this chapter. I believe the most applicable characteristics are as follows: • Exigency or need for the text, • urgency of the text, • purpose of the text, • audience of the text, • rhetoric of the text, and • physical structure of the text, including its medium. If you can describe these six characteristics, you have effectively described the genre and identified what it is supposed to accomplish. You can then determine whether the artifact accomplishes that. My Use of Exigency The author or client has some kind of need that the text is expected to meet. The need may vary from earning a living to making a profit to making a bigger profit, or any of the million different needs individuals and corporations have. Please note that these needs are not descriptions of what the text is supposed to

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do but of why the text is needed. The need (exigency) is the force that drives the production of the communication, and it is reasonable to assume that a variety of different purposes might evolve out of a single need. Connected to the idea of exigency is the urgency it generates. A sudden silence in a crowded and noisy room may cause someone to giggle or say something. In this case the exigency is the silence, and the urgency is trivial. On the other hand, in a murder trial, the urgencies are huge. The exigencies lead to levels of urgency, which lead to what the communication must do to be effective (purpose). Exigency and Purpose Exigency and purpose might seem similar and are easily confused, but they are quite different. Arguably, exigency is the force that precipitates the act, while purpose is the intended result of the act. Suppose I have inherited a warehouse of antiques. I need to do something with them. Perhaps I am also unemployed and broke. Then I probably need to sell them. So those are my exigencies: I have a sudden cache of antiques and I am broke. Now we come to the purpose. Since I need to get rid of my extra antiques, I do something that will sell them (purpose). Perhaps I write a newspaper ad or post flyers on telephone poles or write a letter to an auction house (audience) or do all of them. Although the exigencies remain the same, the purposes can change. With the flyers and newspaper ads, my purpose might be to sell the antiques, but with the auction house, I might be trying to find out what my antiques are worth so I will know what to sell them for. Understanding both exigency and purpose is necessary for understanding the genre of the text. These are simple ideas once you understand them, but, nonetheless, when I discuss them with professional writers, they have the most difficulty grasping the difference between exigency and purpose. Exigency vs. Purpose With the rebuild of a marketing page on a website, the exigency might be the company’s decline in sales, while the purpose of the text might variously be to unload old stock or hype a new product or develop a mailing list. Of course, since this is about communication, “hype a new product” is incomplete. Extending the purpose of a communication always leads to a description of its audience—“hype a new product to . . . ,” “unload our old stock to . . . ,” “create a mailing list of . . . .” Arguably, knowing the exigencies of a text always leads to an understanding of its purpose, and the purpose leads to a description of audiences. In short, the exigency can be seen as a description of a “problem.” “We are bleeding profits” or “we have tons of old inventory we can’t sell,” or “nobody seems to know who we are,” or “we have this great new product we need to bring to the public,” are all exigencies.

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Purpose is different. The purpose of a text is to solve the problem. “This page is designed to persuade readers to buy . . .” or “this page advertises our steep discounts on all of our old stuff,” or “this page introduces us,” or “this page introduces our new line.” Exigency always answers the question, “Why do we need to do this?” The purpose will always answer the question, “What is this supposed to do?” Knowing Exigency, Urgency, and Purpose is Critical for Describing a Text’s Genre Clearly, recognizing the audiences of a document is important, but it is relatively simple to demonstrate that exigency and purpose are even more critical for describing the genre of a text. There is a very interesting spoof of Photoshop tutorials called You Suck at Photoshop. It presents itself as a series of tutorial videos, but after a only a few moments of watching the first segment, the viewer realizes it is actually a story about a neurotic (possibly psychotic) Photoshop guru who is losing his wife, hates his job and boss, and is in an advanced state of emotional devolution. The initial episode began with the following: Maybe you have a photo of the Vanagon that your wife and her friend from high school spend Friday nights in. . . . Oh, hey look, I’ve got that one myself, right here, so let’s go ahead and open that right up. That’s what we’ll start with. Let’s just say for hypothetical that you really want to do some shit to this Vanagon—I mean the real Vanagon. But let’s also say you’ve got a restraining order to prevent you from getting close enough to do that kind of shit to it. So let’s have Photoshop do the dirty work for us. (Big Fat Institute, 2007, pp. 0:32-1:05)

In a total of twenty episodes, the narrator shows his viewers a variety of bleak events from his personal life: how to prepare an image of a wedding band for posting on eBay, how to remove a hypothetical someone (himself) from a security video taken outside a store where thousands of thumb drives have been stolen, how to regain a girlfriend he has flamed in a previous episode, and more. All in all, it is an exceptionally creative piece that splits the difference between audio book with its narrative stripped away and satire of a typical video tutorial. Exigency of You Suck at Photoshop These videos went viral, and within only a few months, the tutorials developed a significant following that speculated for more than a year on who was producing them (8.5 million people, according to National Public Radio, 2008). The consensus was that this was a new and creative approach to telling a story. The episodes seemed to represent a completely new genre of fictional, first-person

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stories, hidden in apparently traditional tutorials. In the end, completely different exigency and purpose were revealed in a National Public Radio (2008) interview. The introduction to the interview spelled it out: “Troy Hitch talks with Scott Simon about You Suck at Photoshop, a hit series of web videos created to explore viral marketing concepts [emphasis added]. Hitch is the creative director for the agency Big Fat Institute.” The text’s relationship with the audience completely changes once it becomes clear this is marketing research and not simple fiction. It is still very creative, and it is still some kind of hybrid that is in many respects like an audio book and in other respects a tutorial, but it is also the staging platform for a study in viral advertising. And 8.5 million people had the genre and audience wrong—they thought they were the audience, but they were not; they were the subjects of the experiment. Its principal audience was the advertising community, and its purpose was to examine new marketing techniques. In a different case, Powells.com advertises the two-volume set for $350,000 that I mentioned in Chapter 1. When I suggested their marketing effort for the book could be improved, the rare book manager replied with the following: Because this geographical area was so important to the Lewis & Clark adventure, the 1814 in original boards makes sense for us to have as a showpiece or attraction. . . . Not that we would turn down a reasonable offer, but it is the only part of our rare book inventory that we did not mark down 30% this spring. (Berg, personal communication, 11-22-2009)

In other words, according to her the primary purpose of the page is not to sell the book, but to enhance the ethos of the company. Without that information, an evaluator (me) would automatically be looking at the document as a sales (as opposed to marketing) tool. Without knowing the exigency and purpose, we can never know about the additional, complicated layers of complex documents, nor can we know the totality of their audiences. In effect, we can never be confident of any evaluation we do without knowing why the document was needed. Exigency, Purpose, and Audience Suppose I am an Army recruiter and my exigency is my inability to meet my recruiting quota. My purpose is to get young men and women to come to my recruiting office. Not only does the purpose contain the audience, but the better you understand my purpose, the better you understand my audience. Moreover, a single exigency can imply many different purposes. I need to increase my recruiting. A document that will recruit law students is far different from a document that will recruit unemployed high school graduates, and that will be different from a document designed to recruit only women or minorities. In general terms, my purpose is to recruit young men and women into the U.S. Army in a time of war, when people are going to Iraq and Afghanistan and

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(perhaps) Pakistan. Knowledge of my purpose pares my audience significantly. Law students doing really well in school probably make up a very small cohort in my audience. On the other hand, law students who need money to finish school might be persuaded to enlist if I am able to facilitate their schooling and schedule them to enlist as Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers. Young men and women who are adrift and looking for a place to be might be persuaded if I can convince them that their peers would be family. Adventurers might be persuaded to “Be All That You Can Be.” Medical students, engineering students, and business students are all potential enlistees, but they will all demand different rhetorical approaches—they are all different audiences. Audience Expectations The audience has exigencies as well. We all have hopes and needs, and in that respect we are all vulnerable to excellent persuasion. The task of the author is to identify those hopes and needs, perhaps through an analysis, and craft the text that taps into them (offers them what they need). With the right rhetorical approach, the law student looking for funding to finish her degree is as accessible for the recruiter as the unemployed high school graduate looking for a place to belong. The audience will have specific expectations of the author, and the author will have specific expectations of the audience. Continuing the above analogy, the audience might expect honesty from the recruiter (ethos), though they might not expect (or even want) complete honesty. The audience might expect interesting stories describing what they might get out of enlisting (pathos), and they might be looking for sound reasons for enlisting (logos). The recruiter will also have expectations: an honestly interested, adventurous, healthy audience, not charged with a felony, etc. Audience expectations help define the genre. When the genre changes, audience expectations also change. Suppose I am accessing a tutorial on programming some complicated activity in Flash. The author’s expectations are completely different and so are mine. The recruiter’s presentation need have no structure, but with the tutorial, I expect carefully laid out instruction and impeccable accuracy. On the other hand, the author has to make assumptions about my level of expertise based on the purpose and nature of the tutorial. What is the Structure of the Interaction? All of these together become a situational social activity that includes what the writer produces, how it is produced, where it is presented, in what form it is presented, author’s expectations of the audience, and audience expectations of the author. If the author (by “author” I mean the person who makes the utterance—it could be a speaker or someone using American Sign Language) calls the audience on the telephone to propose something, it is still a proposal. Knowing the proposal occurred as a phone call as opposed to a note or a formalized package gives us the ability to describe the proposal in a meaningful way as opposed to naming it.

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In an evaluation, if we know the exigency and purpose, plus the author and audience, we have a sense of what the text should look like. That begins to give us an ability to evaluate. If the form of the text matches our expectations and we find that it is impacting the audience as it should, we should be able to declare that it is well done. Introducing audience response to the purpose of the text completes the cycle while (often) introducing a new cycle. Suppose we see the text is obviously directed at the wrong audience or at no particular audience. We instantly know it is not well done. Suppose we see a text that was repurposed from somewhere else. Again, we instantly know it is not going to be effective. But we can do more. If the text is directed at the right audience and is used for the right purpose, we can go to the next step to see if the voice is right for the purpose and audience. Should the text be highly rhetorical? Should the text be subtly rhetorical? Should there be no obvious rhetoric at all? Once you can name the exigency, purpose, author-audience, situation, and structure of the text, you can ask meaningful questions about it. Moreover, once you know the exigency, purpose, and audience, you can create the text in the most appropriate structure for any given situation. If we return to my problem of being broke and having to sell my antiques, we can see how the descriptions can be overlain by that transaction. Because they focus on relationships between the exigencies of the authors, purpose of the works, and the nature of the audience, genres described in the context of their activities become easy to identify, to understand, and to evaluate. Note that in the previous sentence, I say “described.” With an activity-based genre theory (from the point of view of professional writing), genres are much more usefully described than named, and the more detailed the description, the better. Putting It All Together By knowing the exigency of the text, the author can identify and describe the purpose. Knowing the purpose leads to a knowledge of whom the text is supposed to influence. Knowing purpose and audience permits the author to identify an optimal structure for the text. Exigency, purpose, audience, and structure each place a variety of different demands on the author. Once the text is complete, the author steps out and the end product becomes an artifact. To evaluate the text once the author is no longer present, the evaluator must replicate the steps taken by the author: identify the exigencies and purposes of the text. That identifies the audience. Actually, this may be all the evaluator has to do. In the case of the “Careers” webpage example I used in Chapter 1, the instant we know the purpose of the page and the audience, it becomes clear that the page was never designed for that audience. We immediately know the page is problematic. For more complicated evaluation, we must drill deeper into exigencies, purposes, audience needs and expectations, and best structures— including rhetorical stance—to know why a page works or does not.

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Since the author will likely be gone, the evaluator may find the original purpose of a text by asking stakeholders. Knowing the purpose of the text permits the evaluator to identify and describe the audience and best structure. The evaluator can then determine the extent to which the text meets its goals. GENRES IN TERMS OF NOT BEING COLLECTIONS In “Genre as a Social Action,” Carolyn Miller (1994b) suggested that genres are recurring rhetorical situations and that a text that cannot demonstrate an identifiable, recurring rhetorical situation is not a genre. According to Miller, “Genre refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large scale typification of rhetorical action” (p. 38). In her description of the rules for identifying a genre, she argued that some texts fail to meet the rules and are not genres. In her chapter, “Anyone for Tennis?” Anne Freedman (1994) suggested that an important part of understanding genres is understanding what the audience is supposed to do as well as understanding what the audience actually does. Using the exchange between two players on a tennis court for an allegory, she suggested that genres are games, “minimally, of two texts in some sort of dialogical relation” (p. 48). Extending Freedman’s argument leads to the conclusion that there may be few recurring rhetorical situations. Rather than the game of tennis, I suggest the game of chess is a better analogy. Every move in the game of chess is in response to a previous move. Every move has an exigency and a purpose, and the audience will make a move in response. If the reply is a part of the genre, then the reply might be any of a whole variety of moves, some of them excellent and some nonsensical. In chess, there are thirty-two pieces the players use in their “communications.” In the real world, the players have nearly an infinite number of communication possibilities. These possibilities not only apply to language, but looks, behavioral responses, and even objects at hand. Such a broad range of possibilities leads to the conclusion that there may be few situations that can truly be called recurring. One reasonable conclusion from an activity-based genre theory is that there are activities that may occur only once but can still be described with the genre theory tools. This raises serious implications about understanding the meaning of genre. Extending the argument that genres are repeatable situations to their ultimate conclusion gives us the possibility of the existence of genres of as few as one or even of zero. Genres of One Following from Miller’s description, I suggest that genres are defined by situations that can recur as opposed to necessarily recur. The pattern of a social situation might happen only once, but it can still be described in the same manner as other genres. Originally the word genre (meaning kind, class, variety) was meant to describe how human art and communication could be categorized into

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meaningful and comparable families. Such a mindset works as long as you want to put together a class dedicated to a particular clump of literature (e.g., hardboiled detective stories) or art (e.g., abstract expressionism, impressionism, surrealism, Dadaism) or music (e.g., romantic, classical, New York jazz) or communication (e.g., lecture, conversation, love letter). But if you want to understand how language works, genre in its old context is inadequate. In fact, the term may actually be unfortunate. Although the word may technically mean group, it may describe conditions that often have little to do with clumping structures. Rather, it may be a description of the rules of Freedman’s “game”—her ceremonies. Moreover, Freedman went on to suggest that genres might be identifiable in terms of differences rather than similarities. The class studying hardboiled detective stories might well spend their classes contrasting their texts, looking at their differences, because differences might be more interesting similarities. For example, in science fiction, Phillip Dick’s (1964) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Isaac Asimov’s (1950) I, Robot are both works of science fiction about robots and robot-like androids, but science fiction and robots is where any comparison ends, and a reader of one would be wise to expect something entirely different from the other. A class studying works of science fiction might well dismiss their few similarities and discuss their vast differences. How many books are there like Do Androids or King’s Black House? They can both be lumped into science fiction and mystery, but I know of no other books like Black House, and although Do Androids has now been copied by others, it was originally unique. Did it become its own genre when it was copied once? Twice? Thrice? Exactly how many times does the situation have to recur before it can be called a genre? I suggest the fact that it could recur is the important point, not the fact that it has recurred. Lumping the above books into groups where they share so little seems counterproductive. In fact, it becomes relatively simple to identify other works of literature that have no peers. Nobody has ever done a good job of explaining the inner workings of a book as simple as Malamud’s (1952) The Natural. Is this a baseball story? Yes, it is, but it is much more. It’s a rewrite of The High Book of the Grail (Briant, 2007)—it’s a grail myth, but ironically it is a Jewish grail myth, with an ending that can only come from a Jewish grail myth. Where is its peer? This book may be unique to itself—a genre of one. You Suck at Photoshop, a story being told through a series of Photoshop tutorials, is another unique genre communication—another genre of one. Genres of Zero? It is even possible to create a genre with no contents. As far as we know, we have never had a conversation with aliens from another planet. Yet, hypothetically, such a conversation could happen; descriptions of hypothetical conversations with “ET” occur in the news regularly. Carl Sagan’s (1997) Contact does

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this, depicting a hypothetical conversation with protagonist Ellie Arroway. In this case, the alien presents itself in her father’s image. More recently, Stephen Hawking suggested that he hopes that first conversation never happens. He sees aliens as potentially dangerous and suggests we sit back, quietly mind our own business, and don’t draw any attention to ourselves—try to avoid that first conversation because it might not be nice. My point is this: although we can hypothesize about a genre that might be called “first conversation with an alien,” the conversation exists only conceptually; no such genre physically exists yet (as far as we know). That said, the genre first conversation with an alien is simply an empty set. Empty sets are common in both the sciences and math. In biology, the genus brontosaurus is empty, now belonging to paleontology. In math, anytime two sets overlap, they create a new set (all overlapping numbers in set A and set B). If there are no overlapping numbers, the set is said to be “empty.” If the idea of collections that contain nothing is common among the disciplines, I can see no reason it cannot be similarly applied in genre theory. Why Does This Matter? If genres include only repeating patterns, many texts can be said to have no genre. If we are to evaluate texts based on their genres, all texts must have uniquely identifiable genres—even texts that do not yet exist. This makes it possible to discuss texts in terms of their best structures even if no structures exist. And this (and here is the important point) is particularly true in a digital environment, where many genres have not yet been invented. If we return to an active participation theory for describing a genre and reexamine the definition of proposal established by Anderson (1987), we can change his description to fit any situation, describing different genres. “In a [demonstration],” he might have said, “you [show someone how to do something by doing it in front of them].” “In a [progress report] you [explain to someone how you are doing on a project].” If you can describe what a text is trying to do, you are beginning to describe its genre. If you can do that, you can measure how well the text does what it is supposed to do. In short, to be able to effectively evaluate the quality of a text, it is necessary to be able to describe its genre. If there are texts with no genre, there is no good heuristic for evaluating them. If we discard the requirement that they be repeated, genres become easy to define and use for evaluating texts. IMPACT OF AN ACTIVE-ACTIVITY THEORY GENRE In the past, we tended to accept the genres identified by others. A critic somewhere coined “impressionist” derisively. Someone coined “hardboiled detective story.” I have even seen education identified as a genre. For the purposes of

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literary study (and perhaps education), this is fine, but it is a passive approach. I suggest an active approach. For writing and evaluating texts, it is useful for us to be able identify and describe the genres we are manipulating, even if no one else ever has and even if our description remains only in our own minds. The better we can describe these genres, the better we can identify what we need to do to make them the best they can be.

BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE Returning to the Army recruiter discussion, suppose I am well below my quota for the month. What might I do? Well, I might make a recruiting poster. We can immediately see that we have the makings of a genre. So perhaps I put Uncle Sam on a large poster that says, “We need you,” and put it outside the door of the recruiting office with no interest in whom my audience might be. Maybe it will attract someone and maybe not. Suppose I go in a different direction. Suppose I create a poster that will hang in the unemployment office and other places where the majority of people are either unemployed or underemployed. Recruiting poster is no longer sufficient for describing this more specialized poster. Recruiting poster designed to attract the unemployed and underemployed is much more accurate (and begins to describe both purpose and audience). On this poster, a picture of Uncle Sam might not be inappropriate, but it might be less effective than other images. The new poster should be designed for the more specific audience. Such a poster would be designed to offer hope for an exciting career for the unemployed. But the audience can be made even more specific. Suppose I am planning to place the poster in the unemployment center in early summer, when so many recent high school graduates will be flooding the market. Now the poster might represent a stepping stone for a future career with a few adventures along the way. The better you understand the purpose and specific audience, the more effectively you can evaluate the quality of the text. Although recruiting poster can be called a genre, it is clear that it can be broken into a virtually infinite collection of more focused genres. More accurately, recruiting poster should be called a “genre collective” or “family of genres,” or perhaps a “supergenre” (coined by one of my graduate students). The genres within the recruiting poster family are described, rather than named. The description introduces purpose and audience. One might say, “This poster is meant to point out to qualified college students that they can enter the Army as officers,” or, “This poster is meant to entice unemployed high school graduates to log into the Army Game on the Internet, where they can be further enticed into coming into the recruitment center for an interview.” Once you identify a genre by describing its purpose, it is a simple task to evaluate how effectively it succeeds at that purpose.

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COMPLICATING GENRE IDENTIFICATION It is a simple matter to identify a genre when it is lecture-based, or written from one person to another, but what if the author is not human? Moreover, what if the reader is also not human? Contemporary communication is becoming increasingly difficult to understand if we fail to adapt. In the end, the point of studying the genre is to make it into a tool we can use. It is fine if a genre theorist wishes to speculate about the nature of a genre, but we are practitioners, and we need tools more than we need speculation. Suppose your house sends condition reports to your computer, and your computer decides whether to pass the reports on to you or simply make the appropriate decisions itself. In increasingly complex information systems, that kind of thing goes on all the time. Messages are sent back and forth between computers, and orders are given with no human intervention. CBSNews.com gets much of its news from RSS feeds that are in their turn fed by XML databases. It also picks up news from blog feeds. It tracks its users, and if it knows their zip codes, it provides them with local information—news and weather. It receives its local weather from a continuous feed provided by Weather.com and its local news from whatever feed the local paper provides. In addition to configuring for a specific zip code, it configures differently for different browsers and devices—cell phones, iPads, laptops, PDAs, etc. We might assume any texts at CBSNews.com are professional if not excellent, but there is no reason to believe that. Since it gets so much of its text from external sources, if there is no one monitoring the incoming data, there is every chance that its quality can be inconsistent. The other news outlets demonstrate similar problems. The New York Times online component also accesses blog sites for its news. For example, one site it depends on, FiveThirtyEight.com, currently displays the following message: While Mr. Silver is on vacation, and the posting here is somewhat less frequent, we thought it would be a good time to invite fans of FiveThirtyEight.com to weigh in on their favorite posts from the past. (Cohen, 2010, n.p.)

The newspaper seems to be handling the problem of Silver’s absence well enough, but this points to the problem that external resources can be and often are independent and even undependable. At least for the news media, the content is largely similar. Other commercial providers might have a broad spectrum of genres. A company might have databases simultaneously providing content to proposals, annual reports, sales brochures, and content pages on websites for sales and servicing customers. This is a new and complicated problem for writers, but it presents new opportunities. Surprisingly few writers are able to do a good

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job evaluating content in these new environments. Those few who possess these new skills should someday be in great demand. CONCLUSIONS As communication becomes increasingly complicated, it becomes more important than ever for professional writers to understand what is going on with the texts. Because developers and users of websites persist in seeing them using “place” metaphors, it is important that we as writers do not. We need to be able to negotiate through different texts (designed for different purposes and different audiences) all combined into a kind of web-stew. The stew might look really great, but if its ingredients include straw and horse apples (that is to say, inappropriate content), it isn’t being all it can be. It is a good idea to examine the contents of the stew before publishing it. Publish a stew? That brings up another question that must be answered before we can effectively evaluate texts: “What does it mean to publish?” If a website is a place, it is difficult to see it as a publication. In the next chapter, we examine some different genres of digital publication. A game might be called a novel in the right circumstances, just as a poem might be called a “puzzle.” A computer might write a book, and its only reader might be another computer. We have an idea of what we mean when we use the word publish, but our definition is generally fairly narrow and not necessarily descriptive of the process in its larger context. REFERENCES Amazon.com. (2011). Black house [Marketing page]. Retrieved February 10, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/Black-House-Stephen-King/dp/034547063X/ Anderson, P. (1987). Technical writing: A reader centered approach. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Asimov, I. (1950). I, Robot. New York, NY: Doubleday. Big Fat Institute. (2007). You Suck at Photoshop. Retrieved February 10, 2011, from http://www.mydamnchannel.com/You_Suck_at_Photoshop/Season_1/YouSuckAt Photoshop1DistortWarpandLayerEffects_1373.aspx Briant, N. (Trans.). (2007). The high book of the grail: A translation from the thirteenth century romance of Perlesvaus. New York, NY: D. S. Brewer. Cohen, M. (2010, December 15). Any requests? [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/15/any-requests/ Dick, P. K. (1964). Do androids dream of electric sheep? New York, NY: Del Rey. Freedman, A. (1994). Anyone for tennis? In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 43-66). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. Gerson, S., & Gerson, S. (2000). Technical writing: Process and product. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kent, T. (1986). Interpretation and genre. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press.

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King, S. (2001). Black house. New York, NY: Random House. Malamud, B. (1952). The natural. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Miller, C. (1994a). Genre as social action. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 23-42). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. Miller, C. (1994b). Rhetorical community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric (pp. 67-78). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. Miller, F. (n.d.). Sin city collection. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse. National Public Radio. (2008, August 16). Guerrilla ad campaign pushes boundaries [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=93661794 Sagan, C. (1986). Contact. New York, NY: Pocket Books.

CHAPTER 4

What Does it Mean to Publish? In Chapter 1, I suggested again and again that websites are publications. Many web developers have difficulty accepting that proposition. Websites are made up of so many components and many of those components would never be seen in book, or flyer, or whatever else we might normally call a publication. The problem is that we tend to define things by describing them at their core and not on their fringes. It is true a book is a blocky thing with pages and words and chapters and things like that. But an audio book is also a book, as is a MOBI (Kindle) or ePub (NOOK) file. The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the ramifications of publishing. The chapter attempts to answer the question, “What does it mean to publish?” in a way that makes it clear websites are published documents.

SO, WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO PUBLISH? It is a simple task to define publication as long as we look only at the obvious. For example, hand a group of people a book or magazine or even a newsletter and ask them if these are publications, and you will probably receive a uniform “yes.” Now, hand them a letter, proposal, or report and ask the same question, and your answers will not be so uniform. How are publications different from non-publications? In an effort to define hard-core pornography, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart (1964) concluded he could not define it, but “I know it when I see it” (n.p.). As a rule, when we approach the definition of publication, we approach it in much the same manner, so we know it when we see it. But do we really? What things are we looking for when we try to define the term? For example, does the number of copies matter? One million copies of the latest, greatest novel (with an ISBN) would universally be called published. A person might say, “We published a million Ninja Turtle posters.” What about 100 million copies of Crackerjack boxes? Before being stuffed with candy, these boxes are not appreciably different from posters. 85

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There seems to be a place where everybody would agree they are looking at a publication and a place where they would agree they are not. Somewhere in between “publication” and “not publication” there is a no man’s land of doubt. We need to explore this land of doubt, because writers commonly suggest that websites are not publications. As long as a writer refuses to call websites publications, he will have difficulty seeing them as documents. From my point of view, the land of doubt is where we find the most interesting boundaries. In the end, I will suggest that many things that are “obviously not publications” really are publications and that websites count among them. PRINTED MATTER At its most simplistic, publishing means to print something and make it public, or distribute it, but what does “make public” mean? Or “distribute”? How many people does it take to become a public? Can a writer distribute to a single person? Stacks of posters are distributed, but although one-off posters can be said to be public, they can be called distributed only if we stretch the definition to include a distribution of one, yet physically they are no different from posters printed in mass. In an even narrower sense, a computer at Amazon.com accumulates information about a customer and e-mails a flyer uniquely designed for a single person—one marketing document sent to just one person. Of course, some might argue that if it is e-mailed it is not a flyer. Things Not Published? According to copyright law (I’ll discuss this later), if it is printed and made public, it is a publication. What about the printing on a wooden pencil stamped “VENUS”? There is a huge market in printing on pencils, pens, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and the like. I suspect we all have souvenir coffee mugs with all manner of images printed on them. Clearly, to publish does not require a paper product. One might argue that posting a billboard is a form of publishing. Does that not imply that the act of selecting and wearing a T-shirt to express an opinion is some kind of publishing? Apparently not. For purposes of copyright, the U.S. Copyright Office (2011) defines publication as follows: “Publication” is the distribution of copies or phonorecords of a work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending. The offering to distribute copies or phonorecords to a group of persons for purposes of further distribution, public performance, or public display constitutes publication. A public performance or display of a work does not of itself constitute publication. To perform or display a work “publicly” means— (1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its

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social acquaintances is gathered; or (2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.

In brief, according to the Feds, a publication is an object and it becomes published when it is created and made available for transfer of ownership (it might be leased or loaned, but it is still in the form where ownership can be transferred). A book easily falls within this definition, but so do the VENUS pencil, the Ninja Turtle poster, and the Crackerjack box. DVDs of the Nutcracker Suite would be publications, but the broadcast or performance of the suite would not. Interestingly, one-off posters and paintings seem to fall outside the definition while photographs fall inside the definition. Wearing a T-shirt is not a publication because it is a performance and no transfer occurs. There is an additional caveat: to be a publication, the transfer necessarily occurs to “a group of persons.” Some posters are designed only for viewing, while others are designed for owning. How can one be a publication but not the other? Based on the copyright law above, virtually anything that can be printed can be called a publication if it is also distributed and not simply hung up for display. Printing All that raises the question, “What does it mean to print?” Again, we are looking at a thing where its definition seems self-evident. But looking more closely, we will find it is another of those terms we cannot define, but think we know it when we see it. A cursory examination of definitions would lead you to believe that printing is about ink on paper, but many objects are screen-printed, and some are dye cut or embossed with no actual ink or paint at all. Vetting The idea of printing brings us to an idea about publishing that the copyright description does not address: vetting. Typically, publications receive special treatment. With even the crudest flyer, someone designs it and produces it for public consumption. In the traditional media, at the least, the text is conceived, designed, produced in rough form, polished, produced as a final product, and distributed. This applies whether the product is an artistic lithograph or a billboard. Perhaps one million copies are produced and distributed and perhaps only one, but in every case the product is vetted. A young boy who lost his dog might make a flyer for posting in the neighborhood; he might write the copy, paste a photo on the flyer, and photocopy twenty-five copies to hang on lampposts and telephone poles. His process might

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be crude and he might not realize he is doing it, but he conceives, designs, evaluates his design (vets it), produces it as a final product, prints it, and finally distributes it. My point is that printing is a step-by-step process (though not all of the steps are always there). First, original objects are created (usually images and texts). These are combined into intermediate objects (perhaps negatives, lithographic stone, offset plate, silkscreen), and the intermediate objects are used to produce final printed objects (book, coffee cup, serigraph). During these steps, there is at least some effort to maintain a level of quality, and there is the decision (even if unconscious) to proceed with the next step. With the advent of computers, some things have changed. It is now possible to manage the steps and objects interactively in programs so that the steps might not follow exactly the same pattern and only the final step involves a physical object. Images are managed in Photoshop and Illustrator. The finished product may be “pasted up” in InDesign, and it may be printed with an inkjet printer—often an edition of one copy. Nonetheless, publication is the object that results from these steps. Toward a Useful Description With that in mind, it might be possible to produce more appropriately inclusive and exclusive descriptions. I suggest that publish means to have a communication-related idea vetted based on its importance or marketability, authorized for production, designed, developed, evaluated once again based on its relevance and quality, produced, and distributed to an audience of one or more. If we go back to the example of the boy with the lost dog, he might have done a number of things already to find the dog. He might have toured the neighborhood on his bicycle, called all his friends and neighbors, shouted the dog’s name a number of times, and even toured the local animal shelter. These are all informal processes with an absence of organization or vetting. Now, he begins a more formal process. He decides he needs some posters so he can spread his message over a broader audience. He doesn’t think too carefully about purpose or audience, but he does imagine the audience as those people walking past street lamps and telephone poles, and he knows he wants them to be keeping an eye out for his dog. He thinks about what he wants to tell them. He wants them to see what the dog looks like. He wants them to know he will give a reward for the dog’s return. He wants them to know where to report if they see the dog. He figures out the important information. At this point he has vetted the idea and decided to do it, and he has begun the design and copywriting process. He searches through his computer looking for the best photos of his dog and writes his copy. He combines his copy into a Word document with a little poster-like formatting, and he prints out twenty-five copies. In an hour or so he has stapled copies to every telephone pole in his neighborhood, stuck copies under windshield wipers, and taped some to the light poles downtown. He has printed and published.

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IN A PROFESSIONAL ENVIRONMENT Look at an article in a journal or a novel in print in contrast to a dusty manuscript in the bottom of a drawer or a shopping list hung on the refrigerator, and you see works most of us would agree are published versus unpublished. Nobody would argue that a novel in print is not published (even a novel published in a vanity press), and, by definition, the manuscript and shopping list are unpublished. We need only process them through the filter of the above definition and it becomes clear why they are or are not publications. The article and novel are both vetted. Somebody considered them important enough to pay for, or go through, the process of producing and distributing them. This seems to apply to all publications, including pens and pencils, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and digital content. In contrast, it excludes obviously unpublished texts such as manuscripts and shopping lists because they are neither vetted nor distributed. It also excludes new cars, washing machines, and candy bars, because these are not forms of communication, though it would include those parts that do communicate— candy wrappers, automotive window stickers. Commercially Printed But Not Published? Some might argue that window stickers and candy wrappers are printed products but are not necessarily publications. This, as far as I can tell, is an opinion, and I can neither find nor imagine a definition that excludes them. Either of the two definitions above (mine and the Feds’) would include them. They are printed materials, vetted and distributed. They are communications destined to the public. The two definitions, I suggest, effectively cover the journal article, novel, manuscript, and shopping list. The manuscript and list are not publications because they are neither vetted nor distributed. But more importantly, nobody has ever actually made the decision to go through the publication process with these items. Intent to Publish In the end, I suggest that publication results from the intent to publish. This is not as circular as it might seem. What it really says is to determine whether a document is a publication, look at the producer’s exigencies, the document’s purpose, and how it was produced. Exigency and purpose combined will include the intent to publish if there is such intent, and the process will contain some or all of the publication steps. These ideas are implied by any genre theory based on activity rather than structure. If you fully describe the genre of a document, part of that description will include an intent to publish or not publish, and if there is an intent to publish, it will describe the appropriate process.

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Why is the Text Needed? Possible efforts to identify and point to that line between publication and non-publication might include a discussion of the exigency behind the text (why is the text needed?), purpose of the text (what is it supposed to do?), physical nature, production process, number of copies, and audiences. The line may not be visible, but I suggest that it is possible to create a probability that a thing is published as opposed to unpublished based on the intent of the author and the nature of the process. In short, describing its genre identifies whether it is published or not published. Variety Within Publications Within the contexts of some of the simple definitions I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, some can suggest brochures are publications, while letters, memos, and e-mails may not be. Others might suggest proposals are publications under specialized circumstances (if they are distributed) but not otherwise. For example, if the document has commercial intent, one might say it is a publication. On the other hand, if we compare flyers produced by an 11-year-old looking for a lost dog (posted on 125 telephone poles) to a similar number of flyers produced by the local rodeo commission (also posted on 125 telephone poles), I can see no particular difference—yet the youth’s purpose is not commercial. The same applies to the local political candidate. So, at the least, the purpose of a publication can be personal, commercial, and, of course, political.

DIGITAL PUBLICATIONS What about digital publications? When is a digital document a publication? When we visit Amazon.com, are we seeing a publication? What about when Amazon sends us a digital flyer in our e-mail? The brochures or flyers they, and many other marketers send us, are often unique to us. If the flyer we receive is a publication, what about a carefully crafted letter proposing a project or conference presentation and sent via e-mail? For my description of publication to be effective, it should cover digital media as effectively as traditional documents. The Army recruiting website has a page that shows law students how they can improve their lives after school by joining the Army: Established in 1775 by George Washington, the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps is the oldest law firm in the nation. As a JAG Corps Attorney, you’ll gain firsthand experience in the law—the kind your classmates only dream about. (U.S. Army, 2011, n.p.)

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This is a navigation page with little text, a number of small photos, and scores of links. The reference to “classmates” makes it clear the audience is graduating or recently graduated law students. If we look at exigency, purpose, and process, it becomes clear this page could not have been produced as a traditional text, although it might bear a reasonable resemblance to the table of contents of some kind of recruiting booklet. Still, with a few caveats, the process for its production is identical to traditional publication processes. If we look at the code, we discover how it was produced and what it really is. It is a simple page made to look three-dimensional. In the past, large and complex sites were arranged in tables. The developer would often have a table with a single cell that acted as a wrapper for the content on the site and established its parameters. Inside that table would be collections of other tables containing the various navigation tools, sections of content, ads, and whatever else was needed on the page. It was all put together in a matrix. The many components of the matrix describe how the page should look and what it should contain. With the more recent mixed reviews for tables and the growth of cascading style sheets and divisions (DIV), exactly the same thing happens, except a DIV wrapper contains the document and additional DIV containers within the document that contain components. The Army site mentioned above contains the following command for a wrapper: (U.S. Army, 2011, source code).

This defines the wrapper (frame replacement) that begins and ends the site’s content. Inside this wrapper are collections of other, nested wrappers. For example,

defines the left navigation and content area while

defines the menu to the right. These are both contained within the wrapper. Nested within each of these two subsections are all the other smaller sections. Each component on the page is contained by its own set of DIVs. The Publication Process A decision was made to produce this site; it was designed, copy was written, and images were selected; it was assembled by software designed to prepare it for publication, but it was disseminated via the Internet, and it was probably produced using a construction or assembly metaphor. Somewhere between exigency

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and publication, the metaphor often changes, and publication becomes construction. The page is designed in two contexts. First, it is designed as a page, but it is also designed as a part of an architectural structure—not unlike a hall with a number of doors. Games? Returning to my Army recruiter scenario from Chapter 3, suppose that to enhance my recruiting I create a game (actually, the Army has already done that), and I place it on my website. Is it a publication? If we examine the process of creating a game, we will see that the process for producing it is identical to the process for publishing—so similar, in fact, that while new websites are called “sites,” new games are called “published.” CONCLUSION By any definition, websites are publications. They go through all the processes other publications do, but they are not usually printed. Still, they are posted, made available to a public, and if you evaluate the code, it becomes clear that they are flat texts with added attributes that make them interactive and make them look dimensional. They are a sort of pop-up book designed not to look like a book at all. Still, it is easy to argue they result from an intent to publish a communication, they go through a process of design, vetting, redesign, and at some point someone decides to make them available to the public. REFERENCES Stewart, J. (1964). Jacobellis v. Ohio, appeal from the Supreme Court of Ohio (concurring opinion, U.S. Supreme Court ruling). Retrieved February 17, 2011, from http://www. law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0378_0184_ZC1.html U.S. Army. (2011). Army JAG Corps. Retrieved February 17, 2011, from http://www. goarmy.com/jag.html U.S. Copyright Office. (2011). Copyright definitions. Retrieved May 11, 2011, from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html

CHAPTER 5

Theory Behind Usability Studies

Usability theorists describe how websites should be constructed. They base their descriptions on assumptions that may or may not be true. Usability theory, however, is neither new, nor about digital content. Usability is applied to all products, including websites. It is applied to spoons, doors, and supersonic aircraft—pretty much anything. User-centric design evolves out of usability theory. It has become the prescription for how websites should be done, but more important, it describes how we should write in websites. By the end of this chapter, I hope to demonstrate that these prescriptions are not based in logic, but evolved over time to become something new—from evaluating doors and airplanes to evaluating communication. These prescriptions on communication sprang into existence in about 1993 when programmers switched from describing effective programming to describing effective writing. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why that was never a good idea.

USER-CENTRIC OBJECTS According to Donald Norman (2002), in The Design of Everyday Things, even something as simple as a door can be designed so that it is difficult to use. In one case, he described a friend who became trapped between a set of doors, unable to figure out how they worked. Only after a group of people went through the outer and inner doors did he manage to follow them into the building. The doors were designed so that it was impossible to tell where their hinges were and just as impossible to determine which way they swung or even which edge swung. Users of poorly designed doors have as little as a one-in-four chance of pushing or pulling the right way the first time. It is a simple task, however, and to make the door accessible requires nothing more than a well-placed label or a handle designed to indicate whether to push or pull. 93

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UNUSABLE STRUCTURES IN BOOKS Books are also products, and like all products, they can be poorly designed and difficult to use. Books are more complicated than doors, and it can be very easy to make a book unusable—you need only have an inaccurate or incomplete index or a structure that makes no sense. Unlike the door, the way to use the book physically is self-evident, but in terms of conceptual structure, books can be very complicated. For example, I spent three days over Christmas trying to figure out the conceptual structure of a book I received as a present. Initially, the overall structure of 1001 WINES You Must Taste Before You Die (Beckett, 2008) is simple enough. The book is divided into four sections: sparkling wines, white wines, red wines, and fortified wines. After that, however, the structure becomes opaque. Since the book begins by breaking wines into categories, I would expect that same model throughout the book. I might expect a section on Bordeaux, perhaps followed by Burgundies, Cabernets, and so forth—a book divided by wine types perhaps in alphabetical order. A quick examination, however, shows Cabernets followed by Pinot Noirs, which are followed by more Cabernets. If the book is not further subdivided by wine type, I might then expect it to be divided by region, but no, it becomes immediately apparent the Bordeaux are scattered throughout the book. My next guess might be that the book is alphabetized. But Dry River Pinot Noir precedes Chateau Ducru-Beaucaillou and follows Chateau Cos d’Estournel. It turns out that the wines are arranged alphabetically, but based on an almost impenetrable system—at least for a person like me, who is not a wine connoisseur. The book is organized alphabetically by the vineyard’s name (but with amazing twists). If the name begins with something like Chateau or Vineyard or Vina or Domaine, that is ignored in the alphabetizing. If the name begins with Hacienda, which means the same thing as Chateau and Domaine, Hacienda is alphabetized. Moreover, if Chateau or Vineyard or Domaine is followed by a first name, that first name is seldom but sometimes listed alphabetically. For example, if the first name follows des, it is alphabetized in the system. With Le Riche, Le is the word alphabetized. With Domaine Hubert de Montille, Montille is alphabetized, while in the case of Lopez de Heredia, Lopez is used. Finally, with Chateau Cos d’Estournel, Cos is used. This organizational system probably makes sense to wine connoisseurs as well as the authors and editors, but although I understand the process in principle, I can almost never find anything without false starts. I find the system almost impossible to use. I suggest, however, that I, who am not a connoisseur, am the audience. The book is a sort of how-to guide for buying really great wines, something I suspect wine connoisseurs are perfectly capable of doing for themselves. After days of parsing the book, I still only approximately understand its structure.

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USABILITY STUDY OF A BOOK To this point, I haven’t introduced how someone might use this book; I have only discussed how they might read it. One immediate usability problem is that the name of the wine in the book does not always match the name of the wine on the label. For example, one wine is listed in the book simply as the COS, but actually the label says Azienda Agricola COS. If I were to see the wine in a store and looked at the wine’s label, I would never know it was the wine they describe in this book. I am at a loss for how someone might actually use the book to find a wine. The book is two inches thick, and walking around a store, book in hand, comparing wines on the rack to wines in the book seems undoable. Perhaps someone might make a list of a few of the wines named in the book and prowl the wine shops with the off chance they will find a match, or perhaps they could use the book’s indexes. But the book has three indexes: an index by region (in the front), a list of producers that doesn’t include the wine names, and an index that separates the wines based on price (identified with “$”–“$$$$” for a range of inexpensive to very expensive wines). Someone spending a great deal of time decoding the book’s structure might make it useful, but I have my reservations. The book makes an excellent example of a book that needed a good usability study. UNUSABLE TEXTS IN BOOKS Poorly written or inappropriate texts can also make a book unusable: glib but unuseful subheads, for example. Awkward writing or mechanical problems can make even the best ideas inaccessible, because the reader finds it impossible to get past the mechanical problems. In an Amazon.com review of Communication of Complex Information, the reviewer, identified as J. Whitmer (2005), said, Although the author seems to have some good ideas, I have trouble taking the book seriously because of all the errors in writing. Didn’t this guy have an editor? There are many examples, but here’s just one, “Thus far in this chapter, it may should like I’m very negative. . . . My negative feels are not against software . . .” (n.p.)

I think Communication of Complex Information is an excellent book presenting a whole new approach to evaluating and communicating information in complex information systems, but I agree that it is sometimes hard to read past the editing problems. Line: Tying it Up, Tying it Down (Atkins, 2004) serves as a different but still excellent example of content problems making a book unusable. This is a book of knots. On page 14, it shows how to do the double-half hitch. In the first illustration, it shows the tag-end going over the line from front to back and

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coming back through the loop from back to front, but in the next illustration and finished knot, the relationship is exactly the opposite. To complete the knot, the line goes from back to front over the line and through the loop in the opposite direction. The example of the bowline on page 22 does exactly the same thing. If you carefully follow the instructions illustrated, you cannot tie the knots. In short, usability studies do not just apply to websites, they apply to all products we might need to use, and in that respect, usability studies are about using these products. Some of these products are traditional books. If the structure of the book or its information is unusable, the book becomes as unuseful as any bad website. A HISTORY OF USABILITY The idea of evaluating the usability of a product is not new. In WWII we learned the hard way to evaluate war supplies used in combat. Prior to the war, and during the first year or so, the usability of few things was tested. This is not to say the objects were untested; instead, I suggest the objects’ usability was seldom tested. Early failures in usability during the war included the Mark 13, 14, and 15 torpedoes. Although they were tested and passed, they had serious problems in the field; they were unusable. A 1988 report by the Naval Underwater Systems Center (NUSC, 1997) pointed out that the torpedoes ran too deep, the magnetic warheads were too sensitive, and the mechanical warheads typically failed to trigger. The reason torpedoes were sent into combat with so many critical flaws was the failure to complete usability studies, caused by reluctance on the part of the stakeholders (Congress) to pay for them. According to NUSC, the $30,000 to $40,000 annual research budget was inadequate for both developing and testing the torpedoes: Available funding data indicate that from conception (1930) to initial Fleet evaluations (mid-1930s) the three new torpedoes were developed with a total R&D expenditure of approximately $200,000. . . . [B]ut as experienced in World War II was to demonstrate, it was false economy to eliminate Fleet Warshot testing in peacetime and wait until war actually started to find out that the Warshot torpedoes had serious problems. (p. 17)

Later on the same page, they described one of the tests actually done: For example, the new “secret” influence exploder was accepted for service use based on one successful test against a hulk under controlled conditions in spite of the fact that the exploder was known to be sensitive to various magnetic fields at different geographic locations. (p. 17)

So although the military knew the torpedo worked in a static-test situation, nobody knew whether it could be used in combat. Only after word of failure after

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failure in the field did the Navy take the time and spend the money to test the torpedoes. Until then, they simply passed the failures off as poor aiming by the unfortunate submariners. For months, submarines would expose themselves long enough to fire a spread of torpedoes only to find the torpedoes were all duds. Those who escaped and reported the problem were told they had missed their target. The result was, These problems generated much ill will, and a massive technical effort was needed during the first two years of the war to identify and correct the problems that had not come to light until the torpedoes were used in combat. (p. 19)

The report did not mention the score or more of submarines (with defective weapons) lost in the first two years of the war. Earliest Usability Study According to John Wilkinson-Latham (1971), in British Cut and Thrust Weapons, British swords became so weak at one point that “the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph both reported the incident of a lieutenant of the Hussars whose sword had bent double against the mail-clad body of a dervish” (p. 23). According to Wilkinson-Latham, British cavalry were taking weapons from their enemies to replace their defective ones. This precipitated a new War Office committee that examined the problem, developed a test sword, and “user trials continued throughout the following year and from these it was evident that, although this was a great improvement, there were still faults in the design” (p. 25). Based on those usability studies, a new sword was developed that was at the same time comfortable and strong and sharp for both cutting and thrusting. I make no claim that this is the first formal usability study on record, but this is the earliest I have found. I recognize that many products were tested earlier (e.g., even President Lincoln tested the Spencer rifle), but as far as I know, nobody ever tested these weapons’ usability. In short, usability is not about websites; it is about products. Most any product demands usability studies as some level. Unfortunately, usability has become the principal approach to evaluating most components of websites. The question becomes, how is it that usability evolved from being a tool for evaluating torpedoes and swords to the principal tool for evaluating communication? USABILITY THEORY AND DIGITAL MEDIA Although the first mention of studying human-computer interaction occurred in 1959, with Brian Shackel’s “Ergonomics for a Computer,” careful discussion of human-computer interaction appears to have begun with J. C. R. Licklider’s

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(1960) “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” In this article, Licklinder proposed a discipline for studying interaction between humans and computers that he called “man-computer symbiosis.” He said, “It seems likely that the contributions of human operators and equipment will blend together so completely in many operations that it will be difficult to separate them neatly in analysis” (p. 4). He spent the rest of the article discussing the things that must be in place for effective man-computer symbiosis—creating what is in effect the first study in the field of study that was later called Human Computer Interaction (HCI), or less often Human Computer Interface. HCI became a broad field, with researchers ranging from psychology to visual design to electrical engineering. On the website of the Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI, 2011), they briefly describe and justify their history and focus on computers: Human factors, as a discipline, derives from the problems of designing equipment operable by humans during World War II (Sanders & McCormick, 1987). Many problems faced by those working on human factors had strong sensory-motor features (e.g., the design of flight displays and controls). The problem of the human operation of computers was a natural extension of classical human factors concerns, except that the new problems had substantial cognitive, communication, and interaction aspects not previously developed in human factors, forcing a growth of human factors in these directions. (p. 8)

The scope of HCI is particularly broad, including communications theorists, engineers (computer, electrical, mechanical, and manufacturing), communications professionals (information technologists, designers, writers, and editors), cognition theorists, and more. Naturally, among the researchers are the practitioners that apply a trial-and-error approach. As Diaper and Sanger (2006) said, Those of Diaper’s ilk . . . think long and hard about the discipline, its underlying theories, and even philosophy, and then give conference papers, publish articles and books, and so forth. Against them are ranged those, almost certainly the majority, who get on and do it. The result is that, in practice, the discipline of HCI has evolved in an ad hoc manner, driven by problems that had to be solved, by people who try to repeat what they think worked previously without worrying over much about why it worked or whether it could have worked better. (p. 118)

In this paragraph, Diaper and Sanger described how a practitioner might examine HCI, but they also described how usability theory came to be—an ad hoc process evolving out of immediate solutions to practical problems with little interest in why the solutions work or even whether they are the best solutions. They introduced a plaintive discussion of usability on the next page:

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As an example of how the development of general theories in HCI have been ignored, take the term “usability” which since the 1990s has become almost synonymous with all of the disciplines of HCI’s activities. The IwC Journal suggests five goals for HCI, “develop or improve the safety, utility, effectiveness, efficiency and usability of systems that include computers.” . . . Usability was the least of these five, yet has since been promoted to cover nearly everything. . . . [T]he study of HCI became the study of usability. (p. 119)

And so even before there was a WWW, “usability” was born as a practice with little theoretical history or foundation. Usability Sits Alone Although usability evolved from HCI, it embraces few of the discipline’s research interests. In The Review and Analysis of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Principles, Hinze-Hoare (2007) presented an excellent overview of HCI goals and principles. He began with the five important goals mentioned by Diaper and Sanger (p. 1): • Safety • Utility • Effectiveness • Efficiency • Usability He then went on to propose that these apply to five areas of research: education, psychology, ergonomics, efficiency, and collaboration. Of all these areas, usability studies seem to apply only to efficiency. That is not to say that these different research communities will not study usability issues, but that the usability gurus (in their literature) tend to discuss only usability and then only in interface design. Usability Engineering What is now called “usability study” was initially presented as “usability engineering.” Among the first practitioners to use that name was Jakob Nielsen (1994) with his book Usability Engineering. In this book, he suggested that although the text is directed toward computer usability, his suggestions can be applied to anything, even a “railroad car” (p. 1), but when he begins discussing usability engineering, he focuses entirely on interface design. In Usability Engineering, he proposed nine rules: • Simple and natural dialogue: Dialogues should not contain information that is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in a dialogue competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility. All information should appear in a natural and logical order.

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• Speak the users’ language: The dialogue should be expressed clearly in words, phrases, and concepts familiar to the user, rather than in systemoriented terms. • Minimize the users’ memory load: The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate. • Consistency: Users should not have to wonder whether different words, situations, or actions mean the same thing. • Feedback: The system should always keep users informed about what is going on, through appropriate feedback within reasonable time. • Clearly marked exits: Users often choose system functions by mistake and will need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted state without having to go through an extended dialogue. • Shortcuts: Accelerators—unseen by the novice user—may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. • Good error messages: They should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution. • Help and documentation: Even though it is better if the system can be used without documentation, it may be necessary to provide help and documentation. Any such information should be easy to search, be focused on the user’s task, list concrete steps to be carried out, and not be too large. (p. 20) He went on to say, “These usability principles should be followed by all user interface designers. This specific list was developed by the author and Rolf Molich . . . but it is similar to other usability guidelines” (p. 20)—in transforming usability from research in universal product usability or human-computer interaction into the study of usable interface design. On the other hand, as Nielsen (1994) defined usability, he defined usability as applicable to any system. He explained, Usability has multiple components and is traditionally associated with these five usability attributes: • Learnability: The system should be easy to learn so that the user can rapidly start getting some work done with the system. • Memorability: The system should be easy to remember, so that the casual user is able to return to the system after some period of not having used it, without having to learn everything all over again. • Errors: The system should have a low error rate, so that users make few errors during the use of the system, and so that if they do make errors they can easily recover from them. Further, catastrophic errors must never occur. • Satisfaction: The system should be pleasant to use, so that users are subjectively satisfied when using it; they like it. (p. 26)

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He continued, “Only by defining the abstract of ‘usability’ in terms of these more precise and measurable components can we arrive at an engineering discipline [emphasis added] where usability is not just argued about but is systematically approached, improved and evaluated (possibly measured)” (p. 26). I think that at this point, Nielsen’s vision for the future of usability becomes clear. He sees it as a new and rigorous discipline, a branch of engineering. I suggest that this book marks the beginning of usability as a unique discipline. Nielsen’s discussion is a little confused in the sense that he writes about both interface design and analysis of systems beyond the interface, and his rules listed above only approximately align with his components of usability, which are also presented as rules (called “heuristics” and “components”). The reason they seem to not align is because the components of usability are applicable to systems in general, while the heuristics of usability apply to human-computer interaction. Learnability, for example, can apply to anything, while “speak the user’s language” applies only to humancomputer usability. At this point, Nielsen was not directing usability engineering at the WWW. His book was published in 1993, which means he almost certainly began writing it in 1992. The WWW at the time of publication of this book was only accessible using an obscure UNIX browser, called “Erwise.” Mosaic, the first Netscape prototype, was not released until late 1993, and the fully developed browser was not released until 1994. At this point, it is worth pointing out that usability had nothing whatsoever to do with communicating. It was about making computers and programs more accessible to users. Still, although the book was not designed for use evaluating websites, it poised Nielsen to address design and development of websites with few changes in his heuristics—that is to say, design and development with little interest in communication. Dumas and Redish Also published in 1993 (revised in 1999) was A Practical Guide to Usability Testing, by Joseph Dumas and Janice Redish. Just as Nielsen’s book predates the WWW, so does theirs. And they similarly described user experience in terms of products. In this book, they defined usability as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Usability means focusing on users. People use products to be productive. Users are busy people trying to accomplish tasks. Users decide when a product is easy to use.

In A Practical Guide, the authors focused on software and physical objects (e.g., new telephone). The application of their information to web design is

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limited to the fact that websites occur on computers, and neither of them discuss writing quality at all. Origins of User-Centered Design John Gould and Clayton Lewis (1985) published “Designing for Usability,” suggesting there were three important things designers should do when producing any system: (a) focus early on the users, (b) measure empirically, and (c) design iteratively. While Gould and Lewis never actually mentioned “user-centered design,” as you will see, subsequent theorists almost always use variations of these three principles as the core of their discussions. Gould and Lewis’s argument is quite simple: the paper advances and defends these three points while discrediting (or attempting to discredit) competing approaches. Three things are worth pointing out about the timeline of this article: (a) it is entirely about programming, (b) programming of the time was completely different from object-oriented programming of today, and so (c) the programming processes were completely different as well. Programs of the time were largely written line by line in Fortran or Pascal or similar structural or procedural programming languages. The process for programming in these languages involved carefully predetermining what was needed and developing a completed program based on those determinations. The preparation and documentation process could easily take longer than the programming process (including any debugging), and once the programming was done, it was compiled into a finished product. The three principles of usability proposed by Gould and Lewis ran completely counter to the programming processes of the time, which made it difficult for them to get their principles taken seriously. On the other hand, once object-oriented programming and the WWW were common, their principles folded perfectly into the new programming environment. For about ten years, not much was said about Gould and Lewis’s research, but by about 1997, their three principles became so common that writers who list them now do not even bother with attributing their paper. Carol Barnum (2002) implied Gould and Lewis’s achievement with, “Finally, the trumpet call put forth by Gould and Lewis, starting in the 1970’s, has been heard, and their three critical principles of design have become the watchword for user-centered design” (p. 7). In contrast, in 2008, Rubin and Chisnell said, “We want to emphasize these basic principles of user-centered design: early focus on users and their tasks, evaluation and measurement of product usage, and iterated design” (p. 13). Rubin and Chisnell wrote as if they were discovering one of the original truths of usability. Evolving Usability Theories In 1996-97, Jared Spool and a group of researchers examined nine websites in a series of fifty studies (Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, Snyder, & DeAngelo, 1997, 1999). Their self-published report, Website Usability: A Designer’s Guide,

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is, as near as I can determine, the first full-length book on usability to follow Usability Engineering. Their results are “controversial” (their language, not mine) to say the least, but in their defense, they were looking at websites and users when both were brand new to the Internet. In this respect, they were measuring behavior and conditions that were unlikely to remain unchanged. This was a time when users used modems (often as slow as 300 bps and seldom higher than 28.8 kbs) and had access to exceptionally limited content. The Internet was originally developed for information exchange, and with few exceptions the WWW did the same thing. While Nielsen began by listing his heuristics in his executive summary, Spool’s team spread theirs throughout their book as section and chapter titles. They were as follows: • Graphic design neither helps nor hurts. • Text links are vital. • Navigation and content are inseparable. • Informational retrieval is different from surfing. • Websites are different from software (Spool et al., 1997). The conditions at the time of their research presented unique problems, and some of their premises now seem to be problematic. For example, with “graphic design neither helps nor hurts,” they suggested that graphic design neither helps nor hurts navigation. On the other hand, they were surprised to discover that graphic design does impact user preference or attitude. But they ignored that discovery and its implications because they were looking at users being able to mine information and not how people might feel about the site. The most usable website by their description will work exactly like a help file or a good product warehouse. The site people liked the best (Disney) was the site they judged the worst. But as I have pointed out and will again later, the Disney site is designed for entertainment, not data mining. It did not fit within the paradigm they subscribed to. Spool et al.’s argument that “text links are vital” is not so controversial as it is out of date. Their justification was that text links load faster. “The text link is the way users prefer to navigate the site” (Spool et al., 1997, p. 8). Currently, with contemporary throughput, a well-designed button bar is more (and not less) efficient than lists. In one discussion, Spool et al. (1997) suggested “navigation and content are inseparable” (p. 8). What they meant was that some companies at the time were developing websites where the content could simply be plugged into a page already preconfigured (a shell). Their conclusion was, “Based on our observations of Inc. and other shell sites, we have no evidence to suggest that the shell strategy can succeed” (p. 18). That would imply that active server pages, DITA, XML-based news feeds, RSS, and all the rest will ultimately fail. This applies to sites such as Amazon.com, CBSNews.com, and NASA.gov.

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A final, and exceptionally controversial, claim Spool et al. (1997) made was, • The less readable a site was, the more the users were successful with the site. • The less readable the site was, the more the users found the site: - authoritative, - clear, - complete, - satisfying, and - useful. • The less readable a site was, the less likely users found the site: - overwhelming and - over-detailed. (pp. 68-69) Using the Fog, Flesch, and Flesch-Kincaid scales, they determined that a Hewlett Packard (HP) site was less readable than the Disney site but was more easily navigated and so was the better site. The problem with their analysis is that the more complicated words they tested on the HP site (scoring lower on the readability scale) mostly made up a list. • Printing & imaging • Personal Computing • Tests & Measurement • Etc. . . . (p. 70) In contrast, they evaluated text on the Disney site that reflected images, “STAR WATCH: Click your favorite star above to see all of the stars” (p. 70), or disclaimers, “PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR LEGAL RESTRICTIONS AND TERMS OF USE APPLICABLE TO THIS SITE. USE OF THIS SITE SIGNIFIES YOUR AGREEMENT TO THE TERMS OF USE” (p. 70). I suggest the content is not comparable. User Preference for the Disney Site One important discovery Spool et al. (1997) made was that although some of the users managed to get lost on the Disney site, they still preferred it to the more usable sites because they preferred the content. Although Spool et al. found that graphics had no apparent impact on navigation, they discovered it did impact user preference. At the time of their book, based on their conclusions, I studied the Disney site. Spool et al. were measuring based on how quickly users could access information and answer questions in a kind of “scavenger hunt” (their words), but from the beginning, the Disney site has been designed as a place to linger and be entertained. While it is true that you can book a cruise or a trip to one of their hotels, the bulk of the site is designed as a place to play. Until the past

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few months, on some pages, children could print out coloring book pages. In another area, they could play games and print out certificates of accomplishment. In even another area, children could print out posters of all their favorite Disney characters. It should come as no surprise that these sections were sponsored by HP and Canon, large manufacturers of ink cartridges. On such a site, the longer the children linger, the better. Jumping into the site, finding a bit of information, and jumping back out was never the site’s purpose. This implies there have always been other paradigms on the WWW, paradigms Spool et al. (and other usability theorists) have discounted or ignored. It may be a bit of an irony that this is the first time usability gurus publicly examined a quality-centric text and failed to see how different it was from the others they compared it to. But it shows that designers have been creating quality-centric texts from the beginning of the www. Tom Peters (1992), the famous business consultant, argued that, “Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.” The thing most important about Spool et al.’s research is not that some of their predictions may have been inaccurate but that they were pioneers in the field, among the first to look at usability problems with the Internet, and so many of their conclusions were based on a WWW that no longer exists. Next Important Book—Designing Web Usability In 2000, Nielsen published Designing Web Usability, where he discussed in great detail the value of carefully managing content (including graphics) for effective usability. He set the tone of his book in a section called “Art Versus Engineering” by saying, While I acknowledge that there is a need for art, fun, and a general good time on the web, I believe that the main goal of most web projects should be to make it easy for customers to perform useful tasks. (p. 11)

In a section titled “Why Everybody Designs Websites Incorrectly,” he described six important errors that people make. It is possible to turn the “don’ts” on their heads and create a list of things developers should do. 1. Treat the web as a fundamental shift that will change the way we conduct business in the network economy and not as a traditional brochure. 2. Manage the website as a single customer-interface project. 3. Structure the site to mirror users’ needs. 4. Design for optimal user experience, even if that means the site is less “cool.” 5. Force yourself to write in the new style that is optimized for online readers who frequently scan text and who need very short pages with secondary information relegated to supporting pages. 6. Remember that hypertext is the foundation of the web and that no site is an island.

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With his first prescription, he seemed to assume that websites are not documents and claims that one cannot simply move a printed document online. The second part is probably true. He suggested that the WWW is something new and has an important role for the economy. He asserted that designing for the web is not the same thing as designing for print and should be done differently. By designing differently Nielsen (2000) suggested that efficient navigation trumps quality of visual design, and in Section 5 he proposed a new structure for written texts (all genres being written the same way). In discussing writing for the web, he suggested, • Be succinct. Write no more than 50 percent of the text you would have used to cover the same material in a print publication. • Write for scannability. Don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text; instead, use short paragraphs, subheads, and bulleted lists. • Use Hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages. (p. 101) Under a section titled “Copy Editing,” he suggested, “At a minimum, all webpages should be run through a spelling checker. Misspelled words are an embarrassment and may slow down users or be confusing [emphasis added]” (p. 103). Even in describing the editing process, Nielsen demonstrated a concern with speed of navigation and little concern for quality of writing. Later in the section, he suggested using a copy editor, because “most important, copy editors have a knack for tightening up writing” (p. 104), and “for the web, the copy editor’s hunting instinct should be unleashed, and he or she should be even more ruthless than normal in tracking down and eliminating extraneous words” (p. 104). In a section called “Plain Language,” Nielsen suggested using an inverted pyramid and “one idea per paragraph” (p. 104), with the idea presented at the beginning of the paragraph. Nielsen’s (2000) description of good design and effective writing is all about speed of loading and reading. As concerns the writing, he summed up his opinion with: Well-crafted writing and beautiful pictures are certainly appreciated, but they are no longer the defining characteristic of quality. Instead the main questions asked by the user when judging content include, “What’s in it for me?” and “How does this help me solve my problem?” (p. 160)

“Because web users are so goal-driven and so impatient,” he concluded, “content needs to be much more oriented toward providing fast answers and being useful to the user” (p. 160). In these prescriptions, Nielsen described users on the Internet of 1996. Today, there is probably more persuasion-centric and qualitycentric writing on YouTube alone than there has ever been user-centric writing,

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and today’s readers are demonstrating a willingness to read long texts if they are important enough and well enough written. Carol Barnum—Usability Testing and Research With Usability Testing and Research, Carol Barnum (2002) described different methods for testing the usability of products, and while Nielsen’s book was directed exclusively to designing websites, Barnum returned to the idea that usability applies to all products. Interestingly, Barnum defined usability not by what it is, but by what it is not. According to her, usability is not “quality assurance,” “zero defects,” “utility of design features,” or “intrinsic in products” (p. 6). To define it, she used definitions proposed by three sources: • “The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals in a specified context of use with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction” (International Organization for Standardization). • “The measure of the quality of the user experience when interacting with something—whether a website, a traditional software application, or any other device the user can operate in some way or the other” (Nielsen, “What is ‘Usability’?”). • “Usability means that the people who use the product can do so quickly and easily to accomplish their own tasks.” (p. 6) Barnum also quoted Nielsen’s five components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfaction (I have these listed in the Usability Engineering discussion above). Importantly, she went on to define “user-centered design” and spent a great deal of her book explaining how it is done. She described it as follows: 1. Early focus on users and tasks that involves understanding the users, the tasks that users perform, and the environment in which users perform these tasks. 2. Empirical measurement of product usage that involves users providing information about ease of learning, ease of use, and related usability issues. 3. Iterative design that fixes the problems found by users in usability testing as a part of the product development lifecycle. (p. 7) That, in a nutshell, brings us to the contemporary philosophy of usability: identify users early, test users often, and build the product based on feedback from usability tests. This introduces an additional topic presented by Barnum: the distinction between summative and formative evaluation. You can use usability, according to her, to confirm a good design or develop one, or both. She suggested using summative and formative studies in combination for doing both.

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Barnum was not the first to use the term user-centered design, but her book is perhaps one of the three most important in the field—it is certainly my favorite. What she did was popularize the term, and after her book, some variation of user-centered design has appeared in almost all subsequent literature. Mike Kuniavsky (2003) dedicated a chapter to “user-centered development.” In Institutionalization of Usability, Eric Schaffer (2004) used “user-centered design,” “user-centered development,” and “user-centered methodology.” Now, usability guide books commonly have titles beginning with “User-Centered . . . .” In fact, the title of this book (ReaderCentric Writing) is an ironic response to the whole field of user-centered design. Janice Redish—Letting Go of the Words Janice Redish (2007) published Letting Go of the Words and carried Nielsen’s prescriptions about writing for the Internet to their natural conclusions. Redish, coauthor of the 1993 Practical Guide to Usability, explained how to write effectively for the web. She began her book by pointing out what she did on the web the previous day. Among other things, she “downloaded a file,” “ordered a book,” “read a few of my favorite blogs,” and “compared prices on a new camera” (p. 1). She followed up with the question for readers, “Were you just browsing around without a goal or were you looking for something specific?” (p. 1). She continued with, “People come to web sites for the content that they think (or hope) is there,” and she suggested that content: • answers a question or helps them complete a task • is easy to find and easy to understand • is accurate, up to date, and credible. (p. 2) “Most people,” she said, “skim and scan a lot on the web. They hurry through all the navigation, wanting to get to the page that has what they came for” (p. 2). She explained, They don’t read more because . . . • They are too busy. • What they find is not relevant to what they need. • They are trying to answer a question. They want to get right to the answer and read only what they need to answer the question. • They are trying to do a task. They want to read only what is necessary to do the task. • They are bombarded with information and sinking under information overload. • As Nielsen and Loranger (2006, p. 22) say, “If people carefully studied everything they came across online, they would never get to log off and have a life.” (p. 6)

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According to Redish, her goal in the book is to help you provide your site visitors with high-quality content that is easy to find and easy to understand. Letting Go of the Words is about planning, selecting, organizing, writing, illustrating, reviewing, and testing content that meets people’s needs—that gives them a successful and satisfying web experience. (p. 6)

The book, then, is designed to describe how to write effectively, but it does it in the context of the assumption that everybody is using the web in the same hurried and purposeful manner they did in 1996 and that all are one genre—user-centric. If we look at Redish’s earliest writings, we can see that she began as a usability guru evaluating quality of software, not texts. In this respect, her book on how to write is written by a usability studies guru, explaining how to write usable (as opposed to persuasive or effective) content. Taken within that context, it is a valuable resource. STEVE KRUG—REDUCING THE ENTIRE THEORY OF USABILITY INTO A SINGLE PHRASE In what may be the most popular of all books on usability, Steve Krug (2006) simplified the entire history of usability into “Don’t make me think!” (p. 11) in a book by the same name. He dropped discussion of user-centered design (in fact, he seldom used “user”), but otherwise he continued the tradition of usability research toward its most obvious conclusion: simplification of navigation. Early usability labs cost tens of thousands of dollars, as did early studies. Early studies were considered unuseful if they failed to produce statistically valid results, requiring large test groups and substantial testing. Early studies were consistently used for evaluating the finished product as opposed to developing a better finished product. In his book, Krug advanced Nielsen’s argument that any information is better than no information, and he reduced the idea of usability to making certain the elements on a website are self-evident— you should never even have to reflect in your stroll through the website. It is hard to define a simpler principle. BACK TO USER-CENTERED DESIGN So this is the philosophy behind user-centered design in a nutshell. I own a small tractor. I bought it used, and it came with no user’s manual. The tractor is simple enough, but the controls are identified with icons, most of which initially made no sense to me. The tractor has four-wheel drive, but it took me two days to discover how to engage it. Websites are infinitely more complicated than this simple tractor, and much more difficult to effectively design for usability. As

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usability studies of websites have evolved through the past decade, it has become clear that to make a website usable, it is necessary to design it with its specific users in mind from the very beginning—user-centered design. According to Jesse James Garrett (2003), The practice of creating engaging, efficient user experiences is called usercentered design. The concept of user-centered design is very simple: Every step of the way, take the user into account as you develop your product. The implications of this simple concept, however, are surprisingly complex. (p. 19)

Basically, usability gurus are working on the common paradigm that users are easily discouraged and can quickly leave a website. The different gurus generally agree on the definition of user-centered design. Barnum (2002) described it as, “User-centered design (UCD) is the product development process based on learning about the user and applying what you learn to create products that match users’ needs” (p. 121). Dumas and Redish (1999) said, “To develop a usable product, you have to know, understand, and work with people who represent the actual or potential users of the product. No one can substitute for them” (p. 5). Garrett (2003) said, “Every step of the way, take the user into account as you develop your product” (p. 19). All of them said: 1. Focus early on users and tasks. 2. Measure empirically. 3. Design in iterations. . . . and the universal goal is . . . don’t make them think. CONCLUSION Usability studies as a discipline has a history going at least back to the 19th century and has been directed at a full spectrum of products. User-centered design is more contemporary and permits a user to quickly negotiate a site; find a solution, information, or product; extract it; and leave. As the user-centric authors have written again and again, this is the core of their philosophy. In that sense, user-centered design is a process for a single body of users. Measuring the quality of writing for these users is simple, and that is the theory’s strength. Does the writing lead them to the goal they are seeking, however? If it does not, the content is not usable. Does the content entertain or persuade the users? The user-centered model doesn’t measure that. At some point professional writers bought the user-centered argument and embraced it. Universities created usability centers, and designed curricula to teach

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usability at the model for evaluating communication in digital media. This is a good thing, but I suggest we need more. REFERENCES Atkins, J. (2004). Line: Tying it up, tying it down. Brookline, MA: Wooden Boat Books. Barnum, C. (2002). Usability testing and research. New York, NY: Allyn & Bacon. Beckett, N. (2008). 2001 WINES you must taste before you die. New York, NY: Universe. Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction. (2011). ACM SIGCHI curricula for human-computer interaction. Retrieved February 11, 2011, from http://old.sigchi. org/cdg/cdg 2.html#2_2_1 Diaper, D., & Sanger, C. (2006). Tasks for and tasks in human-computer interaction. Interacting with Computers, 18, 117-118. Dumas, J., & Redish, J. (1999). A practical guide to usability testing. Portland, OR: Intellect. Garrett, J. (2003). The elements of user experience: User-centered design for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Gould, J., & Lewis, C. (1985). Designing for usability: Key principles and what designers think. Human Aspects of Computing, 28(3), 300-311. Hinze-Hoare, V. (2007). The review and analysis of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles. Retrieved October 15, 2008, from http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0707/ 0707.3638.pdf Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Kuniavsky, M. (2003). Observing the user experience: A practitioner’s guide to user research. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufman. Licklider, J. C. R. (1960). Man-computer symbiosis. IRE transactions on human factors in electronics, FHE-1, 4-11. Naval Underwater Systems Center. (1997). NUSC on torpedoes: Over a century of leadership report. Newport, RI: NUSC. Nielsen, J. (1994). Usability engineering. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufman. Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Norman, D. (2002). Design of everyday things. New York, NY: Basic Books. Peters, T. (1992). Liberation management: Necessary disorganization for the nanosecond nineties. New York, NY: Komph. Redish, J. (2007). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufman. Rubin, J., & Chisnell, D. (2008). Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley. Schaffer, E. (2004). Institutionalization of usability: A step-by-step guide. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley. Shackel, B. (1959). Ergonomics for a computer. Design, 120, 36-39. Spool, J., Scanlon, T., Schroeder, W., Snyder, C., & DeAngelo, T. (1997). Website usability: A designer’s guide. North Andover, MA: User Interface Engineering.

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Spool, J., Scanlon, T., Schroeder, W., Snyder, C., & DeAngelo, T. (1999). Website usability: A designer’s guide (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Whitmer, J. (2005, June 27). Not impressed [Online book review]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Communication-Complex-Information-Goals-Dynamic/dp/ 0805849939/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1295539037&sr=1-6 Wilkinson-Latham, J. (1971) British cut and thrust weapons. Newton Abbot, UK: David & Charles.

SECTION II

Application

CHAPTER 6

Proposing a New Approach to Content Evaluation

In the previous chapter, I suggested that user-centered design, while valid, is incomplete. In this chapter, I propose a new rubric. This becomes the focal chapter in this book. Until now, I have presented arguments about things that work and don’t work (focusing largely on the ones that don’t), and I have presented theories about how websites are constructed, how language works, what genres are, and so on. The arguments and theories are all important, but from my point of view they are not meaningful until they come together to present solutions. Earlier, I argued that it is better to describe a genre than name it. If you can define it in terms of its exigencies, urgencies, purposes, audiences, appropriate rhetorical stance, and its physical structure, you have a tool you can use to evaluate it in detail. In this chapter I introduce that tool.

EVALUATING EXISTING CONTENT Content evaluation poses problems entirely different from writing original copy. If you are writing, you are probably working within a framework of exigency, urgency, purpose, audience, rhetorical stance, and textural structures (EUPARS) that you should already have identified subconsciously as you prepared to write. Previously existing content is different. In evaluating alreadyexisting content, the first thing you need to do is go back and establish these relationships forensically. If an old text is being copied into a new document, you need to make sure it will still work there. To see if an existing text still works, you have to identify the original EUPARSs, which may be quite old, and compare them to the EUPARSs that might now be very different. Once you have figured out these things, you will be in a position to say, “This still works,” or “This no longer works.” 115

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Problem of Single-Sourcing and Multi-Sourcing An important problem arises because copy being single-sourced or multisourced tends to be relocated automatically with no oversight. Examples of flawed copy being inappropriately pasted into complicated and complex documents abound on the Internet. Amazon.com, for example, depends on its vendors for product descriptions. The quality of copy depends entirely on the vendor, and it can sometimes be laughable. Given the opportunity to sell its product in a product description of any length it wants, Cobra Electronics uses a full nine well-written paragraphs with expandable photos, subheads, and bullet points fully describe one of their 12VDC to 120VAC inverters in persuasive terms. In contrast, given the same opportunities, Scosche describes its fuse holder as “Scosche EWFH Single ANL Fuse holder,” giving no indication of how it works, what it is used for or why anyone should buy it (Amazon.com, 2011a). Scosche simply repeats the title line for the page. Like Cobra, Tripp Lite manufactures an inverter. This is how they market it in their product description on Amazon:

TrippLite APS750 750-Watt DC-to-AC Power Inverter with 20A Charger Tripp Lite’s APS750 3-function DC-to-AC inverter with automatic line-tobattery transfer and integrated charging system serves as an extended run UPS, a standalone power source or an automotive inverter. Supplies up to 750 watts of continuous 120V AC power to 2 AC outlets from any 12V battery or automotive DC source. When AC cable is connected to a live wall socket, commercial power passes through to connected equipment and the battery set is recharged via 3 stage, 20 amp charging system. Supplies up to 960 watts of continuous 120V AC bypass power. In UPS mode, the APS system responds to blackouts and brownouts with an uninterrupted transfer to battery-derived AC output. Includes a set of high current DC input terminals for simple installation (user supplies batteries and cabling). Reliable transformer design, with efficient PWM sine wave output and frequency control, powers resistive electronic loads or large in. (Amazon.com, 2011a)

The description comes in a single dense block of rambling sentence fragments that sometimes end mid-sentence and sometimes end with a period. Problematical texts such as these are not aberrations in Amazon; they are common. In contrast, the NASA collective of websites is spread around the world and covers every scientific topic imaginable, yet I have never seen a comparable error there. Adorama.com, a site where I get many of my photographic tools, usually has excellent content, which they often get by parsing the copy produced by manufacturers. In one case, however, they say,

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• 1080/60p Recording: With its transfer rate of 28 Mbps, 1,080/60p recording (Full-HD, 1,920 x 1,080, 60 progressive recording) conveys about twice the information of 1,080i (interlace) recording • Interlaced Scanning (1080/60i): Only half of the image data is reproduced in each picture. Fabric patterns run together and moire patterns appears • Progressive Scanning (1,080/60p): Reproduces all of image data in a single picture. Patterns in fabric are crisp and clear with no color bleeding. (Adorama Cameras, 2011, n.p.) There are three identifying characteristics for this camera. First, the description points out that this camera records in progressive format. Second, there is a sentence that points out that interlaced scanning is a weakness in a digital camera. Finally, the copy points out that progressive scanning is better for fabrics. There is a small mechanical problem in the second sentence, but more interestingly, although the second sentence describes a weakness in cameras, it is presented in a list of positive features for the video camera being marketed. In the original copy, it was presented as a defect common in other cameras. What happened appears to be this: The features are generated by someone (apparently not a writer) pulling the original narrative apart sentence by sentence and putting the sentences behind bullets. In the original copy, a negative feature of other cameras was introduced in a sentence designed to lead to a next sentence saying the progressive scanning in this camera is the better option. Instead, in the new copy, the negative feature is listed as a positive feature. The difference, I believe, is lack of oversight. With no careful oversight on automated cut-and-paste processes, errors such as this abound on the Internet. In short, careless errors abound on the Internet. Most of these errors occur because someone moved material from one page to another without knowing the genres of the content they were moving. Many more of these occur because computers mine content from a variety of resources with no oversight from qualified writers. It might be an exaggeration to claim that there are more pages with errors than without, but I suspect it’s not much of one.

APPLYING PRACTICAL THEORIES TO FINDING PROBLEMS IN WRITING ON THE INTERNET In the first four chapters, I spent a great deal of time presenting theories that can be applied to evaluating old content or writing new content, but those theories were generalized. In this chapter, I will attempt to make them specific enough to use as tools. The guidelines for evaluating web content are relatively straightforward—figure out what the text is supposed to do and see if it does that. With the right tools, that task is actually as simple to do as it sounds. Once you have the tools, evaluating text is much easier than writing it.

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Dissecting Genres You may have noticed that as I have described texts in this book, I have almost never named a genre. There are two reasons for that. First, most genres you will find on the Internet have never been named. In fact, most genres on the Internet have never even been noticed. Secondly, naming the genre will not get us what we need for evaluating. Instead, we need to dissect the genres. Only when we are looking at the genres’ parts are we able to see if the individual parts work. Instead of saying that a genre is a kind of digital poster, we can break it down into its EUPARS components and examine them. This might seem like an arduous task, but it is not. Most of the time we can do most of the steps subconsciously. Still, later in this chapter, I will introduce a form that may help. But my point is this: you do not want to name the genre, you want to describe the genre, and to do that, you dissect it. Difference between Content and the Site That Contains It It is common for usability theorists to suggest you consider the genre of the site. This comes from confusion over the differences between purposes and genres. Actually, there is no such thing as a site with a unique genre. The very fact that any site has both navigation and content proves that the fewest genres a site can have is two: at least one menu plus at least one other genre. I will discuss this at much greater length later in this chapter, but for now let me suggest that when evaluating content, you are concerning yourself with the individual texts in the site and not the site as a whole. An excellent site is equal to more than the sum of its parts, but it is made up of those parts, and when evaluating the writing, your focus should be on those parts. The appropriate question is not, “Why did we need this site?” but “Why did we need this particular text?” Keep in mind that in this chapter I am not addressing effective writing; I am discussing assessing values for texts that already exist—particularly texts being moved from old sites to new, or being single-sourced or multi-sourced for a variety of different purposes. I suggest that for evaluating these texts, we break the process into seven steps: 1. Identify the exigencies and level of urgency. That is to say, why is the text needed and how badly? 2. Identify the purpose. What is the text supposed to do? 3. Identify the audience. With whom are you trying to communicate? 4. Identify the appropriate rhetorical stance. a. What are the audience needs and expectations? b. What do you hope to do with the reader? c. What is the appropriate stance to accomplish these goals?

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5. Identify the appropriate structure. Should the text be bulleted, numbers, narrative? 6. Evaluate. Imputing a value to the text based on the knowledge you glean from the first four steps. a. What was the text originally supposed to do? b. Does the text now do that? c. What rhetoric is appropriate for the task? d. Does the text have the appropriate rhetorical stance? 7. Justification. Explaining the value you place on the text. It only takes a little practice to be able to do these things well. I have produced a table I can use, but I do not need it to do the evaluation (see Table 1). I use it to show others if I need to persuade them that a text has problems. The table permits me to do the seventh step—justification. This is the first and simplest of several similar rubrics I will recommend. The urgency section is optional. The urgency actually comes from the exigency, and if you understand the exigency, you also understand the urgency. As you look at the table, imagine the following. You are the communications director for a company that has shown astonishing losses over the past quarter. This is an exigency that demands communications, but what communications? The exigencies are clear enough, as is the urgency. The options include “cook the books” and report false results, write a series of press releases that clarify the problems and solutions, stonewall the media, engage in a series of internal discussions with the board and senior officers that will perhaps lead to a best path, leak the problem to the press, etc. Each of these communicative models can be evaluated in the form. Suppose you decide to lie (see Table 2). In this case, the largest problems seem ethical, but they are also practical. We have all seen that lying seldom does anything but dig the corporation into deeper trouble and often bankruptcy. So while the problems with dishonesty are

Table 1. Sample Form that Can Be Used for Evaluating Existing Texts Description

Valuation

EXIGENCY

Why is the text needed?

Valid? Yes, no, maybe

URGENCY

How badly is the text needed?

Badly? Yes, no, maybe

PURPOSE

What is the text supposed to do? Appropriate? Yes, no, maybe

AUDIENCE

Who is the audience?

Appropriate? Yes, no, maybe

RHETORIC

What is the rhetorical stance?

Appropriate? Yes, no, maybe

STRUCTURE

What is the structure?

Appropriate? Yes, no, maybe

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Table 2. Simple Application of the Form Description

Valuation

EXIGENCY

Just suffered a disastrous quarter

Valid? Yes

URGENCY

Appropriate communications are critical

Badly? Yes

PURPOSE

Mislead the audience

Appropriate? No . . . illegal

AUDIENCE

Financial advisors, financial media Appropriate audience? Yes

RHETORIC

Present misinformation

STRUCTURE Press release

Appropriate? No . . . dishonest Appropriate? Yes

ethical, they are also practical. Although I am presenting this as communication in progress, and I have already said that this chapter is dedicated to evaluating previously written texts, you could as easily look at this problem well after the fact, and the same evaluations still apply. Suppose you are looking at a homepage with an extensive, corporate role statement on it. You can ask the very same questions. Suppose the role statement is on the page because one of the vice presidents insisted on it. He is convinced the public needs to know what the company does as soon as they arrive to the page, perhaps because he feels the public doesn’t know enough about the company (see Table 3). Generally, I have found this rubric to be very flexible and expandable, and although I put single, simple sentences in the examples above, you can as easily place whole paragraphs that explain problems more fully. In short, if you can describe the exigencies, urgencies, purpose, audience, appropriate rhetorical stance, and structure of a text, you have enough information to tell instantly whether the text is appropriate for the situation. This applies whether you are writing original texts or evaluating old texts. You don’t need a table to go through that process, but a table helps if you are trying to point problems out to others who are not versed in writing processes. I reintroduce this and discuss it in much greater detail later in this chapter. The next sections explain each element in detail, hopefully making it easier for you to use them in detailed evaluations. COMBINING ELEMENTS OF THE COMMUNICATIONS PROCESS Briefly, every communication begins with its exigencies—some combination of a force or problem or vacuum or need. These exigencies transition into the recognition of a need to communicate. That need to communicate is always

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Table 3. Second Example of the Form Being Applied to an Existing Text Description

Valuation

EXIGENCY

Public doesn’t know enough about the company’s goals and aspirations.

Valid? Yes

URGENCY

Low. Exigency is based on two untested assumptions: (1) public does not know about company’s goals and aspirations. (2) homepage is the best place to introduce the information.

Badly? No

PURPOSE

Explain what the company does and hopes to do.

Appropriate? Maybe

AUDIENCE

The entire population who might visit the homepage for any reason.

Appropriate audience? No

RHETORIC

An extensive narrative on a page dedicated to navigation.

Appropriate stance? No

STRUCTURE Corporate role statement.

Appropriate? No

directed toward an audience (even if the audience is the communicator himself) and places identifiable demands on the author. In combination, all of the above lead to an identifiable communicative structure, which leads to acts and artifacts of communication. In this scenario, a new exigency (need) arises, typically resulting from a communication occurring in an existing situation. The need generates an urgency to communicate. The purpose of the communication is to satisfy the need. For the purpose to be effective, needs and expectations must be met for both the author and the reader. Knowing what those expectations are leads to an understanding of the ideal structure and, ultimately, a final communication. Although this series of events might seem complicated, it is not. A good writer might transition from identifying exigency to identifying the purpose and structures of the final documents instantly. For example, suppose your company has a problem where people got sick after eating your tacos. This is an exigency that demands a number of communications. A good writer would recognize that documents will need to be produced for the Feds, the injured customers, the media, and the stockholders at the very least. Each of these documents would have a different purpose, and, knowing the different audiences and relevant

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purposes, you will know what you need to produce and how it needs to be packaged. You might produce some kind of formal report for the Feds, an apology to the customers, press releases for the media, and a meeting for the stockholders. These are all different genres, but you would instantly recognize the need for a number of them. Others might occur later. In the first chapter, I pointed out that we read through filters that we can use to evaluate the quality of text—as long as we know what it is we are reading. The same thing applies to writing. We view what we write through those same filters, so as soon as we know the purpose of our document, we know how we should craft our texts. For excellent writers, the whole decision process is automatic. Having somewhat simplistically explained the process for generating an original communication, I should point out that all of the automatic capabilities go away when evaluating an old text in a new environment. In this case, you need to find out what forces drove the text when it was originally written. Then you need to find out why it is needed in its new environment. I will discuss how you do this in more detail later in this chapter, but for now I just want to point out the process in broad brushstrokes. Problems might arise from any number of sources. Texts being automatically relocated (single-sourcing and multi-sourcing), as I mentioned in the previous section, can have serious flaws, but most commonly the problems arise as companies revamp or rebuild their old websites and import the old content into the new site without evaluating it. These texts are consistently moved to the new site for no other reason than because they were on the old one. Maybe when the old site was first produced, a vice president (who no longer works there) insisted the homepage needed a detailed description of the corporation’s mandate. He felt the public needed to know right away what the company was about. The question you might ask as you prepare to import the text is, “Is that detailed description still appropriate?” The next sections describe how to parse that and similar questions and identify answers.

IDENTIFYING THE EXIGENCIES I use the term exigency throughout this book. Outside of academic circles, many do not know, nor do they care, what it means. A better term for use in the workplace is “why?” “Why do we need this text?” “Why are we creating this site?” The correct answer to that kind of question describes the exigency. “Why” is a good enough term for the stakeholders. On the other hand, writers are professionals with a professional vocabulary, and exigency is an important part of that vocabulary. If you plan to write professionally, you should know what it means, and you should know why it is important to you. The term is at the very core of writing.

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Definitions and Descriptions of Exigency Exigency has three common definitions, variations of which you can find in virtually any dictionary: (a) an urgent, threatening condition demanding instant reaction, (b) a pressing requirement, and (c) a situation requiring extreme effort or attention. For our purposes, “a pressing requirement” is the most common definition that applies from the point of view of writers, although the other two also apply often enough. Nothing is written or said that does not begin with a pressing requirement. This pressing requirement can be quite subtle. In conversation, for example, even silence can become the exigency that demands speech. On the other hand, corporate exigencies tend to be significant. Maybe the company has been bleeding profit for the past two years. Maybe the company is getting no publicity. Maybe it is getting too much publicity (i.e., the president has been caught with porn on his company computer, or people using the product are getting sick, or somebody claims your beef product has no beef in it). The exigencies might be stated as, “We are sliding into non-profitability.” “Our audience doesn’t seem to know about our new upgrades.” “Our users say our website is not making any sense.” “We had four people get sick after eating in our LA store.” “We have apparently offended our entire reviewing community.” “The public seems to be forgetting all we did during that crisis.” “Eighty percent of our potential customer base has never heard of us.” “We are about to declare bankruptcy.” These are all conditions (exigencies) that require authors to produce texts. Good Exigencies Not all exigencies are bad. The company might have just received the 2011 Car of the Year Award from Motor Trend, or the company just developed a vaccine for the common cold; it has a new recipe for barbecue ribs that can’t be beat, or maybe it is bringing all of its offshored jobs back to the United States. All of these exigencies demand that someone write things, but the appropriate things to write will be different for most of them. The Motor Trend award might require television scripts and magazine ads, while the barbecue recipe might need to show up on YouTube as a series of videos. Eliminating the practice of offshoring might require a series of press releases. The nature of the problems is different, and the demands on the authors will be different, but a communication exigency is always a condition (always arising from a previous communication) that requires authors to produce texts. Many Exigencies, Many Solutions The exigencies driving the text become the background force that requires the text. The solutions may be many and varied. Earlier, I pointed out that the

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problem with food poisoning required a huge series of communiqués. It might include board meetings, press releases, press conferences, released letters, e-mails, and resignations, all dealing with the one exigency. In fact, it may be the rare exigency that can be satisfied with a single text. Suppose a company has decided to move from a five- to a four-day workweek. There are several exigencies. First, the company has the internal problem of how to inform the employees. There might be dozens of different communiqués ranging from as little as permitting the information to leak out at the scuttlebutt (water cooler) to more complex staff meetings with the employees, newsletters, letters to all the employees, or perhaps simply broadcasting the information to the employees through an intercom. Some of these might be positive and effective, and some not so positive and perhaps counterproductive. Additionally, the company would need to communicate with the local community. If it is a big company, traffic patterns would change and the community might need to know about the coming change so it can adapt. If the reason for the change is to improve the company’s ecological footprint, that becomes valuable information for the company’s reputation, and the media needs to know. If the reason for the change is improving the return on investment (ROI) for the company, a different community needs to know about that. What I am saying is that a decision to move to a four-day workweek produces a number of exigencies requiring a huge number of communications, making this an exceptionally complex problem. Many Exigencies are Neutral or Nearly Neutral or False and So Have Low Urgencies Much of the time, the pressure that demands communication is reasonably weak. We will not necessarily be in a lot of trouble if we do not start the process right this instant: “We are not yet making enough profit.” “Sales are good, but we can make them better.” “We don’t yet have a help file for this game.” Moreover, exigencies might well be more emotional than practical and based on misinformation—false exigencies. A café might produce a website not because it needs one, but because everybody else seems to have one. Simple Exigencies Even our simplest communications are driven by exigencies. We receive an e-mail and we have to decide whether to answer it. Receiving an e-mail is a weak exigency that we might choose to ignore. Alternatively, psychologically, four seconds of pregnant silence in a crowded room becomes the exigency for someone to say something—anything. I cannot imagine any text that can exist without some kind of exigency—even if the exigency is just a look of confusion.

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Subtle Exigencies NASA (2011c) spells out its exigencies in its budgets and strategic plans: At NASA, sharing information is a mandate within our founding legislation. Throughout our history, it has been a priority to make data from science missions, research, and other discoveries available for the benefit of the Nation. Our missions are a natural means of interacting with the public and supporting students and teachers. Through the excitement of missions and activities, we help stimulate student interest and achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. STEM-focused teachers use their skills to motivate student achievement and spur creative and critical thinking both in and out of the classroom. In developing student interest and skills, future workers will be prepared to solve technical challenges that benefit our Nation and improve the quality of life on Earth. An American public that is knowledgeable and interested in science, aeronautics, and exploration will value the impact of advances in these fields that help maintain global competitiveness and a robust economy. (p. 34)

Simply stated, their goals are to • inform the American public, • support students and teachers, • encourage STEM learning, • prepare future technology employees, and • create a community that values NASA’s work. To do this, NASA may use scores of genres in scores of venues, integrated in a huge cloud of websites, press releases, personal visits, and the like. The apparent purposes of these genres all fit within the five exigencies above, but all advance the final and overarching one: create a community of friends and supporters. Surprisingly often, the text is not really meant to serve the most obvious purpose. In something of a “head fake,” the text might seem to inform but is actually designed to market an idea—addressing the final “create a community.” Or it might seem to be designed to entertain but was actually produced to inform. All of NASA’s games are designed to teach, while many of the information pages are designed to connect with the readers. This misdirection happens all around us. Many tutorials (perhaps most) are really designed to show how much the author knows, so to the extent that they inform, they improve their ethos. Often, fiction writers will introduce an argument though an unreliable narrator, and the astute reader is expected to reject the narrator and his argument. The best texts are often more than they seem, hiding (while advancing) the text’s exigencies. For this reason, if no other, it is important to know the exigencies of any text before attempting to assign its purpose.

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How Do You Identify the Exigency Behind a Text? This is possibly the most often asked question from my students (well . . . after “What is an exigency?”). The answer is surprisingly simple: ask the stakeholder the question, “Why do we need this text?” You will almost never be evaluating a page in a vacuum. If you are evaluating the quality of writing, you are doing it as part of a larger project, and there is a good probability that someone on the team (or nearby) knows the answer. If Stakeholders Don’t Know the Answer This is where discovering the exigency gets slightly more difficult. There is always the chance the stakeholders don’t know the answer. Often digital texts are created for no good reason, and so there are no good exigencies that anybody can describe. Just as likely, there are reasonable exigencies but the stakeholders will not be able to express the answer to the depth you need. You will usually need to pry the information from them or help them develop an understanding of why they wanted this and then pry that answer out of them. For example, why might a site use its “about us” message for the welcome message on the homepage? Often, that is not a good idea. As often as not, a tagline will work better, in part because it makes for a cleaner page and in part because it is more likely to be read, and if it is well done, the tagline supplies the same meaning instantly. When asked why, the stakeholder might simply be confident it would be a good idea to explain the company’s mission on the first page without necessarily knowing why or why not. Unfortunately, this is a place technical communicators are sometimes tripped up. When asking the “why” question, you might receive something like, “We wanted to explain who we are and what we do right away.” This is not really the answer to “why.” It is the answer to “What did you want the text to do?” Earlier in this chapter I showed a graph where exigency creates a sense of urgency. “We wanted to explain who we are and what we do right away,” describes that sense of urgency but not the exigencies behind it. If you walk away with that answer, you have accepted the wrong answer. The correct answer might be, “We are a new company with a new product, and nobody seems to know who we are or why ours is the best widget.” Another correct answer might be, “Oh I don’t know, the spot just looked blank, and I just thought we should have some text there.” (translation: “I was uncomfortable with that blank space.”) Translating a Wrong Answer into a Right One Even if you are given a wrong answer, sometimes it is easier to translate the stakeholders’ answers, rather than keep pushing and becoming an irritant. For example, “We needed to explain who we are,” translates to “We were concerned

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that our users did not know enough about us.” “We needed a web presence,” on the other hand, doesn’t translate at all, nor does it address the question. It might mean, “We feel the need to be on the cutting edge in communication.” Or it might mean, “Our competition is effectively using the web, and they are devastating our sales.” It is easy enough to translate “We need to explain who we are,” to “We were concerned that our users did not know enough about us.” The differences between these statements might seem unimportant, but that is not the case. Time and again, in this book, I show examples of texts that seem to have one exigency but actually have a different one. Not knowing the actual exigencies for a text, you might be inclined to say it has rhetorical problems when it does not. You simply cannot know the purpose of a text if you have not established its exigencies. If you do not know its purpose, you can say little about the audience or how you expect to interact with it. Order of Descriptions A statement describing the need for a text will often continue with “we need . . . ,” as in “We had four people get sick after eating in our LA store, so we need to . . .” or “Nobody seems to know who we are, so we need to . . .” (the next phrases will describe purpose and audience and structure). “We are approaching the end of the season, and we have a huge excess of this season’s products, so we need to (urgency) entice (purpose) our traditional pool of buyers (audience) with a big sales flyer (rhetoric/structure).” In these descriptions, the order of the elements—audience, purpose, and structure—is not locked in concrete, however, and they can be subtle: “The company president has suddenly turned in his resignation, so we need (urgency) to contact (structure) the media (audience) to arrange (purpose) a press conference. This order of things in a description can be misleading because it implies that order is not important. Actually, the order in which you examine things is very important. Knowing the exigency and purpose always leads to being able to define the audience. Naming the audience never leads to knowing the purpose. For example, suppose I have a principal audience made up of adventurous men and women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-five. What is the purpose of my text? What is its exigency? How urgent is it? None of these questions are answered by knowing the audience. In contrast, if I say I am selling a new line of ultralight backpacking products that are especially useful for extended treks, you are automatically guided toward an understanding of the kinds of documents I need to produce and for whom. The exigency and purpose of a text always leads you to its audience, but the chain of information never goes the other way. Although the segments of a sentence describing the process can occur in a variety of orders, identifying all of the elements can only be done by beginning with identifying the text’s exigencies.

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In short, to find the exigency of a text is easy, but not quite as easy as it looks. Often the stakeholders have no idea why they wanted that text. They may have just felt they needed it. Even when they do know why they wanted it, they might not be able to express that need well. Writers often fail in two areas when identifying the exigencies of a text: (a) they often do not carefully separate their definition of exigency from their definition of purpose, and so (b) they are often not careful about recognizing that their informants are describing things other than exigencies. Remember that a description of the exigency of a text naturally leads to a description of the text’s purpose, and they are often described in the same statement, so it is easy to confuse them. Exigency is the force that demands the text, while purpose describes what the text is supposed to do. HOW TO IDENTIFY THE PURPOSE OF A TEXT Knowing the purpose of a text (what it is supposed to do) is fundamental to seeing whether it is doing what it is supposed to do and for the right audience. To see the purpose, you complete sentences such as, “Because Amazon.com is now competing directly with us, we are bleeding profits (exigency), so we need something (urgency) that will (your purpose here).” “We have these leftover sofas we haven’t been able to get rid of, so we need to” (purpose). “Damn! We got caught with our hand in the cookie jar, so we need a venue that permits us to apologize without actually admitting anything” (purpose). Or alternatively, “. . . so we can belligerently deny everything,” (same exigency, different purpose). Earlier I said, “I cannot imagine any text that can exist without some kind of exigency—even if the exigency is just a look of confusion.” The same thing applies to purpose. Every utterance has a purpose, even if it is simply to restate a previous utterance—or restate the obvious. Value of Knowing the Purpose Knowing the purpose of the utterance is fundamental to knowing its quality. In fact, knowing the purpose of a text is fundamental to knowing whether the text is even on topic or whether it is doing anything at all. There is simply no way to tell whether a text is doing what it is supposed to do if you do not know what it is supposed to do. Multiple Purposes on Every Page Professional communicators often confuse the site for its individual and different texts. You might hear something like, “The purpose of this site is to sell. . . .” Often such a site will be for combinations of marketing or promotion or sales, but even more often it will have purposes beyond just selling or marketing. It might have an investor page or a contact page. Writers who don’t recognize the

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difference between the content and the site can fail to recognize the breakdowns in the text, because they are thinking globally in very general terms about the entire site, as opposed to specifically focusing on its contents. It is better for us to remember that as writers evaluating texts, we are focusing on individual texts at the paragraph level, not the site as a whole. Purpose is Local, Not Global The purpose of a text can change from paragraph to paragraph. If we glance at the NASA (2011b) homepage, we can see links to pages representing perhaps a score of purposes. The pages are all driven by different combinations of the six exigencies I described in the previous section, so although there are a variety of purposes on any page, they will all descend from the same exigencies. Immediately below the logo on the homepage is a carousel that rotates through a series of relatively high-resolution photos (links) identifying various recent NASA successes and upcoming events. Among the eight topics the carousel contains are links to: • The upcoming launch of Glory—a satellite designed to evaluate the climate, with mandates - to inform the public, - to support students and teachers, and - to create a community; • the upcoming launch of Discovery—for a trip to the space station, with mandates - to inform the public, - support students and teachers, and - create a community; • Kennedy Space Center adds one of its flags to the ground zero flag, with a mandate - to create a community. Note that while “mandate to create a community” is the last of their exigencies, it is a driving force behind virtually everything they write. There are also links to NASA’s budget, its purpose statement, job information (including volunteer, internship, and scientific positions), image pages, game pages, and additional pages designed to permit interested readers to follow the exploits in different missions. If we look at all of those links, we can see that they represent perhaps half a dozen menu genres and go to a whole variety of content genres designed for a variety of different purposes. One of the obvious purposes is to provide entertainment for children. Another purpose is to explain to an adult population what NASA is researching. On close examination, neither of the apparently obvious

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purposes are so obvious. While the games are designed to entertain, they are also designed to teach. And while the mission descriptions are designed to inform, they are also designed to persuade. Edutainment Pages The activities on the NASA site include drawing and coloring opportunities as well as games. While the pages may seem all about playing, they actually encourage children to linger and learn as they play, making these pages excellent resources for teachers and students. We can know this from the exigencies. Nowhere do the exigencies say “entertain,” and so we can know that although entertainment might seem the purpose, it is not. The game, “Let’s eat,” for example, is designed for young children and teaches them food groups and proper diet habits. A different game provides an opportunity for children to learn to tell time. NASA (2011a) describes the purpose of the activities section this way: NASA Kids’ Club has educational games, engaging multimedia and visuals, and educational activities to cover K-4 students’ developmental and learning abilities as addressed in national education standards in math, science and technology. The skills levels provide a natural progression through the site that allows users to find games that are best suited to their varying abilities. Developmentally appropriate content is based on national education standards and benchmarks per grade level. Content is written within the K-4 reading levels as determined by the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Score, a tool available in Microsoft Word. (n.p.)

More of the advanced games permit children to test their knowledge of the solar system or see many of the technological spin-offs that have come from NASA research. This last game presents an example of an additional, somewhat disguised, purpose of many of the games. Children who play the game come to understand the impact of NASA’s research on the U.S. economy without realizing it. In effect, NASA plants a seed. Even if the children never grow up to be scientists or astronauts, as adults they may remember all of the important products that spin out of NASA’s research, making the adult a natural friend and supporter of NASA. A different link for older children and young adults (the Mission X page) encourages youths to “train like an astronaut” (NASA, 2011): “Welcome to Mission X, a 6-week international fitness challenge. We’re focusing on fitness and nutrition as we help students to ‘train like an astronaut’” (n.p.). This is an international page with training instructions in nine languages. NASA also has links to internship pages for high school and college students and teachers—support students and teachers, plus encourage STEM learning, prepare future technology employees, and, of course, create a community.

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In short, the purpose of a page (or a segment of text on a page) is a direct result of the exigencies that drive its production. The exigencies and purposes of a page are so closely interconnected that they can both be expressed with a single sentence: “Our condition is X, so we must create a text that will Y (the purpose of the page).”

HOW TO IDENTIFY THE AUDIENCES The audience is not named; it is described, and the description can be slow in coming. “Our customers” names an audience but provides not one bit of information. If the company sells high-powered rifles, “customers” mean something completely different from “customers” in a company that sells flowers. The process of identifying and analyzing an audience is both complicated and iterative. Perhaps more importantly, you will almost never write to a singular audience. Audiences are made up of collectives of different groups with different needs and expectations. If you see yourself writing for a single, generalized group, there is a very good chance you have not drilled very far into the task and still do not know your varied audiences very well. Getting to the Audience Description and Discovering Its Expectations To properly describe the audience(s), think about what your text is supposed to do. Knowing what the text is supposed to do leads to an identification of whom the text is supposed to affect and how you want it to affect them. On the other hand, “whom the text is supposed to affect” is just the beginning. It identifies but does not describe the audience or its expectations. Virtually all books on writing will have sections on audience analysis. Generally speaking, these texts have implied that writers should know their audiences before they begin writing. With analog texts, it is probably important to know your audience as well as you can before publishing, because once published, the text is locked in ink on paper. Web texts are not so locked, and knowing everything you can know about your audience before publishing is probably not so important. The tests you can run to identify your audiences are largely iterative, and many of them are better run after you have written your copy and your audience is interacting with it. You can observe and question the audience, run formal or informal surveys, study the audience’s linguistic conventions and codes, and even run experiments. Even then, however, you can never have more than an inferred sense of who your audience is and what their expectations are. Over time, however, you can see how to impact them, even if you cannot describe them in every detail.

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In short, you come to know your audience through a series of iterative tests, but in the end, you can only have a sense of how you can impact them and their decisions. On the other hand, the more you study them, the better your sense of how you can do that. By studying them over time, you build an even greater understanding of how to impact your audiences. It may not happen quickly, but over time you can have an excellent analysis in place. Research in Audience Analysis A number of professionals in a number of fields have produced research in the area of audience analysis. As a place to begin, I have often suggested that the audience can be broken into four very large categories: (a) informed professionals, (b) uninformed professionals, (c) informed nonprofessionals, (d) and uninformed nonprofessionals. This is a good place to begin, but still only a beginning. Informed professionals include the experts in the field. They will typically have their own languages and codes, and if you do not know them, you can only communicate as an outsider (e.g., programmers, engineers, HR professionals). Uninformed professionals include the CEO of the company who may know nothing about a complex topic, but needs sufficient information to make informed strategic decisions. Informed nonprofessionals include people who may not be professionally involved in a topic but nonetheless are experts in the area (e.g., birders, hotrodders, train watchers, runners). Uninformed nonprofessionals include people who are not amateurs because they are not involved in the topic at any level and who are generally ignorant in that area (e.g., new homebuyers, new computer users). Understanding the audience at these levels is just the beginning. Each of these groups can be broken into dozens of smaller groups, and they can be broken into dozens of even smaller groups. But knowing these four groups will provide a foundation to understanding the languages of these smaller groups. Ginny Redish’s Excellent Model Janice (Ginny) Redish (2007) devoted a full chapter of her book to identifying and analyzing your audience. She reduced her research to seven steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

List your major audiences. Gather information about your audiences. List major characteristics for each audience. Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks, and stories. Use your information to create personas. Include the persona’s goals and tasks. Use your information to write scenarios for your site. (p. 13)

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Much as I argue above, she suggested, “Actually watching, listening to, and talking with your web users and potential users of your site [is important]” (p. 14). According to Redish (2007), other major sources of information come from analyzing your mission, reading e-mails that come through Contact Us, mining customer service and marketing department banks of knowledge, watching and listening to your customers when you can be among them, and interviewing them if possible. Implicit in this is the assumption that audience analysis is an ongoing project that continues long after you have published your site. Redish’s (2007) discussion of audience expectations falls a little short in that she assumes that audience expectations are limited to usability, so when she voices audience expectations, she assumes they will sound like, “I just want to get the job done,” or “No time to read,” or “Remember how busy I am,” or “I just want my information,” or “You have to grab my attention right away or I’ll go to another site” (p. 15). In this sense, she uses the quotes to punctuate her opinions without necessarily supporting them. Still, I highly recommend you read Redish’s chapter. Actually, the whole book is worth reading. Schroder, Murray, Drotner, and Kline In Researching Audiences, Kim Schroder et al. (2003) included a much more comprehensive discussion of audience analysis. They presented four main approaches to analysis: 1. Media ethnography—observation, interviewing, analysis of people using the media. 2. Reception research—examines how communication conventions or codes impact understanding. The communicator uses standardized conventions in the communication, while the audience uses its own conventions. To the extent these codes overlap, reception is more or less compromised. 3. Audience surveys—“gathering information about [audiences] by asking them about themselves” (p. 225). 4. Experimental audience studies—a science of learning from observable actions or responses. Their approaches are complicated, but not as complicated as they sound. Audience as an Empty Vessel . . . or Not One of Schroder et al.’s (2003) concerns dealt with how communicators view the audiences as “empty vessels” or receivers (a transmission model), but the authors suggested that the audiences also enrich (a dialogic model) the message with their own viewpoints, emotions, and responses. Schroder et al. made a strong case for the use of both models in normal communication and an even stronger case for their application in interactive media, where the reader

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is actually driving the reading experience. The transmission model would imply a behaviorist’s (my word, not theirs) quantitative approach to audience analysis, while the dialogic model would imply a qualitative approach. The Act of Researching the Audience Changes the Audience Behavior Another of Schroder et al.’s (2003) concerns was how the act of researching impacts the behavior of the subjects. In most (they said all) cases, it is not possible to analyze an audience without actually impacting it. They described it like this: All audience research is obtrusive. We cannot study audiences empirically without at the same time interfering with the very phenomenon we wish to study—the everyday practices through which people use and make sense of the media—or interrupting people’s lives for the duration of the research encounter. (Schroder et al., 2003, p. 16)

Moreover, Schroder et al. worried that even when researchers and informants speak the same language, the effort to describe the experience and understand the description can be more conflicted than informative; “Therefore, even though there exists a considerable common core within a national language community, there are still plenty of possibilities of misunderstanding” (p. 17). Perhaps the most important takeaway from this is (as I mentioned earlier) that it is not possible to come to a truth about audiences. Rather, it is possible to grow insights; “in other words, audience research always produces a social construction of audience practices and meanings” (p. 17), but the research never exactly tells you who they are.

CONSOLIDATING THESE IDEAS INTO A HEURISTIC I suggest the recommendations of Schroder et al. and Redish can all be collapsed into a heuristic, of sorts. First, we should keep in mind the fact that costs are always important when publishing, so it is never possible to do everything you might wish. You can only strive for the optimal compromise. Moreover, writers are not scientists and cannot be expected to apply rigorous studies prior to beginning a text or evaluating an existing text, nor can they be expected to blindly follow a scientific method. On the other hand, the writer should strive to understand the audience as much as is reasonable. If we can return to the beginning of this section, it should be clear that the goal is not to name the audience, but to know the audience.

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Observation Audience analysis includes observation and (if reasonable) interviews. Basically, I suggest that if you can find your audience gathered in a community (conference, NSF facility, at the coffee shop, at the mall), you can observe and analyze unobtrusively and glean valuable information. For example, in Principles of Marketing, Kotler and Armstrong (2006) described a store used for ethnographic research: Once Famous is a unique ethnographic laboratory for studying customer behavior in a natural setting. Although designed to look and feel like an ordinary retail store, this boutique is anything but ordinary. Surveillance is everywhere at Once Famous. Ethnographers watch from behind mirrored glass, while salespeople interview would-be buyers. Five cameras track consumers as they prowl the store, and store employees study their meanderings, whims, and buying behaviors. Sensitive hidden microphones catch every utterance from shoppers’ questions to snide comments between friends. Later, researchers pore over the tapes and analyze each shopper’s behavior, looking for clues. (p. 111)

I am not suggesting you bug a mall or a store, but if your customer interests map to those of a mall or store, why not spend time observing them there? Suppose I am marketing high-powered rifles. I might spend time in a Cabela’s store. They have huge sections of high-powered rifles. I could wander the racks, evaluating the competition alongside my natural audience. I would not be standing around with a clipboard asking intrusive questions; I would simply be conversing, learning their vocabularies, their motives and emotions. I would be observing and analyzing. I might drop in at their coffee shop and jot down a few insights as I continued observing their customers. As an alternative, let’s suppose you work for a company that customizes and sells training modules. Your audience will be exceptionally narrow—maybe as small as one or two people in any company. Perhaps there is a head of training— that would be an audience. Perhaps in a different company there is no head of training but somebody in HR who handles training. If you want to know what these training and HR managers expect from you as spokesperson for a training developer, you might go to where they gather (e.g., a professional conference) and study them. You could watch them present in their sessions. You could talk with them over coffee. You might be able to compile a reasonably complete collection of their concerns and expectations. You might find out what genres “ring their chimes.” I would do that, and I would do a similar thing with any community I wished to influence with my writing. Having observed your audience, you could then begin to build personas— avatars of a sort—that you could use as a representative audience. When you wrote, you could have a sense of what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it.

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Interviews The act of asking a question and answering it opens the door for misunderstanding and misinformation (particularly exaggeration). Interviewees are particularly bad about exaggerating things or presenting positive answers when they are inappropriate (I have been guilty of that), so interviews must be very carefully designed. For example, a common ruse in the marketing community is to ask a series of questions with critical questions hidden in them. An agency might ask a series of questions about a television program they have permitted subjects to preview. Inside those questions might be one or two designed to see whether the viewers noticed one particular thing in a new commercial they are testing. The whole study is designed to tease out the effectiveness of that one commercial. You might glean similar insights by asking the audience to fill out a very short survey at the bottom of a webpage, where what you really want to know is how many people you can get to fill out a survey. It is a kind of prestidigitation, where you get the interviewee to do something head on, while you are focusing on an oblique variation. Effective Interviews Such oblique tactics are not always necessary. Some straightforward interviews can be effective. One of our doctoral students recently did a series of interviews with project officers at the NSF. His dissertation was based on interviews with more than a score of project officers there. He built a complex set of personas so that someone wanting to write a grant proposal could construct an excellent sense of the audience and its many expectations, and, knowing that, could influence the audience’s reaction to a text. He spent months traveling back to Washington, DC, to interview different officers overseeing different kinds of projects. That, I think, returns us to an important point. It isn’t so much that you want to know who your audience is as you need to know what they want or expect and how you can meet those expectations. Fail to meet the expectations, and you will likely have lost the audience, no matter how well you know who they are. As an aside, the student graduated and was immediately hired by a college of engineering to drive its grant writing, thereby depriving the technical communication educational community of a real shining star. Reception Many communication theorists spend a great deal of time looking at the problem of reception. They look for points where the signal can become garbled. Electrical engineers might look for this point in transmission lines, while cognitive psychologists might look for it in conversations. From your point of view, this may be about how an audience responds to your content. When you lose your audience (for whatever reason—poor writing or poor navigation),

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reception has broken down. You are looking for how the audience interacts with your content (discursive information). Websites are complex and confusing. In them is a great deal of room for misunderstanding the content or not seeing the most important points you want to make—reception can be fuzzy and weak. Devising methods for identifying breakdowns in reception are important. A test of reception can be integrated into a usability study, where you might ask a subject to find a solution that naturally leads past something you consider important. A well-placed question during the test or during a subsequent debriefing could tease out whether your communication worked. A number of researchers also examine facial expressions and posture. The University of Memphis, for example, has a lab (Institute for Intelligent Systems) were subjects’ faces are painted with transparent ultraviolet sensitive dye, and their chairs are pressure sensitive. With an ultraviolet camera, researchers can map test subjects’ facial expressions as they interact with the content. Combining facial expressions with posture (e.g., slumping), their software can identify the emotions of their test subjects. I do not suggest anybody rush out and buy the software and hardware. It would be both expensive and maybe irrelevant because we do not have trouble seeing frustration and boredom. I suggest that while testing the audience, you can look for these characteristics. With a careful examination of test subject expression and posture, you should be able to tell when you have lost your audience. Experimenting with the Audience It is possible to analyze an audience’s behavior on a website discretely, and if the purpose of the communication is to get the audience to do something, a behaviorist’s approach to analysis might be applied. This approach looks at what the audience does both before and after a communication. It cannot determine the “why” of the acts, only the “what” of them. I might not have all possible details about a particular audience, but if I have enough information to be able to influence their behavior, I have enough to do whatever it is I need to do. An excellent tool for tracking what readers do is web analytics. Web analytics is designed to track clicks as a person progresses through a website. It provides a great deal of information, including how long people stay on pages, what pages they visit, what links they click, what search engines they might have used, and much more. Web analysts will be the first to point out that web analytics cannot address the “why” of a behavior, but with a properly designed experiment, it might indeed be possible. Creating Personas It should be clear by now that audience analysis is not something you do before moving on to the next task. Audience analysis is a series of processes

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designed to create an ongoing and growing sense of the audience. But the audience is never a single persona. Rather, the audience is a collection of different people with different needs and expectations. For example, an undergraduate technical communication student body will be made up of designers who can write and like technologies, engineers who cannot do math well but like the technologies and write moderately well, computer nerds who enjoy writing on the topic of computers, creative writers who hope to make a living someday, people who love the mechanics of language and want to edit, plus a few who probably do not belong and have no idea why they are there. Each of these defines a different persona, and each persona will have different needs and expectations. As I work with these audiences, I come to know their individual personas better and better. I know what they like and dislike. I know what they hope for in their futures. I know their fears. With this knowledge I can address them effectively. But (and this is very important) I never write for all of them; instead, I write for each of them. I can write effectively to them because I realize I am not writing for an audience, I am writing for a collection of audiences. So, it should be clear that it is necessary to create a collection of personas. If I return to the idea of marketing training development, we can expect a variety of audiences, including two I have already named. One persona might be a top-level decision maker (maybe a vice president of communications), another might be the person responsible for the actual day-to-day training schedule (clerk or administrative assistant), there might be the person responsible for reducing training costs (director or manager in HR), and another person might do the same thing but work for the director of communications. In a different scenario, consider the ordinary help file. The people using Word, for example, run the spectrum from people who do nothing more than write the occasional letter to hard-core users who switch off all of the program’s automated features, and even harder core users who are tasked by the company with building complex macros for others to use. Text on a help file explaining how to set margins might sound completely different from a page explaining how to record a mass-mailing macro, and might assume different things of the audience. It is hard to imagine a professional communication that has just one audience. Returning to NASA and Audience Expectations NASA has a very good sense of its different audiences and their expectations. Their audiences range from teachers and school children to politicians, and they all expect different things. The teachers expect their school children to learn. The children are hoping to be entertained as they learn. The congressmen are looking for information that validates their investment or impugns the investments of their political opponents. Others are adults who, much like the children, are hoping to be entertained as they learn. The key for NASA has been to identify each of these audiences and design different segments of their sites

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for the differences. Knowing the different audiences, NASA can produce pages that impact them differently and optimally. Subtle Rhetorical Ploys to Meet NASA’s Needs and Audience Expectations With content pages, we would expect NASA to follow the usability model of keeping the content short, chunking it, and using lots of subheads, to name a few of the prescriptions. NASA does separate paragraphs to make the text more readable, but ignores the other prescriptions. What NASA’s authors really do is write particularly well for the audiences, so that someone who is interested in the subject will tend to linger and read—even if the text is the equivalent of a couple of typewritten pages. Instead of making their texts short, they connect with the readers. For example, for the past seven years, NASA has sent out press releases and posted them on its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) site. These press releases have tended to anthropomorphize the rovers: “Instead of just listening, we send commands to the rover to respond back to us with a communications beep,” said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “If the rover is awake and hears us, she [emphasis added] will send us that beep.” (NASA, 2011a, n.p.)

Another example of discussions of the rovers and their adventures being anthropomorphized is here: “It will be the miracle from Mars if our beloved rover phones home [emphasis added],” said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program in Washington. “It’s never faced this type of severe condition before—this is unknown territory.” (NASA, 2011b, n.p.)

Frequent anthropomorphism would normally be inappropriate in scientific writing. Scientists would expect the content to be presented without overt emotion. Scientists are more likely to expect scientific information to look like this: To determine if GFAJ-1 was taking up AsO43- from the medium, we measured the intracellular As content by ICP-MS (11). In +As/-P grown cells, the mean intracellular As was 0.19 (±0.25)% by dry weight (Table 1), while the cells contained only 0.02 (± 0.01)% P by dry weight. This P was presumably scavenged from trace PO43- impurities in the reagents; and not likely due to carryover given our enrichment and isolation strategy [see above, (11)]. (Wolfe-Simon et al., 2011, p. 2)

This is from a recently published article from NASA scientists describing their process for identifying bacteria in meteorites. But NASA’s mainstream,

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adult audience is very different from this Science Magazine article’s audience, and the former will not be offended if the rovers are slipped a bit of personality from time to time. In fact, it can be argued that they are slipping the rovers a bit of personality themselves. There might be some curious scientists among NASA’s audiences, but there are more people who could be called “scientific,” but not “professional scientists,” curious about the various sciences. They might be amateur astronomers and would-be astronauts, a few Trekkies, people who habitually watch Discovery and National Geographic channels, science reporters, or students doing papers. Even the scientists, in this case, may be less interested in the science than in the stories. In terms of the expectations of the audience, the purpose of the text is to entertain and inform, but from the point of view of NASA, the purpose of the text is to entertain and persuade and inform. These texts are all stories—thousands of them—adventures in space. These are all heroic stories of how NASA is successfully exploring the universe (while spending our money wisely and providing a good return on our investment). Many of these stories sound for all the world like Disney documentaries. An audience of professional astronomers or astronauts reading scientific papers might well be offended at something that sounds much like it came from a Disney documentary, but a person (even a scientist) following the exploits of the rovers out of curiosity would have no reason to be offended, and might well enjoy the idea of seeing the rovers as heroic, adventuring avatars. Some people have been following these avatars since they first landed on Mars on January 4, 2004. The anthropomorphizing began immediately. The first quote in the first press release was, “Spirit has told us that it is healthy [emphasis added]” (NASA, 2011, n.p.). Two days later we see, “Our robot geologist was dressed a little warm [emphasis added] for the weather on Mars” (NASA, 2011, n.p.). NASA began their discussion of the rovers by applying human activities and characteristics to them. But suddenly the rover Spirit became uncommunicative. NASA scientists worked for days to troubleshoot the problem. In a press release titled “Gear on Opportunity Rover Passes Martian Health Check” (NASA, 2004), we see this reference to the silent Spirit: “Restoration efforts continue making progress on Spirit. ‘We have a patient in rehab, and we’re nursing her back to health’ [emphasis added] said JPL’s Jennifer Trosper, mission manager” (n.p.). Not only have the rovers been given human characteristics (if not personalities) by the NASA team, it has been intentional since the first day. I cannot speak for all of NASA’s audiences, but I became emotionally entangled with the rovers early on. I have followed them daily. In fact, many of my ideas about how communication can be most powerful on the Internet came from watching these writers through the years. In short, understanding of audiences comes not from a name but a collection of descriptions carefully collected and tested over time. Even then, understanding is incomplete.

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HOW TO ESTABLISH A RHETORICAL STANCE As I have mentioned previously, rhetoric can be described as that part of communication intended to persuade, and all communication has a persuasive component. This persuasion occurs when you effectively meet the needs and expectations of the audience as you meet your own needs and expectations. If you have a user who needs a quick and detailed tutorial on producing a special effect in Flash, you have a good sense of his needs and expectations. The rhetorically sound approach is to provide a serious and effective, easy to understand, step-by-step tutorial that leads the reader to a finished project. But there are different audiences, and their needs and expectations may differ slightly. Suppose the one audience is trying to figure out how to tween animations in Flash. This is a simple process that most anybody who has done any animation in Flash knows how to do. The person wanting to learn to tween is likely a beginner in animating with Flash. Dummies Guides do an excellent job of dealing with beginners. They try to be glib, a little funny, disarming, and instructive. That can be said to be their rhetorical stance. On the other hand, suppose the animator is looking for a way to program calculus and trigonometry into a simulation that permits students to change velocity and angular momentum settings based on equations they have solved and then fire a cannon to see if their solutions are correct. This person might consider glib, a little funny, and disarming content akin to pedantic, baby talk. This person needs a completely different rhetorical stance—the kind of thing you might see in the Foundation series, ActionScript 3.0 Animations, perhaps. Whatever the communication, there is always a rhetorical stance, and the stance will reflect the needs and expectations of the audience in contrast to your needs and expectations as a writer.

NEEDS OF THE AUTHORS ENTANGLED WITH THE NEEDS OF THE AUDIENCE I suggest that the process is quite simple: identify the needs and expectations of the audience and compare them to your needs and expectations, then use your skills and talents as a writer to compose a text that fills them all. In the previous paragraphs, I implied that NASA’s needs and expectations do not align exactly with their audiences’ needs and expectations. NASA’s needs and expectations generally follow from NASA’s exigencies and the purposes of the texts: inform the public, enhance STEM education, develop and recruit from a team of educated scientists, and (implicitly) develop a community of friends and supporters. NASA’s ongoing odyssey of the Mars rovers meets those goals well.

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PATTERNS AND STRUCTURES IN GENRES Patterns in communication make it possible to understand a communication. For example, lightning strikes some distance away, and five seconds later we hear thunder. We know that the lightning struck approximately 5,000 feet away because of the length of silence. We can tell that because sound travels at approximately 1,000f/s at sea level. The five seconds of silence tells us how far away the lightning struck, but it is not the silence carrying the message—there are no media in the silence to contain a message. The pattern of light-silencethunder carries the message. The message is carried by two different mediums and a measurable absence of media. The patterns found in a medium might be vibrations (vocalizations) or images (illustrations) or shapes (written texts) or electrical pulses (webpage), but any communication is constructed of patterns in some kind of medium or combination of media. These patterns become the structures that carry the message. The reason I spend so much time introducing these patterns is because they occur at all levels of communication. The measure of quality in communication is founded in an understanding of these patterns, and for the rest of the section on structures, I will necessarily return to the patterns again and again. Physicality of Genres Just as genres may be broken into subgenres, and these subgenres can be broken into their own subgenres, so can media be broken into submedia. Ink and paper are mediums. Bound books are subsets of ink and paper, and novels are subsets of bound books, but novels also begin to look like genres. The hardboiled detective novel is a subset of the medium of bound books and a subset of the genre of mysteries. This seems to imply a continuum where at one extreme we find something that can only be called a medium (e.g., ink and paper, radio-wave signal, chalk on a blackboard, etc.) and at another extreme the content can only be called a genre (e.g., news story, tale, computer documentation, tutorial, demonstration, etc.), and at a place in the middle things are arguably a combination of genres and named or implied media (e.g., e-mail, webpage, brochure, novel, help file, etc.). I suspect that this is not true. I suggest it is more likely that media and genres exist as separate ideas that overlap. Much as an automobile is not an automobile without its power drive, a genre is not a genre without its medium. But just as the automobile might use any of several drive systems, the genre might use any of several different media. For example, the hardboiled detective novel can exist equally comfortably in a Kindle, a tablet, or in a bound book. Mediums seem to be the physical, structural elements of genres, which cannot exist in their absence. For any genre, there may be a variety of different appropriate media, but there is always at least one providing the appropriate patterns for communication.

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Design of Patterns Previously, I was talking about the physicality of the media—the ink, paper, electrons, vibrations in the air, radio frequencies, etc. How that physicality is molded into a communication is a design issue, and this is where the genre and medium overlap. The appropriate shape of all the patterns we have examined is driven by rhetorical need. As writers, we mold these shapes to do our bidding. The structures of these patterns range from the document’s physicality through real and conceptual metaphors to the document’s ambiance or emotional tone. Our different structural choices can enhance or inhibit effectiveness of the document. This even applies to documents that many might suggest are not designed to be persuasive. Subtle Design Patterns in Content Presentation Just as the language is necessarily rhetorical, so are the design issues. The color of the page is a part of its structure, as is the color of the text, the fonts, and even the number of different fonts. Conceptually, your approach can even be unnoticeable but nonetheless effective. For example, an approach to communicating an idea might be broken into storytelling, inverted pyramid, chunking, or advanced organizing (or some combination of them). Each has its advantages, depending on what you are trying to do. For example, Microsoft uses advanced organizing in their online help. They begin by telling us what this particular page will do for you: Certain numbered lists—for example, legal lists—require the ability to change a number manually and for Word to correctly change the numbers that follow. You can use the Set Numbering Value option to change a number manually while Word renumbers the list that follows. (Set Number Value in Microsoft online help, n.p.)

Advanced organizing is usually applied in instructional settings. The idea is to make it possible to understand where you are going before actually showing you how to get there. Chunking separates ideas into digestible segments. In training, chunking the instruction has been shown to improve learning when compared to traditional texts. Chunking in this context is different from chunking as usability studies gurus use it. In their context, chunking the text makes it less daunting and makes it easier to find elements in the text. In this context, chunking separates each topic from the other, so you can get the information a bite at a time. In Universal Principles of Design, Lindwell et al. (2003) described the appropriate use of chunking as follows: “Chunk information when people are required to recall or retain information, or when information is used for problem solving.

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Do not chunk information that is to be searched or scanned” (p. 30). The “do not chunk information that is to be searched or scanned,” implies that the authors disagree with chunking as usability gurus suggest it. I think a consolidation of the two ideas is appropriate as long as you think about the process carefully. Inverted pyramids permit readers to grab enough information in a few seconds if all they need is an overview. Typically you can read the first sentence in a newspaper story and know pretty much everything (in broad brushstrokes) you will find in the story. Sometimes what you need to hook your readers (get them to read the whole text) is an inverted pyramid that excites them enough to get them to read on. In fact, the lead (that first sentence) is often called “the hook.” Stories are among the most powerful marketing tools available. I discuss this at great length in the next chapter. But all of the most expensive things we can buy are expensive because they have such great stories. The important takeaway is this: you should not just sit down and begin writing. Think carefully about how the information should be presented. How you choose to structure your content can make an important difference in how it is received by the audience. One thing is for sure: a one-size-fits-all approach (chunk it) limits your options significantly. Aesthetic Patterns According to Lidwell et al. (2003), aesthetics are important for more than just making a page look good. They allege that an aesthetically interesting page is viewed by readers as more usable: The aesthetic-usability effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs— whether they are or not. The effect has been observed in several experiments, and has significant implications regarding the acceptance, use, and performance of a design. (p. 18)

This is not unlike the phenomenon where more attractive individuals are perceived as more competent. Creating an aesthetically pleasing page is a matter of choosing appropriate patterns and may have little to do with being pretty. An aesthetically pleasing page for one audience will not necessarily be an aesthetically pleasing page for another. Cabelas.com and 1800flowers.com are structurally similar (both looking like catalog pages with an 800x400 carousel at the top), but aesthetically completely different (Cabela’s with earth tones and greys and 1800flowers.com with lavender and pink tendrils).

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Social Patterns Communication occurs when commonly recognized patterns are transferred from a transmitter to a receiver. The transmitter and receiver might or might not be human. Humans, of course, communicate with each other, but so do computers. Sensors communicate with computers, and computers transmit that information to humans or other computers or even animals. Although these could be classified as genres, there may not always be an obvious social pattern implied by the communication. The exigency forcing the sensor to regularly update a computer would be in the program, yet the process of regularly updating the computer might be called a genre. On the other hand, the need to update the computer will come out of a human need. For example, the thermometer of some vehicles continuously updates the computer, and that message is sent to the dashboard so the driver can read it. Often, the thermometer will update the computer and the computer will generate an intrusive message warning of freezing conditions. The computer is doing something with the thermometer’s information: changing the temperature of a room, or updating the temperature reading in a car. If we drill deeply enough into the exigency, we find a human need. Contemporary genre theorists suggest that these social patterns are an important part of any genre. In the past, the above ideas were irrelevant to professional writing. Professional writing was all about humans communicating with other humans, but now that there are sensors writing to computers and computers composing original content for humans, it becomes clear that conditions for writers are becoming more complicated. Currently, computers either generate simple information or combine bits of content created by humans, but soon they will be doing it with complex messages. A good example of a very powerful computer creating texts and transmitting them to humans was seen on the 2011 Jeopardy! quiz show when IBM’s Watson outplayed two human holders of record winnings. When asked a question, Watson sought out and returned an internally composed answer. It might seem like something of an aberration, one computer that can parse metaphors, red herrings, and ambiguities and provide accurate answers (albeit short ones), but there will soon be many more Watsons, and they will not be providing short answers. IBM sees customer service as one of the first things the next Watson clones will tackle: The customer service industry is judged on two criteria: speed and accuracy. Watson, the IBM computing system designed to compete on Jeopardy!, is built to achieve both of these. IBM experts share their thoughts on how the DeepQA technology that powers Watson could transform the customer service industry into a faster, more accurate experience. (IBM, 2011, n.p.)

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IBM has long been deeply involved with improving content retrieval techniques (e.g., they are deeply involved with Darwin Information Typing Architecture), and this will be a major step in that direction. Another example of computers generating original texts can be found with the AutoTutor. In “AutoTutor: An Intelligent Tutoring System with MixedInitiative Dialogue,” Graesser et al. (2005) described a talking head that provides tutorial information for students: The dialogue mechanisms of AutoTutor are both computationally manageable and similar to what human tutors do. Human tutors cannot deeply comprehend all of the contributions of students, most of which are imprecise, vague, fragmentary, incomplete, and ungrammatical [8]. What human tutors can do is compare student input to anticipated good answers and misconceptions. LSA provides a suitable algorithm for these comparison operations. (p. 614)

Compared to Watson, AutoTutor uses fairly simple algorithms, but in the not-too-distant future, AutoTutor will be combined with a computer like Watson, and computers will efficiently teach us original content. I can imagine a kiosk in a library that can instantly give us accurate answers to complex questions. In short, we have already long been in an environment where genres include relationships between humans and computers and even between computers and other computers. Currently, as computers create texts, they make amazing mistakes and (at least for now) make no effort at a rhetorical stance. When a computer writes, it might as well be writing for another computer as for a human. That is to say, there is no persuasive effort in anything a computer can currently write. Persuasion, at least for now, is something professional writers do better than computers. IDENTIFYING BEST STRUCTURE COMES LAST Ironically, in the sentence describing the genre, the structure often appears while transitioning between exigencies and purposes of a text (e.g., we need a press release to explain). But this can mislead the writer or evaluator. “We are bleeding profits, so we need a webpage that will encourage people to buy more when they come to the store,” can lead writers down a blind alley. Although the structure occurs in the transition between exigency and purpose, it should be put there after the writer’s tasks are clear. Identification of the optimal structure occurs last in the process and is plugged in only then. Here you can see how the flow goes: exigency leads to a transition to purpose of the text without naming the structure. The purpose leads to a transition to the audience. Knowing the exigency, purpose, needs of the audience, and needs of the author tends to define the structure of the text.

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A company’s exigency is that it has a new product (a high-caliber handgun for hunting) that nobody knows about yet. The company decides to produce a campaign to introduce the product to its most obvious audiences—small and specialized. The audiences will have magazines, television programs, and websites they will tend to read, view, or visit. Once the company has identified its audiences and the audiences’ venues of choice, the company is in a position to define magazine ads, television commercials, and webpages it can use to reach them. If, instead, the product is a piece of industrial equipment (perhaps a crawler tractor), the structures will be completely different (even if there is some overlap in audiences). Caterpillar Corporations’s venues will be news releases leading to magazine articles, specification sheets, a webpage, or videos sent to customers. The different structures arise out of the different audiences and where they will be found. Caterpillar Corporation will not find its audience in the same places Ruger & Co. will, and so it will use different genres for reaching its audiences. Complex Exigencies and Complex Social Patterns Exigencies can lead to very complicated social patterns. We are planning to go to a four-day workweek (exigency), and it is important that we inform (purpose) our employees (audience) about the change in a manner that won’t upset them (purpose again). Let’s start by floating the idea at the water cooler (structure) to get a sense of their concerns; then we can address the concerns in the newsletter (structure) and perhaps a series of meetings (structure). In this case, we have one exigency, one purpose, one audience, but several structures. On the other hand, if we are a large company, we also have to notify the city because we are going to impact transportation patterns. We also need to notify the general public—especially if our exigency includes the need to be more green. We need to notify our vendors and suppliers, and our customers. If this is all an inconvenience for them, we have to make a sound argument for why we need to go to a four-day workweek. With any strategic change, a company of any size at all has a collection of huge and complicated communications exigencies, with many communications designed to do a variety of things to a variety of audiences. The structure of the text is the easiest of its components to understand, which is why historically, texts’ genres have typically been described in terms of their structures. To decide what structures to use, however, it is best to identify: (a) exigency, (b) purpose, (c) audience expectations, and (d) what the company needs and expects from the audience. Appropriate structures will follow.

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NATURE OF THE EVALUATION PROCESS Usability studies begin with the homepage or some principal navigation page, and the test subject descends through a series of clicks into the depths of the site. The test subject might be asked to find something and, beginning with that first click on the homepage, would search the site for that thing—moving from homepage through navigation pages to content pages until the thing is found. The metrics would be based on how difficult it was to complete that task. Evaluating Content is Different from Writing Content and From Doing Usability Studies Evaluating the content for an entire site, however, works best in exactly the opposite direction. You begin in the innermost content pages and work back through the navigation pages until you are evaluating the homepage itself. Once you have evaluated a text (having identified exigency, purpose, audience expectation, structures, etc.), when you go up to the next level, it becomes easy to see whether the link on the navigation page is sending the appropriate audiences to the page you just examined, and it is easy to see whether the page you just evaluated evolves naturally from the one above it in the hierarchy. The questions you are asking are simply (a) “What is the exigency, and is it valid in this context?” (b) “How urgent is the communication?” (c) “What is the purpose, and is it appropriate for this context?” (d) “Who is the audience, and is the purpose and exigency valid for them?” (e) “What is the rhetorical purpose of the text, and is it appropriate?” and finally (f) “What is the structure of the text and is that appropriate?”—EUPARS. Anybody can answer the first four questions, but only a well-informed professional writer can answer the last two. If you hold the questions above in mind, you can quickly evaluate any text. Often, however, you have to explain your analysis. Putting your analysis in a chart can help with that. This becomes an effective rubric or template for evaluating existing texts. It is not hard to find examples of writing to which you might apply this rubric, some good and some not so good. The American Solar Energy Society (ASES) has a “Newsroom” section on its website where press releases are available. ASES begin one page with the following: Established in 1954, the nonprofit American Solar Energy Society (ASES) is the nation’s leading association of solar professionals & advocates. ASES leads national efforts to promote education, public outreach, and research about solar energy and other sustainable technologies. ASES publishes the award-winning SOLAR TODAY magazine, organizes and presents the National Solar Conference, and leads the ASES National Solar Tour— the largest grassroots solar event in the world, as well as other powerful programs. ASES is now supported by more than 13,000 members across the nation (solar professionals and grassroots supporters) who work together to help create a sustainable energy economy. (ASES, 2011, n.p.)

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The rest of the page is dedicated to links to press releases. So let’s ask the five EUPARS questions: • Exigency: The press releases do not contain comprehensive descriptions of the association’s background. If the media pick up a story, they will want to add some background material—a reasonable exigency for the conditions. • Urgency: If this is not in place, reporters can discuss the association’s press release but not the association. It needs to be there. • Purpose: The text provides the background demanded by the exigency and so is appropriate. • Audience: The audience is largely made up of journalists looking for news stories they can use to meet their various deadlines. Content they can use with little change is particularly useful. • Rhetoric: The audience is the press (probably mostly science and technology writers), and so the copy is appropriate for that audience. • Structure: The structure is in narrative format. Often such a structure would be inappropriate for a website. In this case, however, I cannot fault the structure. A bulleted list might be more accessible, but the paragraph is short enough, and the text can be copied whole if the reporter needs. For this specific purpose (even from a usability standpoint), this paragraph is probably more useful than a bulleted list. The journalists need the copy to be good enough to use without major modification and expect it to be accurate, and the organization needs the publicity and an ongoing, positive relationship with the journalists. All needs and expectations are met if the copy is sufficiently well written and accurate that the journalist can simply copy the release in total (or significant parts of it). If we put these elements together in a chart, we have something we could show a supervisor to support presentation of our opinion (see Table 4). An analysis of the text demonstrates that it is probably acceptable. Certainly, some writers could write better copy, but the EUPARS components of this copy seem OK. User-Centric or Quality-Centric The above page provided by ASES might seem like a user-centric page, but I suggest it is a quality-centric page designed to connect readers to more quality-centric pages. If you can imagine a reporter looking for a story or information to fill a gap in a story, the longer the reporter lingers in this section, the better it is for the association. It is the quality of the material, not the navigation, which is actually very simple, that keeps the reader engaged.

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Table 4. Template for Demonstrating Acceptability of Content for a Page in the ASES Evaluation

Appropriate? If not, why not?

EXIGENCY

The press releases do not contain comprehensive descriptions of the association’s background. If the media pick up a story, they will want to add some background material.

Yes

URGENCY

This information is important. It permits the reporter to include the organization’s story.

Yes

PURPOSE

The text provides the organizational background demanded by the exigency.

Yes

AUDIENCE

The audience is largely made up of journalists looking for news stories they can use to meet their various deadlines.

Yes

RHETORIC

The audience is the press (probably mostly science and technology writers), and so they copy what is appropriate for that audience.

Yes

The structure is in narrative format. Often such STRUCTURE/ APPROPRIATE? a structure would be inappropriate for a website. In this case, however, I cannot fault the structure. A bulleted list might be more accessible, but the paragraph is short enough, and the text can be copied whole if the reporter needs. For this specific purpose (even from a usability standpoint) this paragraph is probably more useful than a bulleted list.

Yes

NASA’s Relationship with its Reporters There are examples of this relationship between organizations and their reporters everywhere. In March 2011, NASA produced a press release that was immediately picked up the first day and used verbatim under a variety of headlines by more than twenty news organizations. This is valuable, but the cut-and-paste mentality can cause problems. In an article titled “After 13 Months, Roving Cosmos Camera Sends Final Image,” we find the sentences, During its 13-month survey, WISE took millions of infrared images of the entire. NASA expects to share the first batch of photos this April, with the final release slated for the spring of 2012. (CBSNews.com, 2011, n.p.)

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I can’t help but wonder, “entire” what? Entire universe? Entire sky? Missing words such as those above typically come from carelessly cutting and pasting content. Wrong Structure for the Page In contrast, Wholesale Solar says this on its homepage: Welcome to Wholesale Solar, your source for discount prices on solar panels and renewable energy products for home power, back-up power, solar & wind power, off-grid & grid intertied residential, marine and RV power systems. Retail and wholesale pricing. See reduced prices on solar panels, panels by the pallet, grid-tie and off-grid inverters. We design and sell renewable energy systems for projects large and small, for homeowners and do-it-yourselfers, contractors, installers, electricians, and developers. Call one of our experienced solar design techs to talk about your project at. . . . If you have your most recent electric bill handy, we’ll be able to get started with the design process right away. (WholesaleSolar.com, 2011a, n.p.)

If you ask all of the EUPARS questions I asked above, you might conclude the exigency is valid, the purpose of the copy seems appropriate for their anticipated audience, the rhetoric is meant to be persuasive, but the structure is all wrong. Possible EUPARSs are clear enough: • Exigency (valid?): Someone in a decision-making position feared that potential customers coming to the page would not know who the company is and how inexpensive their products are. Probably a valid exigency. • Urgency: This is probably relatively important information. • Purpose (appropriate?): To immediately inform the user. The purpose is probably appropriate. • Audience: The company accurately describes its audiences in the paragraph: various portions of the public and construction community interested in solar power. The audience will range between people completely uninformed on the subject but curious, to people with certification on the subject and simply wanting a less expensive resource. • Rhetoric (appropriate for purpose and audience?): The rhetorical breakdown is subtle. The copy is clearly designed to persuade the audience that Wholesale Solar is a good place to buy solar products, and it assumes that audience is open to persuasion. The audience comes to the page and will find it useful to immediately know they are in a right place, as it is useful for the company to be able to pitch itself to the audience. From that point of view, the rhetoric seems right, but it is not. The audience

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will need to immediately know where they are. The paragraphs do not meet that need. Instead, they force the audience to read unnecessarily dense blocks of text. • Structure (appropriate?): This is placed in a narrative structure. This is not an appropriate structure for instant information. No doubt, you could run a piece of copy through your mind and make all of the appropriate comparisons (see Table 5). The copy does fit within the appropriate exigency, purpose, and audience but is structurally problematic. A homepage is always a user-centric page. On navigation pages, the audience needs instant access to easily understandable information (Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think (2006) states it exactly), and that is what they expect. The text on this homepage would work better as bulleted lists: Wholesale Solar • discount prices on renewable energy products • off-grid & grid-tied residences • remote cabin, marine, & RV power systems • back-up power & uninterruptible power maintenance Retail and wholesale • all projects large and small • homeowners and do-it-yourselfers • contractors, installers, electricians, and developers Call one of our experienced solar design techs at . . . to talk about your project.

This says virtually the same thing the original copy did, but much more efficiently. Effective texts necessarily meet all of the demands of the EUPARS. The original paragraphs failed to meet the demands of the rhetoric and structure. Alien Copy on a User-Centric Page In the example above, I pointed out a segment of copy that is not necessarily inappropriate but is structured wrong. That is a case where a usability study might parse out the problem. In the case below, copy on the same page is completely alien and inappropriate for a variety of reasons. Brief History of Solar Panels Solar panels produce electricity from sunlight. The first solar panel-powered satellite was launched in 1958 by Hoffman Electronics, and until the late 1970s solar panels were used primarily to power space satellites, lights, and small electronics like calculators and watches. In the early 1990s

Yes

Yes Yes Yes

No: The audience will need to immediately know where they are. The paragraphs do not meet that need. Instead, they force the audience to read unnecessarily dense blocks of text. No: The appropriate structure for this kind of content is bulleted or numbered lists.

Someone in a decision-making position feared that potential customers coming to the page would not know who the company is and how inexpensive their products are.

It is probably important that some information be here.

To immediately inform the user.

The company accurately describes its audiences in the paragraph: various portions of the public and construction community interested in solar power. The audience will range between people completely uninformed on the subject but curious to people with certification on the subject and simply wanting a less expensive resource.

The rhetorical breakdown is subtle. The copy is clearly designed to persuade the audience that Wholesale Solar is a good place to buy solar products, and it assumes that audience is open to persuasion. The audience comes to the page and will find it useful to immediately know they are in a right place, as it is useful for the company to be able to pitch itself to the audience.

Narrative.

URGENCY

PURPOSE

AUDIENCE

RHETORIC

STRUCTURE/ APPROPRIATE?

Appropriate? If not, why not?

EXIGENCY

Evaluation

Table 5. Evaluating a Text Inappropriate for its Page—Wrong Structure

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Germany and Japan initiated long-term solar panel-installation incentive programs that resulted in lower costs for solar panel power and spurred the growth of robust PV industries in both countries. (WholesaleSolar.com, 2011a, n.p.)

What are the EUPARSs behind this copy? • Exigency (presumed): “We need to demonstrate that we know our stuff,” or alternatively, “We need our readers to be more informed about our product.” Both are reasonable exigencies. • Urgency: Low for this text on this page. • Purpose (presumed): Impress or inform the readers. Reasonable purposes. • Audience: A portion of the public and construction community interested in solar power. The audience will range between people completely ignorant on the subject but curious, to people with certification on the subject and simply wanting a less expensive resource. The text could only be useful to the most ignorant of these audiences and is unlikely to be useful even to them. • Rhetoric: Rhetorically, this is akin to a class project written by a ninth grader. Anybody who knows anything at all about solar either knows all of this information or is unlikely to need it (e.g., how long Germany and Japan have encouraged solar power). It is written to no particular audience, for no particular purpose, and has no particular stance. • Structure: This is a quality-centric structure. It is designed to be read fully and provides no important independent pieces of information that might be mined (e.g., prices, technical details, future of U.S. government support) (see Table 6). The writing fails on the final two counts. Assuming the exigencies and purpose I mention above, this paragraph does nothing to demonstrate the company’s expertise in the field, nor does it provide any meaningful information for even the most ignorant audience. True, someone who knows little about photovoltaics might not know that strong support for solar power began in Japan and Germany, but what does that bit of information add? Taking a Bad Idea and Making it Worse The next section of the above copy continues with, How Solar Panels Work Basic System Operation: When sunlight hits the solar panel’s cells, direct current (DC) flows through the inverter, which converts it to alternating current (AC). The AC power then flows directly into the building (if there is

Yes Yes

No: It is written to no particular audience, for no particular purpose, and has no particular stance. No: This is a quality-centric structure. It is designed to be read fully and provides no important independent pieces of information that might be mined.

To impress or inform the readers.

The company accurately describe its audiences in the paragraph. Various portions of the public and construction community interested in solar power. The audience will range between people completely uninformed on the subject but curious, to people with certification on the subject and simply wanting a less expensive resource.

Rhetorically, this is akin to a class project written by a ninth grader. Anybody who knows anything at all about solar power either knows all of this information or is unlikely to care.

Narrative.

PURPOSE

AUDIENCE

RHETORIC

STRUCTURE

Probably not

Low for this page.

URGENCY

Yes

“We need to demonstrate that we know our stuff,” or alternatively. “We need our readers to be more informed about our product.”

Appropriate?

EXIGENCY

Evaluation

Table 6. Evaluating a Text Where the Content is Inappropriate for Its Page

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demand), or into backup batteries if the system has them, or to the utility. When the power is flowing back to the utility grid, the electricity meter turns backward. (WholesaleSolar.com, 2011a, n.p.)

And . . . Solar Panel Components The Components: Photovoltaic cells are the core of the solar panel. They are made up of at least two layers of semiconductor material (usually pure silicon infused with boron and phosphorous). One layer has a positive charge, the other a negative charge. When sunlight strikes the solar panel, photons from the light are absorbed by the semiconductor atoms, which then release electrons. The electrons, freed from the negative layer of semiconductor, flow to the positive layer . . . thereby producing an electrical current. Since the electric current flows in one direction (like a battery), the electricity generated is called direct current (DC). Many individual cells are wired together in a sealed weatherproof unit called a solar module or panel. Types of Solar Panels There are three types of solar panels: single crystal, multi- or polycrystalline, and amorphous silicon. Each of these solar panel types is estimated to last at least twenty-five years. Some estimate that forty years is a reasonable expectation. The longevity rating of a solar panel refers to the number of years before the unit starts producing only 80 percent of its original power rating. For instance, some solar panels are warranted to produce at least 80 percent of their full-rated power after twenty-five years. Instead of stopping production completely, a solar panel will gradually produce less and less power over decades. Single-crystal solar panels are currently the most efficient type available, meaning that they produce the most power per square foot of module. The cells are fragile so they must be mounted in a rigid frame, and the solar panels usually have a polka dot or checkered pattern. (WholesaleSolar.com, 2011a, n.p.)

. . . and so on. Wholesale Solar might be hoping to use this information to demonstrate expertise, but these tiny tidbits on the homepage could have been written by a high school student, cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. Even worse, Googling “There are three types of solar panels: single crystal, multi- or poly-crystalline, and amorphous silicon” nets twenty-three different sites all using these exact paragraphs. Some unknown author wrote a simple description of solar power describing solar panels and their components, and twenty-three solar-related websites picked that copy up and pasted it onto their websites—and therein lies the problem and possible new exigency. Somebody in the company found the paragraphs posted on some old site and felt compelled

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to copy them and paste them somewhere. And so in a copy-paste mindset, someone just stuck them at the bottom of the first page—a symptom of thoughtless copy-paste, one of the biggest temptations facing web developers. In short, in the first example above, the text comes from a reasonable exigency; it serves a meaningful purpose for an identifiable audience, and the rhetorical stance leads to an appropriate structure. In the second example, the exigency seems reasonable; the audience is clearly identified, but the rhetorical stance leads to a problematical structure. Still, with some restructuring, the copy can be made to work. In the final example above, we know the copy is ineffective because it begins with invalid exigencies and content totally inappropriate for its audience and its place in the document. Transferring Text from One Document to Another—Copy-Paste Copy-pasting is not in itself a problem. It’s thoughtless copy-pasting that generates problems. It is easy enough to look at texts such as the ones above and quickly see their weaknesses based on quickly identifying their EUPARS, but suppose you are moving text from an old site, where the copy might work, to a new one, where the copy may or may not work. You need to know whether the old text is still valid, and if it is not valid, you need to be able to make a logical argument to a supervisor. You can usually answer that question in moments, if not seconds, on a modification of the form we looked at above. Like the other one, it permits you to identify problems and explain them to others (see Table 7).

Table 7. Rubric for Comparing a Text in Its Old Context to the Same Text in a New Context Old context

New context

Match?

Old context

New context

Appropriate?

Exigency/Valid? Purpose/ Appropriate? Audience

Rhetoric Structure

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The form extends the rubric I presented in the previous section from a single column to two. In this case, I have dropped the “urgency” row because I can find no value in it when making a comparison. You might choose to continue using it. In the form, the “OLD CONTEXT” column applies to the intentions for the text when it was originally produced, while the “NEW CONTEXT” column applies to the copy in its new context. For each of the “OLD CONTEXT” and “NEW CONTEXT” columns there are five questions: “What are the exigency, purpose, audiences, best rhetorical stance, and best structure?” The last column notes whether the old and new exigencies, purposes, and audiences match. If they do not match, or they are not valid, then you know the text is probably defective, and you can make that case to others. Suppose we look at a text I have discussed before, where I know its exigencies, purpose, and audience for a fact and so can use it for demonstration purposes. Students take classes in two areas: first, they build a theoretical foundation in rhetoric so that they can assess any writing situation and adapt their writing to the context as audience-aware, self-aware, self-confident writers; and, second, they learn about writing in a variety of contexts using the most up-to-date tools of technology so that they know both how to write and why they are writing, thus preparing them for the ever-changing job markets of the twenty-first century. (Anonymous, 2001b)

In the OLD CONTEXT column under exigency, you might write “We were being evaluated by Northwest Accreditation,” and in the NEW CONTEXT column, “Our enrollment is dropping.” Both of these exigencies are valid. In the right column under exigency, you write, “Our undergraduate student population is in decline,” and it is still valid. Since both the exigencies for old and new text are valid but do not match, it is highly likely the text is inappropriate for its new place (see Table 8). You actually need go no further than the first row. The mismatch is immediately visible. If you feel the need to go on, however, you could see that in every case, the text should never have been used where it was. If we look at another example I discussed in Chapter 1, we find similar results. English majors have found job opportunities in financial institutions, insurance companies, federal and state government agencies, the hospitality industry, universities, museums, and service organizations. They are employed as personnel and planning directors, administrative associates, marketing directors, technical librarians, wage and salary representatives, service correspondents, claims adjustors, and insurance agents. The English major is also an excellent undergraduate major for those who wish to enter law, medical, or dental school; complete post-graduate work in literature, film, creative writing or library science; or enter sales, management, and marketing programs in large organizations. (Anonymous, 2001a)

No

Sophomores. New text

Professors, evaluators.

Old text

Not written for mid-level college students— language and style are not appropriate.

In this case, the structure should be easy to mine (bulleted and numbered lists).

Written for a highly educated audience of academics. Audience expects academic prose, does not mind long sentences, needs comprehensive descriptions—language and style are appropriate.

The structure is quality-centric narrative. This might not be appropriate in all cases but it is for this audience.

Rhetoric

Structure

No

No

Appropriate?

No

Recruit students—appropriate.

Exigency/Valid? Evaluation by Northwest Accreditation. These evaluations are critical measures of the quality of universities and their programs. A component Purpose/ on a site that does a good job of spelling out Appropriate? assessment metrics and teaching philosophies is crucial. The exigency is valid. Audience

Impress evaluators with our academics— appropriate.

Match? No

New context Programs are largely rated by administration and local legislators by body count. Fewer students mean less funding, fewer jobs, and the possibility of being out altogether. Recruiting students is important for any department. This exigency is valid.

Old context

Table 8. Comparing Texts with Mismatched Exigencies, Purposes, and Audiences

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On the left you say, “Our undergraduate population is in decline,” and on the right you can say, “Our undergraduate population is in decline.” On the left for purpose you can say “recruit,” and on the right you can say “recruit.” But then on the left, under audience, you put “literature majors,” and on the right you say “tech comm. majors.” Instantly, you know the text was never designed for its new audience (see Table 9). Again, you can instantly see the mismatches. More importantly, you can take something like this to a supervisor and easily demonstrate that an ineffective text needs to be discarded or rewritten. MULTIPLE EMBEDDED GENRES Keep in mind as you evaluate that by its very nature, a webpage will have different genres embedded in it. At the least, it will have different kinds of menus. If it is a sales page, there should be some rhetorical area designed to persuade readers to buy. There can also be something akin to a spec sheet that provides details about the product. There might be a review section and a section that offers readers other purchasing opportunities. Those choices would occur in a collection of different menus. My point is that on every page, you cannot simply look at the text as a complete package. You need to examine the different segments, paragraph by paragraph, to make certain every element is doing its job. If we go back to the Wholesale Solar site, we can see a wide variety of genres. The page begins with a well-designed and attractive banner. But the banner is followed by the “Welcome to Wholesale Solar” paragraph. This is a marketing text, and a better choice would have been a tagline or bulleted points. The paragraph is followed by a menu of links to pages dedicated to specific panel manufacturers, identified by their logos. The copy on the pages at the ends of these links seems to be a mix of original writing and content pasted from elsewhere. Generally speaking, the copy on those pages works. Other links lead to pages made up of tables listing products the company sells. These exemplify something I consider a huge error. These pages are purely user-centric, which is to say they assume the user is quickly going to find the panel or other structure she wants, buy it, and leave. This is a good model if the users already know everything they need to know about a product. But one might wonder, why pay $600 for one panel and $425 for another? Why do some panels offer ninety volts with less than an amp, while others offer far fewer volts and more amps? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these differences? On their homepage, Wholesale Solar has about one and a half typewritten pages of information on solar power, which may not be useful to many people. Here, where it is needed, the company has nothing. Here it has the opportunity to actively sell —but instead the company expects users to actively buy. Below the icons on the homepage is another series of tables listing pallets of solar panels by different manufacturers, off-grid systems, and grid-tie systems. Below that is where the company begins the history of solar power I described

No

No

The rhetoric is designed to persuade a literature audience—not appropriate. The structure that instantly highlighted the many and varied jobs in the technical communication profession would be appropriate.

The structure is persuasion-centric. To the extent it hides the problem that the jobs it mentions are not all that good, it is appropriate for this audience.

Structure

Appropriate?

The rhetoric is designed to persuade the audience above—appropriate.

New text

Old text

No

Rhetoric

Engineers who struggle with math, designers who like to write, technologists who write and do art, creative writers hoping to make a living writing.

Impressionable students searching for a place that leads to a degree they can use, but interested in the liberal arts.

Audience

No

Impress sophomores and recruit them into technical communication.

Impress freshmen and sophomores and recruit them into the English department (literature)—appropriate.

Yes

Match?

Programs are largely rated by administration and local legislators by body count. Fewer students mean less funding, fewer jobs, and the possibility of being out altogether. Recruiting students is important for any department.

New placement

Purpose/ Appropriate?

Exigency/Valid? Programs are largely rated by administration and local legislators by body count. Fewer students mean less funding, fewer jobs, and the possibility of being out altogether. Recruiting students is important for any department. This exigency is valid.

Old placement

Table 9. Comparing Texts with Mismatched Purposes and Audiences

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above. In total, counting the different kinds of menus and a carousel, there are at least twelve different genres on the homepage, and most of them are not well considered. Examine the Relevance of Links Once you have examined the page, you should examine the links to that page to make certain they are coming from the right places and bringing the appropriate audiences. Web analytics tools track readers as they pass through web documents. These tools can tell you how many times a link gets clicked, or in terms of percentages, what percentage of readers on a given page click which links. If you create a benchmark of clicks on a given button, you can then make adjustments and look for changes. Any improvements or problems with the change become instantly apparent. Web analytics is an especially powerful tool for examining the relevance of links. In short, look at content pages first. Look at every paragraph individually, identifying the exigency, purpose, audience, and appropriate structure for that paragraph. Evaluate the paragraph based on that knowledge. Once you have examined the individual paragraphs, examine the page as a whole. Once you have examined the page carefully, go up one level and examine the link to that page, making certain it is sending the correct audience to the page in the most effective manner (that is to say, it is sending as many readers as possible). RHETORICAL SUBTLETY In the sections above, I discussed exigency, purpose, audience, and structures in addition to rhetoric. Pretty much any programmer or IT professional can look at those things and determine that there are or are not good matches. But being able to evaluate the quality of the rhetoric separates the professional writer from the technician. This is where you shine, because this is something nobody else but a good communicator can do. A text can seem to be on topic and for the right audience and still fail to do its job, and you are the one who will see that. Conversely, copy can be a shambles, but easily fixed with a few rhetorical touchups. The real strength you can bring to the team is your rhetorical knowledge. If we look at the next example (introduced in Chapter 1), you can see what I mean. First example Nicholas Biddle transformed the journal entries of Captains Lewis and Clark into an artful narrative. Biddle was the rare combination of genius coupled with financial solvency giving him the talent and the freedom to render the narrative highly readable and take no credit. Mr. Biddle chose Paul Allen to complete the publication process hence the name “Biddle–Allen edition.” The Journals (as they were originally written) were not published in

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their entirety until one hundred years after the expedition. That definitive edition was brought to press by Reuben Thwaites in 1904. (Powell’s Books, 2009, n.p.)

Consider the above in the context of EUPARS: • Exigency (valid?): According to Powell’s books, there are two exigencies for this text. Powell’s books needs to maintain a reputation as a dealer of very rare books, and it needs to make a profit. • Urgency: Clearly, there should be something here designed to market the books and their reputation. • Purpose (appropriate?): The purpose of the text is to impress readers and perhaps persuade them to consider the possibility of buying the book. At this point, the text seems to do that. • Audience: Their audience is made up of those rare people who love old books or old Americana or the adventures of the old West and have very deep pockets. • Rhetoric (appropriate?): Superficially, the rhetoric looks good and seems to be meeting the needs of exigency and purpose for the appropriate audience. I suggest that, while not awful, it is not particularly good. The text starts off well. It presents an important part of the book’s provenance but becomes muddled, and by the end, becomes completely confusing. Why are they talking about a book that came to press almost one hundred years after this one? • Structure (appropriate?): The structure is a persuasion-centric narrative, which I believe is appropriate for the audience. I think the only significant problem with the text is in the rhetoric, and with very little change, it can be improved (at least in my opinion): Nicholas Biddle transformed the journals of Captains Lewis and Clark into a remarkable narrative of the most famous and significant American land expedition in history. He applied the rare combination of genius and financial freedom to render the narrative highly readable while taking no credit. Mr. Biddle chose Paul Allen to complete the publication process in 1814. This exceptionally rare “Biddle–Allen edition” began with 1,417 copies, of which approximately half were incomplete or damaged in publication. Only one third ever had all of their maps. At present, approximately twentythree copies remain extant, with only a few in private hands.

I do not claim that my rhetorical rendition is as good as can be written, but I would be surprised by an argument that mine is not doing a better rhetorical job.

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Second example If we say, We have developed a new adrenal support medication and need to take it to market (exigency). We need to produce a new marketing campaign so our customers (medical professionals) will understand its value and begin prescribing it to their patients suffering from hypoadrenalism. And we need a webpage homeopathic doctors can access. Furthermore, we need to persuade the doctors to prescribe or dispense it.

we are naming our exigency, purpose, and audience all in a bundle. When we look at a body of text designed to persuade medical professionals that this is a substance worth prescribing, we can see whether it appropriately affects the audience it is supposed to affect. Adrenal Support is a homeopathic formula for symptoms related to hypoadrenalism. The adrenal glands are triangular shaped glands located on top of the kidneys. They produce hormones such as estrogen, progesterone, steroids, cortisol and cortisone, and chemicals such as adrenaline (epinephrine), norepinephrine and dopamine. When the glands produce more or less hormones than required, disease conditions may occur. (Elixir of Life Apothecary, 2011, n.p.)

Looking at the EUPARS components of the text, we find, • Exigency (valid?): We have a new homeopathic formula that nobody knows about—valid. • Purpose (appropriate?): Inform homeopathic prescribers about the formula— appropriate. • Audience: Doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, others medically informed. • Rhetoric (appropriate?): Knowing what the text is supposed to do and to whom, we instantly recognize it fails. The problem, however, is rhetorical. The text is appropriate for the place but has no clear audience. It appears to be written to someone who does not know what an adrenal gland actually is and fails to explain why the medication is an important supplement for people with hypoadrenalism. It has the look of a text written (or copy-pasted) by a writer who has no idea how to write for a specific audience. It is written in lay language, except for the jargon, which few lay people would understand. On the other hand, true medical professionals may be offended, because it uses the professional equivalent of “baby talk” and tells them nothing at all. In this case, there is no sense of being directed at any audience; nor is there a sense of the text having any purpose. The text fails rhetorically. • Structure (appropriate?): The copy appears to have been written within user-centric guidelines (short, chunked) and fails because it is too short.

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Although this text falls short of its goal, it is copy/pasted into no fewer than seventy-five websites. Being able to efficiently evaluate quality of rhetoric in texts may be your biggest strength as a writer. The ability to cast persuasive copy for specific audiences is uncommon, if not rare, and it is the important skill that those who would advocate writing for a generalized audience fail to recognize, much less understand.

RICH MEDIA—BACK TO EVERYTHING IS A TEXT So far I have applied these rubrics to alphanumeric texts. Since a genre can occur in any medium, these rubrics apply equally well to any medium on the webpage. To evaluate the effectiveness of a video, one applies exactly the same processes. One site with borderline usability but amazing marketing, particularly with rich media, is the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que house mentioned earlier. Their homepage is attractive enough, but finding their marketing information is awkward. Navigation to the content pages occurs across the top of a cluttered page spelled out in rope characters on a wooden board. Access to their marketing strength (testimonials) can be found in two small boxes at the bottom, buried under the clutter. One of the boxes goes to a collection of “Testimonials.” The other, titled “News & Events,” goes to a 404 page. The testimonials link (in 6pt, saying “Read more,”) goes to a collection of amazing comments and videos. The testimonials begin with Sandra Bullock saying, “My God, this food is the best, I mean the best!” Under her statement are three links to video reviews by Bobby Flay (“Best Thing I Ever Ate,”) Duff Goldman (“Best Thing I Ever Ate,”) and Adam Richman (“Man v. Food,”) all calling this the best barbecue they had ever eaten. These links are followed on the page by links to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, People Magazine, Wall Street Journal, Southern Living, and many more, all calling this some of the best barbecue you can eat. In an article called “31 Places to Go This Summer,” the New York Times lists the Salt Lick as number one. I find the irony thick in this website, where the most amazing marketing they have available is actually the most difficult thing to find in the site—chalk one up for usability. On the other hand, usability gurus tend to frown on a lot of video on websites. Although it is self-evident that any one of these videos is worth a fortune, it is also possible to use the EUPARS rubric to demonstrate their value: • Exigency (valid?): The Salt Lick is approximately twenty miles from the nearest city, Austin. To bring a body of customers, they need more than simple advertising. They need to build a cult following—this is a valid exigency.

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• Purpose (valid?): The video (I’ll use Bobby Flay’s, “Best Thing I Ever Ate: Salt Lick Beef Ribs,”) was produced by the Food Channel. The Salt Lick placed it on their site to help build the case that their barbecue is the all-around best (it joins other similar reviews). • Audience: The audience is national, not regional. It includes people who love barbecue and enjoy the experience of a special place to eat. Austin has many visitors, and the Salt Lick wants to attract as many of those as they can—in addition to a huge, loyal crowd of customers. • Rhetoric (appropriate?): Bobby Flay provides the best rhetoric possible. He is an outsider with no obvious agenda, and he calls their beef ribs the best he has ever eaten in a video that is nothing short of gushing. The sense is that this is a review, not an ad, but it is so positive, it might as well be an ad. The rhetoric is definitely appropriate. • Structure (appropriate?): There are a number of reviews from major newspapers, and they are all excellent. But for a barbecue-holic, nothing tops seeing these amazing caramelized slices of beef and pork being flopped over on an open pit and slathered with mops full of thick sauce. On the video, we see them sliced into servings and served to a table surrounded by hungry people who have been breathing in the odor of cooking beef and pork for the past ten minutes. The only better structure is to take the audience there and let them see for themselves. One of the things Flay says in the video is that they only serve the beef ribs occasionally. When he recorded the show, customers had to ask if Salt Lick is serving them, because usually they are not. That is no longer true. Since the Flay video, they have had to put the beef ribs on their daily menu—a testament to the value of this video. IDENTIFYING SUCCESSFUL TEXTS There is a great deal of excellent writing on the Internet. In fact, I suggest there is a lot more good writing than bad. The problem I see with writing on the Internet is not that so much of it is bad, but that it can be hard to tell one from the other. That is the problem I have addressed in this book. Some of the best writing on the Internet may be done by NASA. They have clearly spelled out their exigencies and their purpose and have clearly identified their audiences. NASA’s children’s (Kid’s Club) pages tend to be filled with noisemakers. You can hardly pass your cursor over any object without getting a loud “BEEP” or “BOOP” or “DING.” If you do not mouse over anything, the website will hiss at you. Initially, the links all seem to go to different kinds of games, but on closer inspection it becomes clear that there are a number of learning activities as well. The page includes slideshows highlighting astronauts, coloring books, and drawing tools.

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REMOVAL OF CONTENT Just as the rubric applies to genres in any medium, it also applies to the removal of genres from any medium. For example, imagine you are releasing a new, expensive product. You will have copies of the old product still available at a lower cost. These copies are in direct competition with your new ones. Your exigency is that, if the old product is still very good, it will interfere with sales of your new product. As outlets lower the price of the old product, it becomes even more competitive. You want to sell the old product, but you do not want to compete with your new one. Microsoft struggled with that when nobody wanted to give up XP for Vista. One solution is to reduce your marketing and support for the old product as you increase marketing on the new one. One of Canon’s solutions on Amazon is to remove the enticing photographs of their older cameras from the marketing site (because so many of them are identical to the images in their new product page), but keep the text in place. People who buy their older cameras do it based on their new bargain price and would unlikely have purchased the more expensive one anyway. The Canon VIXIA HF S21 (Amazon.com, 2011c) is an older but more professional video camera than the VIXIA HF S30 (Amazon.com, 2011d). At Amazon, the HF S21 currently sells for $899, marked down from $1,299—about one third. On a different page, the HF S30 sells for the full price, or $1,099. To market the HF S30, Canon opens with, The VIXIA HF S30 can record up to 12 hours of the most crisp, high definition video possible, with a 32GB internal flash drive. It is also equipped with two SDXC-compatible [emphasis added] memory card slots, but it gets even better. With Relay Recording, the camcorder automatically switches video recording from the internal drive to the next available SD memory card, when the memory becomes full. (Amazon.com, 2011d, n.p.)

In contrast, to market the HF S21 they say, Canon’s flagship VIXIA HF S21 Dual Flash Memory Camcorder, with a 64GB internal flash drive and two SD memory card slots [emphasis added], offers Canon’s most sophisticated feature set to date—blurring the line between consumer and professional. Canon’s superlative proprietary imaging technologies help deliver video and 8.0 megapixel photos with incredible detail and lifelike color. Touch & Track allows you to achieve sharp focus and precise exposure for any subject, simply by touching the generous 3.5” High Resolution (922,000 dot) Touch Panel LCD. Native 24p Mode perfectly matches the frame rate of film. And 5.1-Channel Surround Sound ensures your audio complements the stunning realism of your video. (Amazon.com, 2011c, n.p.)

The content in the second example presents a much better camera (the 2010 flagship camcorder). If readers read both blocks of copy carefully, they are likely to select the S21 over the newer and more expensive (but inferior) S30. The

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most notable difference between the blocks of copy is that Canon removed any images that might encourage readers to continue reading S21 text. There is nothing left in the copy but dense blocks of alphanumeric text. One might ask why they would undercut the marketing for one of their cameras. It is a simple enough task to use EUPARS to look at the value of removing the marketing photos from the page, changing the structure of the rubric only slightly (see Table 10). In the end, this is simply an exercise, because the need to reduce marketing and support for the older camera to keep it from competing with the new camera is self-evident. In short, it is a simple matter to evaluate content on a website once you know the site is a document made up of a variety of different genres with different EUPARSs. Much of the time, you will have no need for tables to evaluate the conditions surrounding the genres. As with the example above, much of the time the results are self-evident. On the other hand, if you need to convince a supervisor how bad or good a text might be, the matrix should help.

TESTING WHETHER YOUR REWRITES WORK In Chapter 1, I pointed out how important it is that you know what your text is supposed to do and that you use that knowledge to write a text designed to do that. The problem is once you have written the document, even if it applies to exigency, purpose, and audience expectations (not to mention your own), you cannot know if it is any good unless you can see whether it works. How do you know? Leica Cameras sells a digital SLR, medium-format camera for a mere $22,995 (Amazon.com, 2011b). The camera might be worth $23,000, but this is what Amazon’s reviewers say about the copy: Is it just me or has Amazon forgotten to mention anything about a lens other than above average glass. From the listing, you really can’t tell if a lens is included or not! Leica does make way above average equipment and this S2 is truly over the top. Unfortunately, I would have to disagree with another of the Amazon listed features: Affordable! Yeah, if your budget has room for another car payment. (Harbin, 2010, n.p.)

The review brings up three important points: (a) the camera costs as much as a car, (b) the lens is actually not included (another $5,000, at least), and (c) the information in the copy is incomplete and inaccurate. A good writer looking at comparable copy from other camera companies, who produced a table like the ones I showed above, would find the copy acceptable in all aspects but one. It is not well written—the rhetoric is poor. This is what separates good writers from the rest of the people who produce copy like this. This is also what separates

Yes

Yes

The purpose of this text is to sell this camera while not competing head-to-head with the HF S30. Canon customers and potential customers who are looking for a bargain and would buy a camera marked down by 1/3, even if it is not the newest camera. New content

The purpose of this text is to sell this very expensive camera.

Canon customers and potential customers who want the best they can afford for about $1,000.

Old content

Purpose

Audience

Yes

Yes

Produce content that sells the bargain camera without competing with the higher end camera.

A structure that includes much less chunking, denser text, and no photographs or icons designed to reengage the reader. The reader has to want this camera to wade through the text.

Produce the glossiest possible ads with many photos demonstrating the quality of the camera.

The structure is chunked, easy to read, and persuasive text with high quality photographs and many icons designed to reengage the reader.

Rhetoric

Structure

Appropriate?

Yes

The old Canon VIXIA HF S21 has been replaced by a more expensive prosumer camera and now competes in price with more expensive and lower quality VIXIA HF S30.

New Canon VIXIA HF S21 marks the edge between consumer and prosumer cameras. The camera costs about $900 and fills a high-end niche in consumer or a low-end niche for professional cameras.

Valid

New content

Exigency

Old content

Table 10. Justification for Removing Content

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us from the IT professionals, engineers, and meddling vice presidents. Leica’s copy appears as a single, dense paragraph in 9pt type: Developed exclusively for digital photography without any compromises [sic]. With the size and handling of a 35 mm camera, its performance and quality set new standards for medium-format photography. The complete Leica S-System was developed together with professional photographers with the goal of offering high quality pictures and effortless operation and handling. The entire system is based on a totally new image sensor in Leica S-Format, 30 x 45 mm in size and the classic Leica aspect ration [sic] of 3 to 2. The large area and integrated design afford optimal picture quality. With 37.5 million pixels, cropping is never a problem, even for large-format prints. The camera is the perfect instrument the photographer can now focus on taking pictures rather than on the technology. The LEICA S2 components are the very best quality and finely tuned to one another, producing the perfect picture that is naturally sharp and does not require digital correction. Leica S2 Body, Black Adobe Lightroom Software [sic] Leica Image Shuttle [sic] Battery Charging Unit [sic] USB Cable. (Amazon.com, 2011b, n.p.)

If this were pulled from a student’s writing, it would receive a low grade. The sentences often raise more questions than they answer. What do they mean by “professional photographers”? When I used medium-format cameras, I was shooting road construction equipment. What is the sentence, “The large area and integrated design afford optimal picture quality,” supposed to mean? Or, “The camera is the perfect instrument the photographer can now focus on taking pictures rather than on the technology,” for that matter? Is there a missing comma somewhere, or are these two disconnected sentences somehow merged? Any competent writer with access to the information could easily do much better. REWRITING BAD TEXTS AND KNOWING YOU HAVE IMPROVED THEM Suppose you recognize that you have a poorly written text. Now suppose you identify the genre-based filters you need to rewrite the text. Finally, suppose you have carefully rewritten the text. How do you know the rewrite is any better than the original text? This is a variation of the original question. Toward this end, you can use focus groups, interviews, or web analytics to see if your readers are being persuaded. The problem, of course, is that focus groups and interviews can give you useless information. You need to devise very good questions to get good answers from either group. Some studies have indicated that either is equally effective under normal conditions, although others suggest the focus group method is superior. Most of these studies, however, are anecdotal, based on experience or opinion. One empirical study done by Menno de Jong and Peter Shellens (1998) compared group studies and individual interviews and

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found that the group study is numerically superior but not statistically different. Their recommended methodology for either study was to have readers read the document, putting a plus or minus next to sections that please or displease them. The readings were followed by question-and-answer periods where test subjects were allowed to express opinions. One disadvantage of the focus group is that discussion often permits members to change their opinions or influence the opinions of others. This becomes a serious problem when a dominant member derails the discussion. Focus groups require excellent moderation. Is It the Best It Can Be? Having done all that, the question lingers, “How do you know if the document is really the best it can be?” Well, you never can do. You have perhaps improved it if your focus groups were truly representative of the audience, but how do you know how much you have improved your copy and how do you know if the improvements make your text effective? In the end, with analog documents, you can only publish them and see what happens. Digital documents, however, are different. Digital documents can usually be updated immediately. They lend themselves to iteration. This means if you want to test a document, you need only change it and see what happens. Any change often brings instant results. For example, suppose you have a website and you do not seem to be getting traffic to your “About Us” page. Suppose you change the navigational button for that page to a text you hope is persuasive. The change will either cause the traffic to increase, decrease, or stay the same. Whatever the case, using web analytics, you will have some usable results by the end of the day, and if you have a good benchmark, you can apply statistical values to your results. Web analytics tools present you with far more numbers than you can ever use, but they also make it possible to see whether your changes are having any impact. Web Analytics Process This is a behaviorist approach to evaluating your texts—seeing how much they impact your readers. Web analysts will be quick to point out that with web analytics, you can never know the answer to “why.” You can only know the answer to “what.” That may not be entirely true. You might not be able to know the answer to what your audience is thinking (why they are motivated to do something), but if you have a benchmark and improve a link, and the number of people clicking the link jumps, you can assume the jump is a result of your rewrite—you can know the why in terms of cause and effect. Suppose you have only 12% of your visitors on a page click on an important button, and it has been like that for as long as you have had the button. How would you know? There are a number of web analytics tools, some of which are free. Most commercial websites use these tools for monitoring their traffic. Google Analytics is one of the free tools, and it will show you how many people

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have clicked on all of your links. Google Analytics will tell you the percentage of the people who visit a page and click on the link. Suppose you have benchmarked a button for a month and get a consistent average of 12%. Now, suppose you make a change and the number of clicks drops to 6%. This is not good, but you will know you have done something wrong by the end of the first or second day. Now, suppose instead of losing ground, you made a change and clicks jumped to 24% and stayed there over several days. If you made no other changes, you can be confident that the one change made the difference. As a rhetorician, you can make an educated guess as to visitors’ emotional state (if that is what you were trying to influence), but you can know for certain that more people clicked that button because you made the change—and you can prove it.

CONCLUSION The rubric I demonstrate in this chapter is the critical point of this book. All of the theories I presented in earlier chapters lead to this rubric, and all of the recommendations I make in later chapters evolve out of it. For example, in Chapter 10, I describe the professional writer’s role in an agile development team. I assume you are using the rubric as you work. When you are creating new content you can use the rubric to evaluate the quality of the content, but you can also use it to create metadata, style guides, or web crawler friendly copy. In the next few chapters, I describe user-centric, persuasion-centric, and quality-centric content. This rubric defines these different writing styles. For example, if the purpose of a text is to facilitate navigation, it is clearly usercentric. But if its purpose is to get you to buy something, it is persuasion-centric. Being able to quickly evaluate a piece of text based on its EUPARS allows you to make a description based on logical assumptions. You do not need the tables I demonstrated. They are merely physical manifestations of something you will have no trouble doing in your head. The only time you should need them is when making your case to someone who doesn’t have your evaluative tools. You also do not need to embrace EUPARS as I have presented it. The point is you have this tool, and you will no longer be fooled by others who try to tell you to write web content so it quickly guides the user in and out of your texts.

REFERENCES Adorama Cameras. (2011). Panasonic HDC-HS900 220GB HDD high definition camcorder, 1920 x 1080p HD, 3.5in touch screen LCD, 20x intelligent zoom. Retrieved June 10, 2011, from http://www.adorama.com/PCHDCHS900K.html

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Amazon.com. (2011a). Scosche EWFH single ANL fuse holder. Retrieved June 10, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/Scosche-EWFH-Single-Fuse-Holder/dp/ B000KIR8M0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1307713586&sr=8-1 Amazon.com. (2011b). Leica S2 37.5MP Interchangeable lens camera with 3 inch LCD. Retrieved June 16, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/Leica-S2-37-5MPInterchangeable-Camera/dp/B002KHZXXU/ref=sr_1_33?ie=UTF8&qid=13078891 87&sr=8-33 Amazon.com. (2011c). Canon VIXIA HF S21 Full HD Camcorder w/64GB Flash Memory & Pro Manual Control. Retrieved June 16, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/ Canon-HF-S21-Camcorder-Control/dp/B00322OP40/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid= 1308317980&sr=8-1 Amazon.com. (2011d). Canon VIXIA HF S30 flash memory camcorder with SuperRange optical image stabilizer with powered IS. Retrieved June 16, 2011, from http:// www.amazon.com/Canon-S30-Camcorder-SuperRange-Stabilizer/dp/B004HW7E0Q/ ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1308318831&sr=8-3 American Solar Energy Society. (2011). Newsroom. Retrieved 04-05-2011, from http:// www.ases.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=138&Itemid=5 Anonymous. (2001a). Careers in undergraduate technical communications. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from http://imrl.usu.edu/techcomm/undergrad/index.htm Anonymous. (2001b). Mission and philosophy. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from http:// imrl.usu.edu/techcomm/undergrad/philosophy.htm CBSNews.com. (2011, March 24). After 13 months, roving cosmos camera sends final image. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20046796501465.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody De Jong, M., & Shellens, P. (1998). Focus groups or individual interviews? A comparison of text evaluation approaches. Technical Communication, 45(1), 77-89. Graesser, A. C., Chipman, P., Haynes, B. C., & Olney, A. (2005, November). AutoTutor: An intelligent tutoring system with mixed-initiative dialogue. IEEE Transactions on Education, 48(4). Retrieved from https://umdrive.memphis.edu/aolney/public/ publications/AutoTutor%20An%20intelligent%20tutoring%20system%20with%20 mixed-initiative%20dialogue.pdf Harbin, C. (2010, June 6). This is one lame listing! [Online product review]. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Leica-S2-37-5MP-Interchangeable-Camera/dp/ B002KHZXXU/ref=sr_1_33?ie=UTF8&qid=1307889187&sr=8-33 IBM. (2011). IBM centennial film: Wild ducks—Celebrating 100 years of visionary clients. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ibm# Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2006). Principles of marketing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Lindwell, W., Holden, K., & Butler, J. (2003). Universal principles of design. Beverly, MA: Rockport. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2004, January 26). Gear on opportunity rover passes martian health check [Press release]. Retrieved from http://marsrover. nasa.gov/newsroom/pressreleases/20040126a.html

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National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2011a). NASA game descriptions and national standards page. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.nasa.gov/ audience/forkids/kidsclub/flash/extras/Game_Descriptions_National_Standards.html National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2011b). NASA homepage. Retrieved February 19, 2011, from http://www.nasa.gov/ National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2011c). 2011 NASA strategic plan. Retrieved from http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/516579main_NASA2011StrategicPlan.pdf National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (2011d). NASA mission. Retrieved February 20, 2011, from http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer 20110104.html Powell’s Books. (2009). History of the expedition under the command of captains Lewis and Clark to the sources of the Missouri, thence across the Rocky Mountains and down the river Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Retrieved January 8, 2009, from http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9781135459321-0 Redish, J. (2007). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufman. Schroder, K., Murray, C., Drotner, C. K., & Kline, S. (2003). Researching audiences: A practical guide to methods in media audience analysis. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press. WholesaleSolar.com. (2011a). Homepage introduction. Retrieved June 13, 2011, from http://www.wholesalesolar.com WholesaleSolar.com. (2011b). Brief history of solar panels. Retrieved June 13, 2011, from http://www.wholesalesolar.com Wolfe-Simon, F., Blum, J., Kulp, T., Gordon, G., Hoeft, S., Pett-Ridge, J., et al. (2011). A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus. Science Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2010/12/01/science. 1197258.full.pdf

CHAPTER 7

Writing Persuasion-Centric Content

Unfortunately, I cannot produce a conclusive list of genres that work best in persuasion-centric venues. This is a new and growing class, ripe with possibilities, and exhibiting numerous examples that do not translate into analog environments. For example, the You Suck at Photoshop series (Big Fat Institute, 2011) represents a combination of a novel with its narrative stripped away and replaced by a series of Photoshop tutorials. I suggest that we haven’t begun to discover all of the new genres possible, and the technologies (e.g., HTML5) that permit even more genres are evolving very rapidly. I can, however, provide a list of genres I commonly see in these venues and discuss how they work when they work well, and I believe many of the ideas I discuss will transfer to the new genres. In the first chapter, I introduced some metacognitive metaphors we use when we write. I suggested that no one metaphor is appropriate for all genres. For example, the writing metaphors applied to proposal writers do not apply to poets or ad writers or viral marketing writers. The metacognitive metaphor for proposal writing (a kind of persuasion-centric writing) might be “watchmaker,” but the metaphor for the viral marketing writer or ad writer might be “creative artist.” Not only can I not tell you how to write well, I can’t even tell you how you should visualize yourself as a writer. I can say this, however: if you fully understand why you need the text, what you want the text to do, and what the audience will expect, you are well on your way to producing effective content. If you need funding for a project, and you want to write a document (a proposal) that is meant to extract funding from a very particular and exacting community (a community that will reject the proposal for as little as a few spelling errors), you will pick a completely different writing model than if you are trying to get your homeowner’s association to let you install solar panels on your roof, although in both cases you are writing a proposal. 175

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What I can do is introduce different genres and explain why I think the writing works or doesn’t. I cannot tell you how to get to the ideal finished product because the ideal finished product changes with every exigency. OVERT AND COVERT PERSUASION Arguably, all communication persuades at some level. Even material that might be considered nothing more than facts needs to persuade. For example, in the case of instruction, if the content fails to persuade the reader, learning is impacted. If the reader has strong misconceptions, he may well simply refuse to believe the instruction. If the instruction has glaring, factual errors, the reader has no reason to believe even the parts that might be accurate. If the content is too convoluted or confusing, learning is again impacted. Although persuasion exists in these environments, it may not be noticeable. The author, however, should notice, particularly in this kind of environment—the author needs to know how to persuade the reader that the content is worth reading. It is one thing to shout to an audience how wonderful some chopper or blanket or potato peeler is, but it is quite a different thing to persuade a reluctant reader that your information is valid. Covert persuasion of this sort occurs in quality-centric writing. That said, some content is specifically designed to persuade. The whole point of that kind of communication is to get the reader to respond in a predictable way. Communication of this nature is strongly rhetorical. It might “close the deal,” or persuade someone to change political parties or even click a button. Whatever it supposed to do, it is persuasion-centric. DIGITAL FLYERS DESIGNED TO SELL ME SOMETHING Approximately once a day, I receive an e-mail from Amazon.com presenting me with the latest product they want me to buy. It is fundamentally identical to hardcopy flyers I receive from Best Buy and Staples in my newspaper. In addition to the flyers I regularly receive from Amazon, I receive more from Sony, Bose, Iomega, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, all arriving as e-mail and all designed to sell me things. Although their purposes are similar, they are in many respects different from each other and demonstrate significantly varying degrees of success. One of their most notable differences is the quality of the writing. Amazon’s flyer is probably the most automated, least polished and most unimaginative, while Bose, Iomega, and Dell typically produce somewhat cleaner and more polished mailings. My Amazon flyers are less polished because they are so clearly written (actually “assembled” is a better word) by a computer. For example, some weeks ago I bought a new Canon camera from Amazon. The next day, I received an e-mail flyer that began with, “As someone who has shown an interest in

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cameras, you might like to know about the newest Kodak digital cameras that are currently available at Amazon.com” (2010a). What are the odds I am going to need another camera? This, and virtually all other flyers I receive from Amazon.com, are filled with information based on browsing and purchasing choices I have made in the past. For example, a day after buying a book on writing for the Internet, I received, “As someone who has purchased books on computer culture from Amazon.com, you might be interested in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” (2010b). And a day after purchasing a lens for my DSLR I received, “As someone who has shopped digital SLRs and lenses at Amazon.com, you might be interested in this special offer . . .” (2010c). The nature of the template for their flyers never changes: As someone who did (X), you might be interested in (Y)

This is a simple programming algorithm, and superficially it seems to target the appropriate audience. Being someone who has purchased a camera, they might reasonably assume that I have an interest in cameras. These e-mails point to the strength and weakness of computer-generated documents. The computer goes to a database and downloads content based on my browsing history and most recent purchases. This is virtually free advertising. But the algorithm pastes the content into a template with little regard for its relevance and no regard for quality of writing. In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson explained, “Quality relevant content cannot be spotted by an algorithm. You can’t subscribe to it. You need people—actual human beings—to create it” (2010, p. 24). Let’s suppose you work for a department store and it is your job to produce content designed to generate follow-up sales. How might you do it better? Amazon’s idea is excellent as far as they take it, and since it costs them little to send me the e-mail, it might improve their ROI. But Amazon’s grasp of the needs of the audience is minimal. I bought the new Canon camera for my wife, and the next day I received the e-flyer trying to sell me a new Kodak point and shoot camera. Why would I want a new camera if I just bought one? As a human, you would have recognized that I am unlikely to need another new camera the next day. You would have produced a smarter flyer that would have tried to sell me accessories for the camera I just bought. For example, this Canon is a relatively expensive camera with a fixed lens. When my wife scratches the lens, the camera will be ruined, and without a filter she will scratch the lens. You would have offered to sell me a filter to protect my lens. Of course there is no filter that fits this particular lens so your opportunities to sell me products grow even more. The fix for this lens is a simple adapter that fastens securely to the lens and will accept a 58mm filter. Naturally, the old lens cap doesn’t fit the 58mm filter, so you can also sell me a new lens cap. Rather than offer me an opportunity to buy another camera that I almost certainly will not buy,

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you could offer me something you know I need. You could send me the e-mail offering me a solution to a problem I might not even know about and provide snippets from reviews to reinforce your point. The copy you write (using Amazon customer reviews, 2011) might look like this: IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO RUIN A FILTER THAN A LENS! As someone who has purchased a CANON PowerShot SX30, you might want to protect your lens with a filter and adaptor. Here is what others have said about that: • The 58mm Filter Adapter for CANON PowerShot SX30 is the best investment I ever made. • RECOMMENDED! This fits perfectly on my new “Canon Powershot SX30 IS” to allow for 58mm lens filters. • This product is awesome with SX20is. I bought the Bower filter kit and Zeikos lens hood, and couldn’t been happier with the combo. • Thank god someone stepped in with this awesome gadget, at a great price too (Canon usually charges $25+ for filter adapters). Unbelievably simple, snaps on like a charm, and is very tight. Protect your lens and your camera with an adaptor, filter, and lens cap with a tether, and you’ll never regret it.

A new boilerplate is created, and so the writing remains simple: “As someone who has (X), you might find (Y) useful. See what (Z) says.” The difference is the new boilerplate considers more carefully what the audience might need as a result of their previous purchase. There is a much better chance of you doing that than the computer. This is not to say Amazon.com’s process is necessarily bad. Rather, it is to say that they never know when they send out one of these e-mails whether their content is or is not any good. On the other hand, it is unlikely the content is good if the audience has already purchased a version of what they are trying to sell. A good writer would know the answer to those questions. Good Writers are Rare In contrast, the Bose emails look much like glossy magazine ads. Also in contrast, Bose ads have identifiable purpose and audience, and they address specific problems this audience might face. A recent Bose emailed flyer said (2010): Now it’s easier than ever to enjoy home theater. Our innovative Unify™ intelligent integration system simplifies setup and control. Onscreen menus guide you through every step.

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Unlike Amazon’s personalized approach, this is a broadcast e-flyer, sent to everybody on their mailing list. Although I received this, I am not the audience, but the audience is identifiable. Imagine a boy, looking for a lost dog, placing flyers under the windshields of cars. We find that while he broadcasts to everybody he can, his audience is limited to those few people who can help him find his pet. Similarly, Bose broadcasts to everybody it can, but its audience is limited to people who are so frustrated with their remotes they will pay a premium for a simpler system. I am not Bose’s audience in this case because I am comfortable with a variety of devices, each with its own remote. I would never spend a thousand dollars or more for a device that makes it easier to navigate my entertainment center. If you evaluate the rhetoric of the Bose ad, it becomes clear that it has a specific audience: people who are not comfortable with complex entertainment technologies. I can only speculate at this point, but I suspect that the Bose ad is actually more effective than Amazon’s because, although it broadcasts to everybody, it has a specific audience within that community, and there is a good chance some of that audience will respond to the ad. In contrast, by broadcasting only to me based on my recent purchases, Amazon.com seems to have defined its audience, but by offering me products I obviously will not purchase, Amazon’s ads actually have no audience at all. That said, having a clear sense of the audience does not mean the writing is excellent. There is a truism among writers, “don’t tell me, show me.” Although the Bose ad is a step in the right direction, it still doesn’t show, it only tells. Much of this chapter will be spent demonstrating the difference. Lynda.com’s Marketing Strategy Lynda.com seems to have an excellent marketing strategy. I believe that two of its approaches work really well. In one case, anybody who uses Adobe products extensively will use Adobe TV from time to time to find useful tutorials. Lynda.com provides many of those tutorials. Since their tutorials are usually excellent, it doesn’t take long for a professional to connect with Lynda.com’s site. Subscriptions are $25/month (or $250/year), and at that price they are a bargain if someone needs to learn to use a software very quickly. A second approach Lynda.com uses is to post many of its tutorials on YouTube. It takes only a glance at viewer comments to see they are often greatly impressed by Lynda.com’s tutorials, and you can frequently see posters suggesting they are going directly to Lynda.com’s site to view the other tutorials if not to subscribe to Lynda.com. For example, in response to a video produced by Chris Orwig (2011), two readers suggest they need to see the entire tutorial set. • I only have CS3, but I need to take a look at this course soon! Sounds great! • GREAT VIDEO! I’m gonna watch the entire course for sure.

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Access from YouTube is simple. You need only click on a link attached to the video to go to a page of more than a hundred tutorials every bit as good as the one that served as bait. Some of the tutorials on this page are available to anybody but most are available only to subscribers. But that’s OK . . . the “sign up” button is bright yellow and is among the first things users see. Less Successful Approach A third approach is directed at people who already know Lynda.com and are on its mailing list. The company sends me an e-flyer about once a week and an e-newsletter about once a month. It has an audience made up of software users, but the audience is nonetheless diverse (e.g., its audience includes hard-core programmers, art photographers, and artists doing 3D animation). Lynda.com flyers are broken into segments meant to attract people from these diverse communities. Typically, the copy of one of these segments begin with, “In (X) (Y) demonstrates how to do (Z)” or “Join (Y) in (X) as he shows how to do (Z)” or “(X) with (Y) shows how to do (Z).” All of these, Zs are made up of lists. For example, in one block of copy they said (2010), Join David Gassner in Dreamweaver CS5 with PHP and MySql as he explains how to add dynamic data to a PHP-enabled web site in Dreamweaver CS5. The course shows how to plan and create a MySQL database, define a PHP-enabled site in Dreamweaver CS5, connect the site to the database, and manage and present dynamic data. Dreamweaver CS5 features are demonstrated throughout the video series, including PHP custom class introspection and site-specific code hinting.

The boilerplate is identical for all of Lynda.com’s marketing copy – intro, list, list, list. Although this copy is vastly better than Amazon’s copy, it still exhibits several problems. First, it presents a confusing mixture of agents or subjects. The copy begins with an understood “you” combined with “David Gassner” as two agents in the same phrase. This in itself is not a problem, but the next agent becomes the course and then a final agent hidden in a passive voice. In a sense, the content drifts from being addressed to “you” without specifically stating so, to being addressed to no one in particular. More problematical are the lists in the copy. They are machine gunned to the reader in paragraph form and filled with jargon, making them oppressive and more difficult to read. Worse, there is a saying in marketing, “sell the benefits, not the content,” and in this case the lists do not even begin to describe the many benefits of the tutorials. This copy simply lists the content with no effort to sell anything. If we examine the implied audience for this copy (with all its jargon—e.g., dynamic data and site specific code hinting), we might expect the audience to be a sophisticated web manager moving up to dynamic, database-managed sites. Actually, the tutorials begin by explaining the difference

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between dynamic and static sites, something any informed web manager would already know. In fact, about almost anybody with web experience (even me) could learn how to produce dynamic sites from this set of tutorials. A beginner, who might run screaming from this dense jargon, might actually find the tutorials easily understood. This is a case of poor rhetoric and content excluding a large portion of the tutorials’ intended audience. It is more difficult to do, but a better approach might be to describe the class or what it is meant to do and not just list a few of its contents. Join David Gassner in Dreamweaver CS5 with PHP and MySql as he explains how to add dynamic data to a PHP-enabled web site in Dreamweaver CS5. In this comprehensive tutorial, Gassner explains from the ground up the processes involved in developing a server that interacts with the user. He explains how database servers work, how to set them up, and how to manage them. By the end of the tutorial, anybody with any web design or web management experience should be able to adapt to publishing database managed sites. Click here to see the tutorials.

In this case, I keep the agent constant, until I get to describe the audience— “anybody with any web design or web management experience.” On the same flyer, Lynda.com continues, In Photoshop CS5: Athletic Retouching Projects, Chris Orwig demonstrates how to use Photoshop CS5 to add energy, motion, and strength to portraits and shots of athletes in action. This course covers removing blemishes from the subject and the background, adding motion blur, enhancing muscle tone, and making adjustments to photos shot in outdoor lighting conditions. Sections on underwater portraits and working with multiples subjects are also included. Exercise files accompany the course.

A better approach might be to explain that in this comprehensive tutorial Gassner describes the process for designing and producing professional photographs of professional athletes: In Photoshop CS5: Athletic Retouching Projects, Chris Orwig demonstrates how to add energy and motion to photographs of athletes in action. In 43 tutorials, he introduces 9 photographs of world-class athletes, and he demonstrates how to repair photographic flaws to a level that brings the photos up to professional standards. These instructions will be valuable to any professional photographer (or advanced amateur) who specializes in photographing people in posed or natural settings. Click here to see the tutorials.

“Click here . . .” leads to the actual set of tutorials, where users can explore the topics at their leisure. This may only be marginally better copy, but the original

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is based on one of three highly overworked boilerplates directed toward nobody in particular—almost anything would be better than that. Some might suggest that by not listing the topics I am denying readers looking for specific skills a chance to see those skills in a list. On the other hand, the tutorials cover hundreds of these skills of which only a few are listed. If, instead, I describe the tutorial as a whole, I am implying all of the topics in a global description. In a sense, I am talking about strategic goals rather than a few individual goals— strategic as opposed to tactical. At the same time, I clearly define the audience who will benefit—and point to the benefits. One final thing I do that could draw criticism is invite the reader to check out the tutorials. In the past, usability gurus have suggested “click here” is amateurish. I suggest that anytime you ask your reader to do something specific, you are encouraging a behavior, and that is to your advantage. If you command someone to do something, they will often do it. “Click here,” is such an imperative. The boilerplates Lynda.com uses are easy enough to write. Simply go into the tutorials and drag out a few processes being taught. Put them into a list with a pre-determined pattern and no sense of audience and you’re done. If I were going to the site looking to use PHP with MySql to build interactive websites, the boilerplates would not be so bad, but this is a flyer hoping to get me interested in these tutorials, either because they want to keep me subscribed or they are hoping to coax me into subscribing. Either case calls for their best rhetorical approach. I typically never click on the links these flyers offer because I do not connect with the copy, even though I use Photoshop and Dreamweaver extensively. In short, I am an ideal audience for Amazon and Lynda.com. I purchase more from Amazon.com than from any other store, and I am an ongoing subscriber to Lynda.com and even use the site for the textbook in many of my classes. Even so, the pleas of their e-mailed flyers fall on deaf ears. They are uninteresting and unpersuasive. Neither of them has figured out how to sell me. Both organizations use boilerplates extensively, which can be very powerful if used well, but it takes only a glance at the copy to see that it is altogether uninspired and uninspiring. If we look carefully at the purpose of a piece of copy, it always tells us who the audience is. What is the purpose of the quote above about Photoshop? I think it is to attract professional photographers (and those who would like to be) who specialize in photographing people to test out a tutorial designed to help them be better professionals. The purpose of the SQL/PHP quote is to encourage web professionals and advanced amateurs who work on static sites to learn how to do dynamic sites. In each case, the copy is trying to get someone to do something. The someone is easily identified, as is the something. The purpose of both blocks of copy is obviously highly rhetorical. Better than an easily produced boilerplate, is copy specifically designed to meet the rhetorical needs of its audiences.

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PERSUASIVE NARRATIVES A few years ago, the Volo Auto Museum in Volo, Illinois offered $1 million for the Porsche James Dean was driving when he crashed and died. The car (if it still exists) is of very little physical value, because none of it is left unbent. Shortly after the crash, the engine, transmission, and one door (the only parts considered to have any value at all) were removed and sold. With these parts removed, the Porsche 550 Spyder is nothing more than scrap that might be worth as much as $20. On the other hand, other 550 Spyders, in mint condition, currently sell for $800,000 to $1,200,000 each (SpeedTV.com, 2011). Consider this: a completely destroyed car known to be missing its only working parts is worth as much as its perfectly restored twin. Why? If Volo Auto Museum finds what is left of the wreck and buys it for $1 million, they will not be paying for the car, they will be paying for the story that comes with the car. The current most valuable automobile ever sold is a 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC, sold in 2010 for between $30 and $40 million. This is an odd looking car, and very rare, but I own the only GMC dually pickup produced by General Motors in 1966 (it’s hard to get rarer than that, and it looks pretty odd too). On a very good day the truck is worth maybe $15,000, but only if I spend perhaps $25,000 toward restoration. The thing that makes the Bugatti so valuable is its history (its provenance)—the narrative that comes with the car. The Bugatti was the first of three cars produced in an effort to make the most luxurious car of all time, and was pampered and valued its entire life. The Atlantic had been in the private collection of the family of Dr. Peter Williamson and had only rarely been seen in public in the past 40 years, said Gooding President David Gooding in a statement. It was a previous Best in Show at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 2003. This car was the first in the series of only three Atlantics built, chassis number 57374, based on the Aerolithe Electron Coupe concept shown at the 1935 Paris Auto Salon. The Mullin Automotive Museum, the reported new owner, specializes in art deco and is rich in examples of the style from French makers such as Talbot-Lago and Delage (Edmunds.com, 2011).

In contrast, my GMC was shipped in two parts (dually truck chassis and separate bed) to a farmer in North Texas who wanted a better pickup for his overstuffed camper. The dealership and the farmer mated the bed to the truck, and it mostly sat under a tree wearing a huge camper, fading in the sun, getting uglier and uglier, until I finally acquired it. All of the most valuable things we can buy have stories that make them valuable. Without its story, the Bugatti is a dog of a car (compared to current luxury vehicles) that rides only moderately comfortably (it has horsehair stuffing

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in its seats), is undependable (it comes from a time when “chauffeur” was another way of saying “mechanic”) and it would never survive in today’s freeway system. Without its story, the Bugatti would be worth less than a Ford, the perfect 550 Spyder would be worth about half as much as a Porsche Boxter, and James Dean’s Spyder would be worth nothing at all. With its story, a pile of twisted scrap is worth $1 million dollars, and with its story, a Bugatti is worth as much as $30 million more. According to Craig Baehr and Bob Schaller in Writing for the Internet (2010), “Narrative then is not merely another form of human communication. Instead, it represents the very way that information is represented in the brain. Language evolved, it appears, so humans could convey more elaborate stories. . . . And research suggests that language is built around narratives” (p. 83). It is hard to exaggerate how important narratives are in human discourse. We are animals who think in terms of narratives, who describe our lives in narratives, who entertain ourselves with narratives, and we are persuaded by narratives. The Pacific Catalyst In 2010, one of my favorite websites did everything wrong by usability standards (PacificCatalyst.com, 2011). The body of text on its homepage began well below the “fold” at the bottom of the screen and went on for the equivalent of three typewritten pages. These were just the first two things the site did that would make usability experts cringe. On the other hand, the page was filled with links to articles, and a listing in National Geographic Magazine’s, “50 of the World’s Best Tours of a Lifetime.” There were additional articles from the Boston Globe, Coastal Living, Pacific Sun and Motorboat and Sailing magazines, plus the equivalent of twenty-four typewritten pages of personal testimonials, one of which is a three-and-a-half page poem. These were all narratives of different types, and were filled with glowing descriptions of exciting and enjoyable days at sea. For example, one description read like, “One day it was hiking to a point where we could watch a glacier calve. But this was not just a chunk of ice falling; this was the entire face of the glacier, 250’ high and 500’ across, crumbling, crashing to the sea, creating an upsurge (and a bang) like a bomb. . . .” Another testimonial said, The crescendo of the humming waterfalls intensified as we glided further into seclusion. Guided by a team of bald eagles and protected by the snow capped mountains, we were untouchable. A pair of dolphins escorted us out of the cove, as we watched nature in its purest form. We were paddling toward the boat, wet and cold, when a speck of slick black skin broke the water’s surface next to my kayak. Almost as an applause for enduring the rain, the now familiar sound of a whale spout followed. I stopped paddling and allowed the Minki whale to satisfy its curiosity, before turning back toward the warmth of the Catalyst.

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The magazine articles were no different. In an article penned for the Boston Globe, Christine Hemp said,

You’re not only traveling through Alaskan wilderness, you’re traveling back in time—into an aesthetic most people don’t get to experience anymore. On what other journey can you sit down to dinner after a day of hiking and sea-kayaking, have the captain uncork a bottle of Ravenswood merlot, and regale you with the rich history of your vessel as well as techniques for warding off brown bears? (2011, p. 1)

It seems clear from the testimonials and magazine articles (which are actually also testimonials) that the crew and the passengers become a family of sorts. The testimonial is clearly the dominant genre on this site. In the chapter titled “Anything Can Be a Text,” I pointed out that the author of digital content needs to be aware of the rhetorical value of all his content. This site uses images especially effectively. Among the links on the homepage is one titled, “PHOTO ALBUM,” that goes to a page named “SCRAP BOOK” (mismatched links and page names represent another small annoyance for usability experts). There is no additional text on the page apart from seventy-six links to amazing photos from trips, an average of seventy photos per trip. Each of these links goes to a narrative made up of nothing more than photographs— people hiking, eating crab or salmon or halibut, shooting photos of bears or whales or eagles, kayaking along calving glaciers, playing on deck, or fishing— approximately 5,300 photos. The website markets cruises on a ship called Pacific Catalyst. Like the Bugatti, the Pacific Catalyst has its own history. She was commissioned by the University of Washington as a research vessel in 1932. During her heroic period (World War II), she was armed with machine guns and depth charges and served as an anti-submarine patrol boat among the Aleutian Islands, and in her bleaker days, she served as a whaling and fishing vessel. She is one of only a few wooden boats of her vintage still afloat. The website might not meet stringent usability standards, but for the appropriate audience, it is clearly persuasive. In the winter, the Pacific Catalyst cruises around the Puget Sound, but in the summer she cruises the Inside Passage of Alaska. By the end of May 2010, all but a few berths for the summer cruises were filled and paid for, and many berths for the summer of 2011 were already being booked with the deposit already paid—a year-anda-half in advance! In effect, passengers are paying as much as $4,500 each (plus travel and incidental expenses of maybe another $1,000 per family member), sight unseen, for a cruise on this boat, and during our worst recession since 1929.

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The Marketing Plan The company is owned by Bill and Shannon Bailey. Shannon is responsible for the marketing. She has tried a variety of marketing directions with varying degrees of success. When I dove into marketing and sought television and other avenues that were offered and spent more money—I did not see much result. I used Gordon’s Guide . . . no real results. I used a Seattle TV/website promotion . . . no real results. Magazine ads seem to have [few] results. What appears to work best is the “personal”, the magazine articles (such as the Coastal Living article and the Boston Globe article brought in major business). This year Alaska magazine has sought us out to do an article and are coming aboard. I also was able to write an article for 48 North, a local boating magazine, that seems to get picked up by tourists across the nation who visit our home port of Friday Harbor, San Juan Island. I have been told by guests, that the personal was what drew them. The recommendations found on travel sites draw people to our site and they investigate. The articles are clipped and read and held on to for several years with the thought that if we go to Alaska this is the way we are going to go.

Again and again, the things most impacting their marketing are stories—written and photographic narratives. Shannon also discusses the impact of their website. I think the website is important for first timers as well as those who once came aboard and their referrals. The slideshows reveal to people what to expect and to those who have gone a way of sharing what they had with their friends and family. We also take requests and send a brochure and DVD out to them. The DVD is a picture slideshow set to music of our trips from the previous year. I make a new one every year and send it out to all our customers from that year, as well as to every request that comes in that year. But more importantly, they are building families. I send Christmas cards to all of our guests every year. Again we continue to make this personal, family. We grow and connect on the boat, and even before people come on the boat. . . . (Bailey, personal communication, 04-03-2010)

The company’s principal effort is to create a family. The copy on its website acts as an invitation to join that family. In an introduction to descriptions of their trips, it says, “The myriad islands and imposing coastal mainland, still rising from the sea, form a natural invitation to exploration and adventure.” The copy acts as a similar, natural invitation, “We walk through meadows . . . where we add our footprints to those of bears, moose and wolves. We meander from cove to cove, seldom seeing another vessel, seldom sharing our quiet anchorages,” for about three pages. For me, it was difficult not to visualize myself as one among the “we.”

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In brief, Bill and Shannon Bailey get their greatest marketing success from word-of-mouth (testimonials), magazine articles (testimonials), and written letters of thanks (more testimonials) which they can post on their website and Facebook page. All of these things seem to be written by people who feel a part of the family. Contrast: Inside Passage Charters In contrast, there is a similar cruise being offered by a competitor, Inside Passage Charters (2010). Inside Passage’s site is usability perfect. Pages load quickly and never extend below the chrome, but there are none of Catalyst’s excellent narratives. Instead, we find user-centric content with highly efficient navigation and very short content segments: “Experience the Natural History, Nature & Wildlife of the Inside Passage. Our 7 day/6 night ecotour lets you explore the amazing wonders of this unique ecosystem,” or “Cruise Stephens Passage, Frederick Sound and Chatham Strait visiting many destinations. Hiking, kayaking, photography, fishing, beachcombing and more. Includes 2 nights hotel in Juneau. Limited to 10 passengers.” A native Alaskan might know what Stephens Passage or Chatham Straight are, but their target audience likely will not. Like the Lynda.com content I discussed earlier, the content on this page represents yet another example of a writing style that begins with an introduction leading to lists that do not actually provide useful information. I think it is a kind of mindless grasp at overwhelming the readers with all the things available without actually letting them see anything. On the other hand, with Pacific Catalyst the reader is encouraged to visualize joining “us” as we do something together. Like Catalyst, Inside Passage has a photo album. It includes nineteen photographs, all taken by a single, professional photographer. Five of the photographs could be said to depict someone having fun. The rest of the photos on the site might as easily have been downloaded from the Internet or scanned from a brochure. There is no sense of any of the photos having been taken by a passenger or crew member. These websites not only point out the difference between telling and showing, but also the differences between telling and persuading. In short, the exception disproves the rule. Usability is important. People will flee a profoundly unusable site. Still, given the right purpose, an excellent narrative is powerfully persuasive, however long it might be, and in persuasioncentric content usability takes a back seat. Value of Reviews Reviews are testimonials of a sort, but presented as a more balanced narrative—reviews may be negative, neutral, or positive. In a collection of reviews, all three kinds might be present. Reviews are also often very long. It is not

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uncommon for a review to go on for ten or more pages, but someone making an informed decision on an $800 camera, $15,000 tractor, or $65,000 car may still read every word of the narrative. For example, three pages into a review of the BMW 335D, Edward Loh says (2011), But of all the cars we spent significant time with during the last couple years, only one had that sparkling, spark-plug-free personality. Only one pushed us to pen prose claiming “it might just be the best car on the road.” Only one had us karaoke-ing along with the King. And that was our beloved 335d.

If the narrative is relevant, well-written, and sufficiently exciting, readers will be inclined to read it all, however long it might be. I can find no product or service that is unreviewed. From a common spark plug. . . . If you’re looking for horsepower don’t buy these plugs. However, if you’re looking for smoother acceleration and idling then these are the plugs for you. My Miata was cold hearted out of the crate. It would require about a 2-3 minute warm up before it smoothed out. After the installation of the Bosch plugs the car ran perfectly from cold start to full operating temp. Acceleration is smooth and predictable and the engine seems to respond quicker (Ted Williams).

. . . to a tiny, mom-and-pop motel in Raton New Mexico: We were looking for a decent place to stay near Capulin Volcano. I checked Tripadvisor and this place came up. Looks a little questionable on the outside as these types of motels you never know what to expect. What a gem, truly a clean, friendly, mom and pop type of establishment. Cheap rate. If I had any complaint, it might be that the breakfast was a little light—but what you do expect for the $. I can honestly say that for us, all things considered (including price)—this was our favorite stay in New Mexico. On a side note, TripAdvisor led us to this place and it is much appreciated. I hope TripAdvisor helps to keep motels like this running successfully.

Note that this review ends with a testimonial. RETURNING TO SALT LICK BAR-B-QUE As we discussed earlier, the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que makes outstanding use of reviews. In addition to reviews, rewards, and testimonials, Salt Lick also uses video reviews.

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Video Reviews Within the spirit of “show don’t tell,” video reviews are at least as effective as written reviews, and they are quickly becoming just as common. These reviews are particularly valuable to users when the videos discuss products or services that can be easily demonstrated but not so easily visualized. I recently purchased a log splitter based entirely on video reviews depicting a variety of reviewers using it to joyfully split 24” hardwood logs into firewood. Somehow, the image of this relatively tiny device effectively splitting a log is much more powerfully presented in a video than explained—seeing is believing. Few marketing plans effectively utilize the power of good reviews. The Salt Lick restaurant uses videos produced by the likes of Bobby Flay and Duff Goldman from the Food Network and Adam Richman from the Travel Channel exceptionally well. Those who regularly visit the Food Channel, or eat in his gourmet restaurants, know Bobby Flay and the TV segment, “The Best Thing I Ever Ate.” One such segment is dedicated to the Salt Lick. In this, he says, “I don’t usually cook beef ribs. It’s one of those things I leave to the Salt Lick.” In his video, “Man vs. Food,” Adam Richman does a five-minute segment where he shows how Salt Lick produces its barbecue and says, “The trifecta of flavors in the smoke, dense oak and pecan, and spices makes the finished brisket a masterpiece,” and “I’ve gotta tell you point blank (and you guys have seen me eat a lot of stuff), it is some of the best I’ve ever eaten.” These videos are housed on the Salt Lick website, but they are also all on YouTube along with many more. The “Man vs. Food” video had 12,900 viewings at the time of this writing. Below the video is a list of testimonials by people either impressed by the video or by their experience at the Salt Lick or both. The video was posted on YouTube in August 2009, making it (at the time of this writing) exactly thirteen months old. This means this video gets 1,000 views a month. YouTube is an important and free marketing tool for those who learn how to use it. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE REVIEWS A tiny company manufactures and sells leather bags. Saddleback Leather is headquartered in San Antonio but it has no storefront. It depends entirely on YouTube videos for its customer base. The company president announces new product releases on YouTube and depends on dozens of amateur-video reviews to generate customers, with views ranging from more than 14,000 to around 900. All the reviews I found on YouTube were highly positive and were accompanied by statements (testimonials) from satisfied customers and others wishing they had their own leather bags. Clearly, Saddleback Leather has discovered an audience (or has been discovered by an audience).

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Less Favorable Reviews MGM Mirage and Dubi combined to spend $8.5 billion on CityCenter in Las Vegas. The 17-million square foot resort is nothing short of amazing to behold, but its reviews are not so amazing. The average of its reviews are between three and four stars, and almost nobody gives the center unqualified positive ratings, while many give it exceptionally poor evaluations (2011): CityCenter is boring. Unlike other major resorts (Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Venetian), there’s no beautiful gathering place and nothing really fun. The center of the development, which should be beautiful, is a multilayered set of streets, with cars buzzing in and out. This development lacks character and the “fun” factor that is found in the rest of Vegas. In addition, the location is terrible: Far from the Monorail, far from even the bus stop. Get ready to pay for lots of cab rides, and have patience, because there’s almost always a LONG cab line (Robert E.).

Most reviews were not so caustic. The vast majority gave the resort three or four stars. These were all presumably offered by people like us, visitors to Las Vegas wandering through the overawing glass buildings. But a more informed review by Mark Lamster was similarly ambivalent. He had a few kind things to say about his experience there, but mostly he was harsh: The absurdity of CityCenter’s urban gesture of separating its buildings now becomes apparent. The PR team has arranged for SUVs to take journalists from the Aria to the Mandarin Oriental for a cocktail party. . . . That said, Silk Road, his restaurant at the Vdara, is not a success, even on his terms. The lobby sofas in its bar area are uncomfortable and the decorative wave patterns on its walls looks like they were pulled from the lobby of a Marriott. . . . The mind wanders. Is the word vdara Spanish for “banal architectural experience”? Alas, no. It is the invention of the CityCenter marketing team, and has no meaning.

Suppose you are planning a trip to Las Vegas for a conference. Now, suppose you had thought you might be willing to spend the extra money to stay at the newest and most expensively built place in the United States. Finally, suppose you read some of these reviews. Would you not reconsider? In short, great reviews and testimonials can make an excellent marketing tool. On the other hand, in an environment where the public can evaluate the reviews of any place, mediocre reviews may be as devastating as the great ones are helpful . . . and as I mentioned earlier, everything gets reviewed these days.

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Back to Narrative Normally, it would be inappropriate to pick up a topic I abandoned pages ago, but there is one more use of narrative I think is important to examine. A few pages ago I discussed how Saddleback Leather was using YouTube to market itself, building a body of fans prepared to write good reviews of the products. This all begins with a narrative on the site. It is the story of how Saddleback came to be. It is the story of a rambler who spent a great deal of time in Mexico drifting from place to place. At some point, he had a leathersmith make a custom backpack. Later, worn and torn, the backpack began eliciting questions and comments from people in the United States. Ultimately, he had a few more made and quickly sold them. When he had even more made, he sold them too. Today, he still rambles around Slovakia, Australia, Bora Bora, South America, Africa, and everywhere he goes, he tests his bags against whatever elements are most likely to destroy them: spears, salty depths, crocodiles, and whatever. He has attached a story to his bags that makes them desirable. The narrative goes on in the company site and on a Facebook site, in addition to the YouTube videos I have already mentioned. This introduces an interesting question. As I read David’s (face of the company) narrative, I was impressed, but over time, I thought David seemed a bit selfish, egotistical, and ungrounded. He seemed to do nothing but ramble around the world with his “hot” (his word) wife with no particular purpose or goal. In effect, he seemed to have formed a company with no more exigency than to fund his playtime. If he were out testing his equipment, that would be a different matter, but he seems to be doing nothing in particular, occasionally testing his equipment as an afterthought. Personally, I might go into a store and buy one of his bags because they do seem to be strong (if very heavy and very, very expensive), but he offers his bags through no retailers. In short, narrative is possibly the most powerful of all marketing tools, but not all narratives are as useful. Narratives can be as destructive as helpful if they are negative or perceived as negative—they have to be carefully considered and carefully written. With the case of Pacific Catalyst and Salt Lick, the narratives are powerful in large part because they are told by customers. With Saddleback, the narrative is interesting but presented by Saddleback to, I think, less positive effect. But narratives can also be devastating. Now that anybody can become a reviewer, a product that fails to meet expectation can receive devastating narratives, and these narratives are beyond the manufacturer’s control. INSTRUCTION AS A MARKETING TOOL Adobe does an excellent job of marketing its products with Adobe TV. As Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and Flash (among their many products) become increasingly complicated (and as their online help becomes increasingly useless), Adobe depends more and more on instructions created by a pool of

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Adobe product experts. Many of these experts use the Adobe products on a daily basis and present professional quality tutorial videos for Adobe TV. Some of these videos do little more than market new Adobe products, but many more of them introduce useful information. Producing these videos becomes excellent self-promotion for professional artists, photographers, and others who use Adobe products professionally. Only a few years ago, these tutorials would have been step-by-step, written instructions. Over time, however, these written instructions have been increasingly supplanted by videos. In many cases, the tutorial can be supported by advertisers. Nividia ads are commonly seen in the Adobe TV videos, and Lynda.com ads can be seen supporting the less well known instructors who are self-publishing their tutorials. Some of these tutorials show up on YouTube and demonstrate the skills of people who might be fairly new to a career and not yet networked, and some lead potential students to instructional websites. YouTuber Cory Williams has a tutorial video on how to increase views in YouTube. He says, “To get more views, try posting some tutorial videos. . . . ” .

It’s information that people need. If you’re really good at something, then talk about it, because I’m sure somebody out there (or a lot of somebodies out there) might want to, you know, know about it. . . . So, yeah, make a tutorial video, it’s very good, and it’ll help a lot of people (0:46).

There are a number of examples of companies using tutorials successfully. SimplyMaya.com is a website dedicated to instructing students learning to use elements of Autodesk Maya, a powerful 3D animation software. Tutorials cost from $19 to $24 each and represent hours of instruction. Students can pay by the topic or buy a lifetime subscription for a little over $350. The instructions are excellent, if a little boring, and a Maya artist, particularly a new Maya artist could hardly do better than internalize these tutorials. SimplyMaya connects to another tutorial website, SimplyLightwave, with comparable tutorials for using NewTek Lightwave, another 3D animation program. I found this website because they have tutorial videos pasted all over YouTube. A person new to Maya might browse through different tutorials. As they browse, they come across a variety of tutorials. Eventually, the browser will come across SimplyMaya or CG tuts+ or another excellent tutorial site, GFX2Day. This doesn’t just apply to difficult systems like Maya. A different site is dedicated to the entire spectrum of Computer Graphics. CG tuts+ does not charge for its tutorials. Instead, they provide them for free and depend on sponsors for support. HUMOR AND VIRAL PERSUASION Many of the companies I have discussed so far in this chapter use the Internet for effective marketing. The Salt Lick does a reasonably effective job of using a

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simple form of viral persuasion. One or two videos about the Salt Lick Bar-B-Que on YouTube have drawn around 50,000 viewers, but most of them have drawn only a few hundred. They could use viral marketing much more effectively. In contrast, the Hema department store chain in the Netherlands produced a Flash page that had well over 1 million hits in its first few months of existence. It received the “Webbie” for best viral marketing. “You Suck at Photoshop” received more than 8 million hits in its first year and also received a Webbie. SMP Films A company called SMP films does short videos for distribution on the Internet, posted on YouTube. A number of the videos are very popular. For example, “Mean Kitty Song,” went from 48 million views to 50 million this past week. Their brand new “This Side Up” video jumped from 0 to 106,000 views in little more than a week. SMP Films is actually a videographer/ actor/songwriter named Cory Williams, plus his wife and a small supporting crew of friends. Viewers are encouraged to subscribe to the SMP Channel. It costs nothing to subscribe, but when people have subscribed, any new videos produced by SMP will show up on their homepage when the subscribers open YouTube. This increases SMP’s viewing body, which increases the number of views on the ads that sponsor the videos, and that increases their revenue. Currently, they have more than half-a-million subscribers, and more than 183,000,000 video views in the channel. SMP also operates the Mean Kitty Channel, which currently has more than 321,000 subscribers and 53,000,000 upload views of their videos. In combination, their videos have been viewed more than 236,000,000 times as of this writing. Since their videos are so good (particularly their more recent ones), they have developed a following, many of whom are not subscribed to their channels. SMP does self-promotion and marketing ads for an SMP T-shirt they market. Ironically, even their ads are sponsored. “How to Fold Mean Kitties” is currently sponsored by BP, an unnamed prostate cancer drug, and Guffins (a company that markets virtual pets). In this video, Williams folds several T-shirts handed to him by someone off screen, then “folds” the two cats that star in the mean kitty videos. Clearly, the more readers linger on YouTube, the better it is for these web-based entrepreneurs. LONG OR SHORT? If we return to a segment of particularly bad writing I have used earlier, I believe I can demonstrate that long can be persuasive in persuasion-centric writing. For example,

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Careers Students thinking about majoring in English inevitably confront the question: “What are you going to do with an English major?” Contrary to popular belief, however, career opportunities for English majors are quite favorable because English majors are adaptable. They have the critical thinking skills to adjust to a variety of different career paths, and in a world where workers can expect to make major career changes more than five times during a lifetime, adaptability is no small asset. English majors have found job opportunities in financial institutions, insurance companies, federal and state government agencies, the hospitality industry, universities, museums, and service organizations. They are employed as personnel and planning directors, administrative associates, marketing directors, technical librarians, wage and salary representatives, service correspondents, claims adjustors, and insurance agents. The English major is also an excellent undergraduate major for those who wish to enter law, medical, or dental school; complete post-graduate work in literature, film, creative writing or library science; or enter sales, management, and marketing programs in large organizations.

A sophomore considering a career in professional or technical writing will not find the above copy very persuasive. In fact, I suggest it might turn him or her away from considering a degree in professional writing. The fact that it was designed for literature majors but is being directed at people interested in professional and technical writing is bad enough, but it actually offers little information. Imagine a sophomore considering a career in writing. He will know nothing about the subject and will be interested in anything he can find. Persuasive content will give him everything he is looking for, even if it is a little long. I propose the following rewrite. Careers Technical communication is frequently ranked in the top ten careers by U.S. News and World Report and Money magazines. This is largely because the career is so broadly defined that it includes almost any professional skill-set from highly creative and artistic to exceptionally technical (and so, very well paid). It’s the job of technical communicators to figure out how things work and explain that information to the people who would use those things. Toward this end, technical communicators may design and develop websites, develop instruction modules, create simulations, animations, or illustrations, write scientific articles, edit magazines or journals, or create user documentation. The information below will give you a brief overview to the job market for technical communicators and describes several opportunities students have for increasing their marketability. Jobs Technical communicators can have a variety of job titles ranging from technical documenter to multimedia specialist. Depending on your emphasis

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of study, you can find a wide range of job opportunities and titles in this field. The following are examples of job titles and areas of interest.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Documentation Specialist Communications Director Multimedia Specialist Project Manager Technical Writer Web Master Computer documentation Training development Book publishing Animation Proposal writing Document management Editing Article writing Marketing writing Web production and management Environmental writing Medical and pharmaceutical writing Report writing Game narration and design Technical copy writing Video script writing VR design and production

Professional Duties Since technical communicators have such a wide variety of skills, they are needed in almost every professional field to do a number of jobs. The duties of technical communicators might include tasks such as:

• • • • • • • • • •

Editing Interpreting information, ideas, and concepts Marketing Writing instructional documents Researching Creating multimedia packages Web design Document design Newsletter writing Proposal writing

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Salaries According to the Society for Technical Communication 2005 Salary Survey, salaries of technical communicators can range as follows:* Entry-level: $42,000 to $60,000 Mid-level: $51,220 to $70,000 Senior-level: $64,000 to $100,000+ *Actual Salaries depend on location and experience. To find more information about technical writing salaries, visit the STC website at www.stc.org Student Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication Graduates may enhance their networking and marketability through participation in the student chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. In the past six years, our chapter has distinguished itself nationally by winning the following awards: 2002: Region 5 Pacesetter Award 2003: Synopsis, Newsletter Award of Merit 2004: Synopsis, Newsletter Award of Excellence and Most Improved 2005: Synopsis, Newsletter Award of Excellence 2005: National STC Chapter of Merits 2006: International “Best of Show” Newsletter STC meetings are typically workshops where members learn software, develop job skills, or interact with alumni or other technical writing specialists.

Look at all the scrolling the reader has to do. This goes against almost everything the usability experts suggest (though it is chunked) about writing for the Internet. But when readers want information, the page should give them at least as much as they want. With the original text somebody cut and pasted the content without considering how carefully the information matched the audience, but it did meet the expectations of a typical usability study. CONCLUSIONS Persuasion-centric content is designed to get someone to do something specific. Doing this sometimes takes time, and the content may necessarily be longer than user-centric content. The difference between persuasion-centric and user-centric is simple but important. If the purpose of the content is to get someone to the completion of a task as quickly and efficiently as possible, the user-centric model is good. But if the point is to get someone to do something they hadn’t planned, persuasion-centric content is necessary—as much persuasion-centric content as it takes.

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REFERENCES Amazon.com. (2010). As someone who recently bought a camera. Email received May 1, 2010 from Amazon.com Amazon.com. (2010). As someone who has shopped digital SLRs. Email received May 10, 2010 from Amazon.com Amazon.com. (2011). Customer reviews: 58mm filter adapter for Canon PowerShot. Retrieved 06-16-2011, from http://www.amazon.com/58mm-Filter-AdapterCANON-PowerShot/product-reviews/B00330O2U8/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8 &showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending#R3PKP2I5ZI0VW7 Anonymous. (2001). Careers in undergraduate technical communications. Retrieved January 8, 2011, from http://imrl.usu.edu/techcomm/undergrad/index.htm Baehr, C., & Schaller, B. (2010). Writing for the internet: A guide to real communication in virtual space. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. Bailey, S. (2010). Personal correspondence. 05-04-2010. Big Fat Institute. (2011). You Suck at Photoshop. Retrieved June 20, 2011, from http:// www.mydamnchannel.com/You_Suck_at_Photoshop/Season_1/YouSuckAtPhoto shop1DistortWarpandLayerEffects_1373.aspx Bose. (2010). Unify™ intelligent integration system simplifies setup and control. E-mail received May 3, 2010 from Bose. Edmunds Inside Line. (2011). 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic sells. Retrieved June 4, 2011, from http://www.insideline.com/bugatti/1936-bugatti-type-57sc-atlanticsells.html Halvorson, K. (2010). Content strategy for the web. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Hemp, C. (2011). Alaska at eye level. Published in The Boston Globe, March 24, 2002. Retrieved June 24, 2011, from http://www.pacificcatalyst.com/boston_ globe.htm Inside Passage Charters. (2010). Inside Passage Charters homepage. Retrieved October 25, 2010, from http://akinsidepassagecharters.com/index.html Lamster, M. (2011). What am I doing here? Tall buildings and high anxiety in Las Vegas. Retrieved October 27, 2011, from http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html? entry=12748 Loh, E. (2011). Final verdict: BMW 335d. Retrieved June 20, 2011, from http:// www.motortrend.com/roadtests/oneyear/1012_2009_bmw_335d_verdict/performance. html Lynda.com (2011). New releases. Email received April 28, 2011 from lynda.com Orwig, C. (2011). Lynda.com: Photoshop CS 5 for photographers. Retrieved June 20, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_97FwFsgpw PacificCatalyst.com (2011a). Alaska small ship cruises. Retrieved June 24, 2011, from http://www.pacificcatalyst.com/ Redeyez. (2011). Review of Melody Lane motel. Retrieved June 24, 2011, from http:// www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g47169-d253354-Reviews-Budget_Host_ Melody_Lane_Motel-Raton_New_Mexico.html Robert, E. (2011). Review of City Center, Las Vegas. Retrieved June 21, 2011, from http://www.yelp.com/biz/citycenter-las-vegas-2

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SpeedTV.com. (2011). 101 cars: 1954 Porsche 550 Spyder. Retrieved June 9, 2011, from http://automotive.speedtv.com/article/101-cars-1954-porsche-550-spyder/ Williams, C. (2011). How to get more views on Youtube. Retrieved June 28, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bXdKTDAa_s Williams, T. (2011). Review of Bosch spark plugs. Retrieved June 18, 2011, from http:// www.miata.net/products/perform/boschplugs.html

CHAPTER 8

Writing Quality-Centric Content

Suppose you are communications director for a midsized corporation and have just heard of a thing called Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), apparently used for managing corporate information, and you want to know whether it applies to your company. What you want to do is a thorough examination of the topic. You want as much depth as you can get. You could begin by opening Google, and typing “DITA” into the dialog box. The search engine will give you a page with links to more than 70 million resources. The first relevant resources is a Wikipedia page that attempts to explain what DITA is and what it does (2011). The article’s description begins with a paragraph meant to provide an overview of the topic. Darwin Information Typing Architecture The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an OASIS standard XML data model for authoring and publishing. Many third party tools support authoring, including XMetal and Arbortext. With the DITA Open Toolkit publishing system, DITA features single source publishing, inheritance, topic-based authoring, and content reuse [The underlined passages in this paragraph represent links the author used to lead users to supporting information]. (n.p.)

A problem with the writing quality immediately arises. Of the three sentences meant to introduce and describe DITA, two name applications that can be used for authoring in DITA formats. Why is the writer describing authoring programs used to create DITA, before having described DITA? Programming information has a place in an article describing DITA, but not before DITA is even introduced. In this article, a reader of this introduction would still have little idea of what DITA is. 199

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USER-CENTRIC FORMAT The first sentences in the DITA article would also have been much more effective if they had not depended on so many links to add information. This article is presented in a format prescribed by virtually all usability gurus. Because (according to usability gurus) users do not like to read lengthy texts, the gurus suggest writers produce short segments of content supported by links to additional information. The article is an example of quality-centric content (explaining complex and extensive ideas) being inappropriately presented in a user-centric structure. Rather than take the time to inform the reader, the author has created three sentences filled with jargon connected by links to more jargon and even more confusing information. For example, the first sentence suggests that DITA is an “OASIS standard XML model.” The reader is immediately faced with the question, “What is an OASIS standard XML model?” By following all of the links, the reader can find out that OASIS is, “a global consortium that drives the development, convergence and adoption of e-business and web service standards” (2011, n.p.), and that XML is “a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form” (Wikipedia, XML, 2011, n.p.). Neither of these descriptions addresses DITA nor the phrase “OASIS standard XML model.” The reader is left with the need to construct a meaning out of disparate parts. Throughout this article, the reader is forced to look up individual words largely unrelated to each other and then try to connect their meanings in a new context. On the other hand, OASIS standards turn out not to be a particularly important part of DITA. In IBM’s description of DITA (they are the creators of the technology), they mention OASIS only once as an aside, “Also, DITA makes use of the popular OASIS (formerly CALS) table model” (IBM, 2005, n.p.). So having spent the time figuring out approximately what the phrase means, it turns out that it is not relevant to the meaning of “DITA.” By introducing irrelevant material and creating links to supporting information that fail to be in any way supportive, the author actually makes the content more difficult to understand. In the end, the reader might have some sense that DITA is some kind of protocol for creating information architecture. Rewriting the Faulty Paragraph Consider the following rewrite of the first paragraph: The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is a protocol developed for creating and managing complicated content in large communication venues. Effective DITA content is largely made up of snippets or chunks that can be individually named and stored in XML databases. The strength of these databases is they permit the content to be divided so that its segments can be used and reused for a variety of different purposes. For example, a product’s specifications might be broken into chunks and stored

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so the dimensions could be accessed by an online specification sheet, while the safety features could be accessed by a safety training course, and various operating processes could be accessed by an operator’s manual. DITA is particularly valuable for content that is often updated. In such conditions, updates are automatically transferred to relevant documents.

While most any good writer who understands DITA protocol, and is willing to make the effort, could rewrite this even better, I suggest this is significantly better (and much more informative) than the original and not particularly longer. USER-CENTRIC STRUCTURES IN WIKIPEDIA The problem with the Wikipedia article above is it is designed to be usercentric. A loss of writing quality can result from the article’s design structure. While the structure can be effective if well used, the pages lend themselves to user-centric writing. The content, however, is always quality-centric. Such a structure may encourage writers to forsake quality of writing and editing and substitute content based on snippets and user-centric links such as those in the above example. The writing effect of negative quality-centric content in user-centric format is to make reading more difficult. In the paragraph below readers have to search sixteen additional articles. Rather than inform, it confuses. The following is a different article (2011) demonstrating the same problem. Machine-Readable Medium In telecommunication, a machine-readable medium (automated data medium) is a medium capable of storing data in a machine-readable format that can be accessed by an automated sensing device and capable of being turned into (practically in every case) some form of binary. Examples of machine-readable media include (a) magnetic disks, cards, tapes, and drums, (b) punched cards and paper tapes, (c) optical disks, (d) barcodes and (e) magnetic ink characters. Common machine-readable data storage and data transmission technologies include processing waveforms, optical character recognition (OCR) and barcodes. Any information retrievable by any form of energy can be machine-readable. Examples include: _____________

After the “Examples include” comes a list of twenty-four links to other Wikipedia pages describing phonograph records, Dictaphone tapes, chemical substances, punch cards, paper tapes, and more. The entirety of the article is made up of three sentences and forty-one links to other articles. In a circular definition, the article says machine-readable media is media that can store data in a machine-readable format. By following all of the links to all of the different resources, and by reading all of the content on all of the resources, it is possible to infer what machine-readable medium means, but only after figuring out what machine-readable means. Moreover, while the article clearly states that almost all machine-readable content is binary, the majority of the examples used were not binary media, and although the author begins with

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“In telecommunication . . . ,” many of the examples have nothing to do with telecommunication. Finally, clicking on some of the links leads the reader to pages only indirectly related to the content of the article or content implied by the link. For example, clicking on “medium,” (which presumably links to a definition) takes the reader to “Data Storage Device,” which only mentions “medium” in passing without ever defining it. A quality-centric description might read more like the following: Machine-readable media The term “machine-readable media” refers to media with the properties of being able to host data in formats accessible to a variety of different devices usually designed to access that content. For example, records are accessed by record players, magnetic disks are accessed by computers, radio and television signals are accessed by receivers, and barcodes are accessed by specialized readers.

This represents two short sentences with no links to anywhere else. The article might continue from this point, but the reader begins by not having to participate in a hypertext treasure hunt. A Treasure Hunt Leading to Puzzle Pieces The effect of Wikipedia’s model is to create a puzzle of sorts, where the reader is forced to leave the document again and again to find out what key words mean, then come back into the document armed with a cacophony of descriptions, attempt to figure out which description applies and combine it with all of the other descriptions into an understanding of what the article is supposed to mean. In just the first paragraph of the second Wikipedia example, there were sixteen such excursions to supporting material (some of which were just as complicated as the original articles, some of which were irrelevant, and some of which lead to inappropriate information). Wikipedia’s Vetting Teachers will often tell their students to beware of Wikipedia content, not because it is bad, but because there is no good way of knowing what its quality actually is. If the information is correct, students can only know by vetting it themselves. The same rules apply to the quality of writing in Wikipedia. Since there is very little vetting in Wikipedia, and no vetting of the writing, it takes very little searching to find both exceptionally poor and exceptionally good writing there. Wikipedia does apply limited vetting to their articles. They rate their articles and encourage readers to improve them. The example above, for example, is ranked “stub,” by Wikipedia, with the additional comment that the article provides very little meaningful content and may be little more than a

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dictionary definition. In that respect, they do rank the level of information. What they don’t vet, however, is accuracy of the content or writing quality. Nowhere in their vetting of this article do they add “inaccurate and misleading information,” or “poorly written.” Instead, they depend on their contributors to maintain quality. Obviously, in many cases, this tactic does not work. On the other hand, sometimes it works very well. Effective Writing in Wikipedia The first link from the original article on machine-readable media is to an article on telecommunications. I believe this article makes an excellent example of good (if not excellent) writing. Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded drumbeats, lung-blown horns, or sent by loud whistles, for example. In the modern age of electricity and electronics, telecommunications now also includes the use of electrical devices such as telegraphs, telephones, and teletypes, the use of radio and microwave communications, as well as fiber optics and their associated electronics, plus the use of the orbiting satellites and the Internet.

In contrast to the machine-readable article, this article is well-vetted, not so much by Wikipedia as by its reader/contributors. The article has a “GA” rating, which means it is generally considered good, though still not up to the professional standards found in traditional encyclopedias. Nonetheless, I suggest this is a good example of quality-centric information in a digital environment. There are links to important ideas if the readers want more information, but readers will have no trouble knowing what “telecommunication” means after reading the first couple of sentences even if they never click any of the links. The difference between the user-centric writing in the DITA and the machinereadable examples, and the quality-centric telecommunications example is the amount of information the reader can access without having to click links to other articles to fill in missing information. A Quality-Centric IBM Article IBM is one of the major proponents of DITA. Included on their website is an article that fully describes what DITA is and how it works. The article is significantly better, but it is very long (eight pages of single-spaced, 8pt type). It completely ignores usability prescriptions to keep it short. The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is an XML-based, end-to-end architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering technical

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information. This architecture consists of a set of design principles for creating “information-typed” modules at a topic level and for using that content in delivery modes such as online help and product support portals on the Web. At the heart of DITA, representing the generic building block of a topicoriented information architecture, is an XML document type definition (DTD) called “the topic DTD.” The extensible architecture, however, is the defining part of this design for technical information; the topic DTD, or any schema based on it, is just an instantiation of the design principles of the architecture. This document is a roadmap for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture: what it is and how it applies to technical documentation. It is also a product of the architecture, having been written entirely in XML and produced using the principles described here. (Day, Priestley, & Schell, 2005)

The content is dense, but by the time a careful reader goes through the entire article, she should have a good sense of how DITA works and what it is supposed to do. While Day et al. might not be thinking they are producing quality-centric content, the content they produced depends on the quality of the writing and not user-centric structures to provide the readers with what they need. Example of Persuasion-Centric Writing Disguised as Quality-Centric Writing When I typed “DITA” into the Google search engine, I received more than 70 million listings. The first of them was the Wikipedia article I discuss above. The next example leads to DITA.XML.org where we find the beginning of an article with a link to its complete version (Lundin, 2011). Are you creating and managing content nobody reads? In pursuit of the ultimate techCom information architecture Of course you say “no”. But, how do you know if your documentation is read and used (and helps the user)? My experience is that a lot of companies create and manage content that nobody reads. Nobody reads due to two reasons: users can’t find it (even if it is relevant) or because the content is judged to be irrelevant, when skimming the text.

Never mind the quality of the prose. The subtitle, “In pursuit of the ultimate techCom information architecture,” implies this will be an informative article, and the segment begins by implying it will show its readers how to create and manage content that users will read. The segment is followed by another that continues the promise, and it is followed by another that seems to address that promise—but instead, does a head-fake and readdresses the problem and asks more questions.

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Well, moving to DITA allows you to reuse and be more efficient in producing content nobody reads. Maybe you are creating and managing a big manual, describing the product from various angles; in total many hundreds of pages of descriptive content. This is the way it has always been in your company for the past 10, 20 or even 30 years. Who needs the descriptions, when, to accomplish what? Have someone in your company thought about that? Where is the content strategy? And what do you say when people in your organization are questioning the type of content you write?

Although this seems to begin by showing how DITA can help with the problem, it actually suggests DITA exacerbates the problem, and asks more questions, having answered none so far. A few paragraphs further in the article, the author again seems to be about to answer the questions he has posed: So why am I babbling about this? Well, there are things going on out there. As said in previous post, users are searching, not reading. And the time users can to spend on searching is decreasing and the amount of content to search in is increasing. Users are also getting more and more inpatient. Maybe not the “old” user you have today, but think of the “google generation.” They want the information that answers their question, delivered in the tool they are using (in the help system, smart device or whatever), valid for the product they are using, in the language they prefer, by just touching the magic button. You need to engage your users and monitor their happiness, build collaboration platforms where users, you and others can share ideas and content.

Instead, he merely restates the problem and finishes with, “You need to engage your users and monitor their happiness, build collaboration platforms where users, you and others can share ideas and content.” This is a solution? It should be clear by now that this is not meant to be an informative article; it is meant to lead the reader to a link to a marketing page. This is a misleading persuasioncentric page disguised as a quality-centric page. The final paragraph leads the reader to the link in question: How do you develop a content strategy? Many technical communication organizations must develop the strategy with their left hand while producing content. It is like paving the road at the same time as you are driving the car. This is of course ineffective and means that there will not be a strategy, since it takes time to reflect and put all pieces together. But instead of developing a strategy from scratch you should look at existing strategies. SeSAM is a design methodology that helps you to determine what content you need to manage. Instead of starting from scratch, you can start from SeSAM and cut cost in developing a content strategy. Explore SeSAM already today. (link highlighted in grey)

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Readers who go to the SeSAM site find more questions. For example: Are you a product manager or user documentation manager in need of • Vitalizing and improving the user manual(s) to make it easier for end user to find in them? • Implementing a structured way of planning how content is specified in global content creation teams? • Re-arranging content in manuals to make them highlight the product features? • Finding a way of stating requirements on user documentation?

Eventually, after clicking on yet another link, the reader finds information about SeSAM and discovers that none of this has had more than a peripheral relationship to DITA. The methodology has four steps. In step 1 the subjects that constitute the product are identified. In step 2 search situation facets are developed and the subjects identified in step 1 are classified according to the facets. One important facet is the required domain knowledge, the user is assumed to have to be able to carry out the different tasks. User profiles can be developed based on the required domain knowledge. In step 3 content is organized in content packages (manuals) based on the results from step 1 and 2. In this step it is defined how subjects are organized within a content package. In the last step 4 it is defined how the content packages are best transferred to end user, which includes the recommended way to distribute (media channel) and present (layout) content.

SeSAM appears to be a process used for identifying appropriate content in manuals and guides. Having read four pages of content, however, I still cannot explain exactly what SeSAM does or how it works. Furthermore, in this search, I have moved completely away from the original topic of DITA protocols. This, I think, is an example of intentionally misleading writing. In short, it takes little effort to find examples of poorly written quality-centric content on the Internet. A simple search for information about a complex idea will usually lead you right to more examples than you would care to read. The problems in these texts seem to follow from a variety of conditions. Two such conditions include (1) authors attempting to write quality-centric texts in user-centric format, and (2) authors having no idea what kind of text they are writing and so creating a persuasion-centric text represented as quality-centric. Finally, to add to Ludin’s list of reasons someone would not read your content, “users can’t find it (even if it is relevant) or because the content is judged to be irrelevant, when skimming the text,” I suggest a third: the quality of the content is often so bad, readers actively disengage. This returns us to my original

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description of quality-centric content: quality-centric content depends on the quality of the writing to engage the reader and keep her engaged. OTHER QUALITY-CENTRIC WRITING I have been following the adventures of Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, since they landed on Mars in 2003. For years I tracked them daily . . . then weekly . . . then from time to time . . . but I have always kept an eye on them. Over time, they anthropomorphized. I see them as heroes of parallel odysseys millions of miles away. Of course there is a reason: NASA presents them that way. For example the following is the descriptor on a link attached to a news story: “Robonaut 2 is set to leave Earth in February for one of the greatest adventures in the history of robotics.” The article continues with: For its first training sessions, R2 will be placed on a fixed pedestal for lessons on a task board. The board has switches, knobs, and connectors like the ones astronauts operate, and the crew will mock up chores for R2 to master. Once the legs are added, the trainee will be able to move around inside the station, wiping handrails, vacuuming air filters, and doing other mundane tasks for the crew.

One might ask, “Is it possible for a robot to have ‘the greatest adventure in the history of robots?’ Can a robot have an adventure?” When I leave on a road trip, is my car about to have an adventure? At NASA, there is a common thread of excitement in most of their narratives. Stories about research in the natures of distant planets are often presented as if the story changed the way we will see things in the future. For example (Coulter, 2010), “In sci-fi movies, the first stirrings of life happen in a gooey pool of primordial ooze. But new research suggests the action might have started instead in the stormy skies above.” The article suggests that as a result of the Cassini spacecraft’s finding unusually large molecules in the atmosphere of Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, researchers reproduced the atmosphere and ran tests. They got large organic molecules, leading to the supposition that Titan’s atmosphere may be filled with organic molecules and the supposition that life on Earth may have begun the same way. The NASA site makes an excellent example of a site where readers are encouraged to linger and learn (although it is actually a misstatement to refer to NASA’s site as “a site.” NASA actually has dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of sites, but almost all of them do the same thing: encourage readers to linger and learn). The sites do that with interesting, well-written content. I suggest these are good examples of quality-centric sites. When I go to NASA.gov, I never go with the intention of grabbing a piece of information and leaving. I go there to explore and learn, and I am never disappointed.

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I contacted Coulter to ask what their mindset was as she and her colleagues wrote. In an email (04-4-2011) I made the following suggestion: “My hypothesis about your writing is that it is important for NASA that you not just report the news; you must also make it accessible, interesting, enjoyable, and to some extent persuasive (even if you are not selling something).” Coulter replied (04-06-2011) with,

To put it simply, we engage our readers by applying the principles of good storytelling to science writing. (I won’t list them all here, but one example is that we include the “human” element—the scientist’s personal reactions, etc.—when we can.) . . . I have no idea whether my writing adheres to any standards of “good” web writing, but I hope that by telling a good story in a concise, compelling way, I both inform and entertain my readers.”

In directly answering my hypothesis, “. . . that it is important for NASA that you not just report the news; you must also make it accessible, interesting, enjoyable, and to some extent persuasive,” she answered, “Absolutely!” In short, the NASA site makes a perfect example of quality-centric writing. NASA wants people to read their stories. The thing that keeps readers on the site reading the stories is the quality of the writing.

OTHER QUALITY-CENTRIC CONTENT A different site, also designed to encourage readers to linger and learn, is Lynda.com. The Lynda.com site, which I have mentioned earlier, is filled with tutorials. Of course there are a number of sites that have tutorials, but the length of a set of related tutorials on this site often exceeds thirty hours. In effect, these are classes. Again quality is the glue that binds readers to the site. The tutorials are universally professionally done, and are generally worth the hours it takes to go through them. Furthermore, they cover digital topics from photography to software skills to programming techniques. Because Lynda.com is a subscription service, getting readers to linger and learn is critical to its fiscal health. If its content is unsatisfactory, Lynda.com is out of business. But it has a format that seems to work, and its tutors seem universally well-qualified. When I need to learn to use a new application or programming language, this is where I go first. Sometimes I go there for information on how to do something specific (as a user would), but most of the time I go there to linger and learn more about a topic as a student or a reader would. My students go there as well. I seldom require textbooks in my classes, but my students are always required to subscribe to Lynda.com.

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Independent Learning Engineering Courses An important part of my research through the years has been directed toward making engineering courses available for independent learning over the Internet. In essence, I am trying to do what Lynda.com has so successfully pulled off. In this effort, I have produced video courses in thermodynamics, strengths of materials, electrical engineering, and dynamics, which are currently available (e.g., Thermodynamics, 2009) for students anywhere in the world. These courses are complete and up to forty-eight hours long. The courses are used in a variety of ways. The lectures are given by master teachers and recorded in high resolution. For example, lecturers at branch campuses can teach their classes, but give students additional access to the master lectures, or students who miss critical classes can catch up via digital video. In some cases, students who needed a class not being offered have taken the entire course independently. In short, Lynda.com and the engineering classes represent an extreme example of where students are encouraged to linger and learn. In both cases, students pay good money for that opportunity, and in both cases, the quality of the content and not the quality of the navigation encourages them to spend that money. Linger and Be Entertained When in Website Usability: A Designer’s Guide, Jarred Spool et al. (1997), examined the Disney site, they pointed out that it was the least navigable site of the nine they studied. Yet, they confessed it was well-liked by their test subjects. Their conclusion from that finding was that the Disney site was poorly designed. I suggest they came to the wrong conclusion. The Disney site was an early example of effective quality-centric design, and in its entire history, its designers have never subscribed to the user-centric model. From the beginning, it was designed as a place for children to linger and be entertained. These years later, the site is still not particularly easy to navigate, and Disney seems to be having a problem with some of its content being lost, but the site still offers a great deal of entertainment. It takes a while to load, but when it finally gets loaded, children are treated to videos and games and a variety of diversions. The top of the page is devoted to a mix of self-promotional videos. Below the screening area, there are links to pages designed specifically for preschoolers along with rows of links to games, coloring book pages, and other activities. These pages are all designed to entertain. Children can play hide-and-seek with the Queen of Hearts, capture pixy dust and put it into their wands, stack blocks with Handy Maney, help Buzz Lightyear with his Spanish, and engage in dozens of more games. They can also use a variety of drawing and painting tools to create characters and post them on the site. Of course this is a place for children to linger to be entertained, and it’s the quality of the content that keeps them playing.

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Disney’s ROI The longer the children (and their parents) linger, the better it is for Disney. In addition to games and distractions, some of the pages offer videos of children meeting with Disney characters mixed with videos of children being surprised by parents telling them, “Jump in the car, we’re leaving right now for Disneyland!” In one video, a little girl became so excited she shed tears of joy through the entire video, in another, a little girl in a Cinderella dress danced with Cinderella at one of the Disney theme parks. I couldn’t help thinking, “What a wonderful surprise it must be for a child to be notified on her birthday that the car was packed and they were about to drive to Disneyland.” I have no young children, so I can never do that (maybe for a grandchild?), but if I had a young child, I would be tempted. On the site, children are also given the opportunity to print out coloring book pages and full color pictures of all the animation characters. YOUTUBE AND OTHER SOCIAL MEDIA Adults go to YouTube, Facebook, MyDamnChannel.com, the Comedy Channel, and various fan sites, etc., to be entertained. YouTube’s search engine is the second most used search engine on the Internet. If Facebook were a country, it would be third largest. With more than 800 million members, it is even more populous than the United States. Just as with Disney, the longer people linger on these social sites, the better it is for the sites’ ROIs. The sites depend largely on sponsors, so the more clicks or views they can demonstrate to their sponsors, the more they earn. YouTubers who run their own channels, attract crowds and generate discussions are given the best ads. Some of these channels attract hundreds of thousands of subscribers. They receive the most and the best ads. YouTubers seem to come in three groups: (1) individuals who want to post interesting things they have videotaped, (2) professionals who make their living producing videos and posting them on YouTube, and (3) artists promoting themselves. The majority of the most viewed videos come from these artists. Of the top ten videos, eight come from this group. The top three are Justin Bieber (534 million views), Lady Gaga (375 million views), and Waka Waka (338 million views). Of the rest of the top ten, two are cute baby videos. The best of the professional YouTubers produce videos that receive 100,000 or so views, but they will occasionally create a video that goes viral. Corey Williams’ “Mean Kitty Song” (discussed in the previous chapter) adds about 1.5 million new views per week (currently at 54 million) and is 155 on the list of all time views on YouTube (number three in the animals and pets category). In terms of the number of comments (which are important for the producers’ bottom line), “The Mean Kitty Song” has 205,545 comments as of this writing. This video has gone viral and is supported by the largest corporations (e.g., Google, Gillette, Toyota, and Nokia). In contrast, his other videos tend to pick up

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between 100,000 and 200,000 per week for three or four weeks and then plateau. Compared to “The Mean Kitty Song,” these numbers might seem anemic, but compared to most other YouTubers, Williams ranks among the most successful. He produces one new video a week, and they all quickly move into the 100,000 to 200,000 range. Except for the superstars, I can find nobody else so consistently popular. Williams is able to make a living on YouTube with consistently entertaining (albeit sometimes bizarre) content. CONCLUSION Consider this: Facebook has more than 800 million members, YouTube has the second most used of all search engines, and NASA has as many as 200 sites, and nobody comes to any of these environments intent on getting or doing something quickly and leaving. Add to Facebook and YouTube all of the instructional sites on the Internet, and you will find far more quality-centric pages on the Internet than there have ever been user-centric pages. Although user-centric design is the preferred approach to web design, persuasion-centric and qualitycentric pages vastly outnumber user-centric pages. REFERENCES Coulter, D. (2010a). Spirit’s journey to the center of Mars. Retrieved June 10, 2010, from http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/24feb_martiancore/ Coulter, D. (2010b). Robot 2 set to launch in February. Retrieved June 10, 2011, from http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/31jan_r2/ Coulter, D. (2010c). Did life fall from the skies? Lessons from Titan. Retrieved June 10, 2011, from http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/30dec_titan/ Day, D., Priestley, M., & Schell, D. (2005). Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture: Toward portable technical information. Retrieved June 28, 2011, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/ Hailey, D. (2009). Thermodynamics. Retrieved June 14, 2011, from http://imrl.usu.edu/ engineering/thermoSite/index.html IBM. (2005). Introduction to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Retrieved June 30, 201, from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/ Lundin, J. (2011). Are you creating and managing content nobody reads? In pursuit of the ultimate techCom information architecture. Retrieved June 29, 2011, from http://dita.xml.org/blog/are-you-creating-and-managing-content-nobody-reads Spool, J., Scanlon, T., Schroeder, W., Snyder, C., & DeAngelo, T. (1997) Website usability: A designer’s guide. North Andover, MA: User Interface Engineering. Wikipedia. (2011). Darwin information typing architecture. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Architecture Wikipedia. (2011). Inheritance. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Inheritance Wikipedia. (2011). Machine-readable medium. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_medium Wikipedia. (2011). XML. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML

CHAPTER 9

Writing User-Centric Content

In a simple sense, user-centric content is that content described by usability gurus Jacob Nielsen, Carol Barnum, Janice Redish, Steve Krug, and others. This is content designed to lead users as efficiently as possible to a solution with the expectation that once the users have achieved the solution they will leave. It is a specialized writing, designed for efficiently providing results (perhaps above all else). When I go to a website, I often have some idea of what I want. In such a case, I am not there to browse. Suppose I want a book on usability. I get to Amazon and type “usability studies” in the search engine and get a page stacked with books about usability studies—350 of them, the last time I checked. I scroll through the listing, paying attention to the reviews. I see one that interests me and click on it. That usually gives me a photograph of the book along with a publisher’s description and a dozen or more reviews. The reviews will usually tell me how closely the book fits my needs. If the book looks like what I want, I do the one-click thing and go away. In this scenario I am a user. I will skim, jump from topic to topic with little more than a glance at the content. In such a place, there is only one way to cater to my reading style: write with that style in mind. The text should be brief, easy to read, highly informative, and (as Steve Krug says) it shouldn’t make me think. This is the style of reading that all of the “writing for the Internet” books address. According to Janice Redish (2007), “[Readers] don’t read more because . . .” • They are too busy. • What they find is not relevant to what they need. • They are trying to answer a question. They want to get right to the answer and read only what they need to answer the question. • They are trying to do a task. They want to read only what is necessary to do the task. 213

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• They are bombarded with information and sinking under information overload. • As Nielsen and Loranger . . . say, “If people carefully studied everything they came across online, they would never get to log off and have a life.” (p. 3) She goes on to describe good writing for this community: “Good web writing” • is like a conversation • answers people’s questions • lets people grab and go In fact, if you can master these prescriptions, you will have mastered the nature of user-centric writing at its core, although that does not mean the writing will be effective. As I will point out in this chapter, a lot of user-centric text is useless. Jakob Nielsen (2006) describes a world where users are becoming leaner and meaner. With time and experience, “. . . users get more ruthless in evaluating sites as they gain experience; they become faster at scanning pages and quicker at dismissing things they don’t like” (p. 30). He goes on to say, “The more years they have been online and the more comfortable they get with judging web sites, the less time they will spend on the homepage” (p. 30). In Writing for the Internet, Craig Baehr and Bob Schaller (2010) agree fully. “Since users prefer shorter passages and skim online content, it is important to write online content to accommodate these needs” (p. 111). Steve Krug (2006) reduces it all to, “Don’t make me think!” He goes on to explain, “It’s the overriding principle—the ultimate tie breaker when deciding whether something works or doesn’t in web design. If you have room in your head for only one usability rule, make it this one” (p. 11). In short users are not readers; they are skimmers, and they don’t linger. They are task oriented. They are quick to tire of inefficient or complicated or lengthy content—particularly on the homepage. According to Nielsen, you have about ten seconds to get them to move deeper into your site, so every word counts. Once they have moved into your site, you may have a leisurely twenty-five seconds to get them to where they need to be. With that ever-present one-click button and next day delivery, it is not unusual for me to buy something at Amazon.com in under a minute. GOOD AND BAD WRITING IN USER-CENTRIC TEXTS I have never considered usability theorists wrong as they describe users. I do, however, consider their arguments about producing quality content incomplete and applying to only one of the communities who access the Internet—those I describe in the previous paragraphs. Having said that, even when limited to user-centric writing, it takes only a glance at many texts to recognize that there

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is good user-centric writing and there is bad, and having a good and usable structure does not necessarily make a good user-centric text. Confusing User-Centric Texts In the previous chapter, I introduce several Wikipedia articles that emulate a user-centric model. Examining the articles superficially, I was able to demonstrate the impact of attempting to use a user-centric model for producing qualitycentric content. I would now like to reexamine one of the articles, in greater detail and rewrite it as an user-centric text. In telecommunication, a machine-readable medium (automated data medium) is a medium capable of storing data in a machine-readable format that can be accessed by an automated sensing device and capable of being turned into (practically in every case) some form of binary. Examples of machine-readable media include (a) magnetic disks, cards, tapes, and drums, (b) punched cards and paper tapes, (c) optical disks, (d) barcodes and (e) magnetic ink characters. Common machine-readable data storage and data transmission technologies include processing waveforms, optical character recognition (OCR) and barcodes. Any information retrievable by any form of energy can be machine-readable. Examples include: ____________________

The rest of the article is made up entirely of bullet points linked to other articles in Wikipedia. The following exemplifies: • Acoustics • Chemical - Photochemical • Electrical - Semiconductor used in volatile RAM microchips - Floating-gate transistor used in non-volatile memory cards - Radio transmission • Magnetic storage • Mechanical - Pins and holes o Punched card o Paper tape - Music roll o Music box cylinder or disk - Grooves (see also Audio Data) o Phonograph cylinder o Gramophone record o DictaBelt (groove on plastic belt) o Capacitance Electronic Disc

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• Optics - Optical storage • Thermodynamic. (2011a, n.p.) The article is made up of links to information that is often written similarly. If properly assembled, the links might provide meaningful insights. On the other hand, the article creates a kind of puzzle where the user has to find and assemble all of the pieces before he can (perhaps) understand the description. In addition, there is a great deal of contradiction in the texts, and a user looking for insight into the meaning of machine-readable media might leave more confused than informed. For example, the article begins with, “In telecommunication, a machine-readable medium . . . ,” but most of the examples have nothing to do with telecommunication. Beginning with, “In telecommunication . . . ,” implies that machine-readable media is a product of telecommunication. Why not begin with, “A machine-readable medium is . . .”? Suppose the reader is not certain what the author means by “medium.” It is, after all, a word with slippery meanings ranging from water to people who can see the dead. Click on the word “medium” in this description, however and we get this section from a Data Storage device article: A recording medium is a physical material that holds data expressed in any of the existing recording formats. With electronic media, the data and the recording medium is sometimes referred to as “software” despite the more common use of the word to describe computer software. With (traditional art) static media, art materials such as crayons may be considered both equipment and medium as the wax, charcoal or chalk material from the equipment becomes part of the surface of the medium. (2011b, n.p.)

This contradicts the article on machine-readable media in a variety of ways but the most obvious is that the recording media have no direct connection to telecommunications and although much telecommunication occurs using energy as a medium, the above article identifies recording media as a “physical material.” Unfortunately, this is not a description of “medium” that contributes to the article. In fact, many of the links go to information that fails to contribute to the article in a meaningful way. Rewriting the Article A user could go in circles here, and never know what a machine-readable medium is. Despite its user-centric nature, a user cannot quickly scan this material and be quickly informed. Rather, he becomes ensnared in a bog of confusing, misleading, irrelevant, and contradictory information. The problem

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with the copy is this: The author is carefully following usability prescriptions without thinking about the quality of the writing. Suppose I rewrote the article. MACHINE-READABLE MEDIUM A machine-readable medium is a material or energy capable of storing or transporting data in patterns that make the data accessible to mechanical and/or electronic reading devices. Examples include: Physical media • paper tape read via mechanical pins or light • recordings stored on vinyl and read by record players • templates used in manufacturing Energetic media • radio waves read by receivers • light waves read by optical readers • sound waves read by audio equipment Media in combination • magnetic impulses read from hard drives and tapes • electrical impulses read from gates in computer memory • electrical patterns transmitted through wires (e.g., Morse code, telephone) The above paragraphs are clearly user-centric, yet little of the content needs additional defining; the paragraphs are significantly shorter than the original article, and they can be read and understood in under a minute. The rest of the article would provide much more information, but if someone wanted a simple and quickly read explanation, this rewrite might suffice. EXCELLENT INFORMATION IN ONLINE HELP Microsoft Word’s online help (2007) is clean and efficient. Suppose, for example, a user wants to create a macro. Using the table of contents, she can click on Macros > Record or run a macro and immediately find the page she needs. Or she can type “Create a Macro” in the search engine and receive a list of options: (1) “Digitally sign a macro,” (2) “Record and run a macro,” (3) “Create, remove, or change a trusted location.” In either case, she will find the following: In Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can automate frequently used tasks by creating and running macros. A macro is a series of commands and

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instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically.

This is simple, clear, and easily understood. When the user reads this, she immediately knows it is what she needs. For user-centric texts, letting the reader immediately know she has found what she is looking for is a strong rhetorical tool. To enhance this, Microsoft adds examples of possible uses: Typical uses for macros are: • To speed up routine editing and formatting • To combine multiple commands—for example, to insert a table with a specific size and borders, and with a specific number of rows and columns • To make an option in a dialog box more accessible • To automate a complex series of tasks. (2007, n.p.) They begin with an excellent rhetorical ploy—talking to the user as if they were interested in helping and as if she were an informed adult. She can also be confident she is reading content Microsoft writers produced. Compared to help files that lead users to articles and tutorials produced by the general public, this adds a great deal of ethos to Microsoft’s content. Suppose a user wants to change the heading of each chapter in a book to include the chapter number so she can spend less time looking for the different chapters as she edits. She does not know the vocabulary for doing that, so she tries “chapter + header.” The first option she sees is “Insert headers and footers.” She clicks that link and gets a definition of headers and footers and a description of how she can use them (2007): “You can insert or change text or graphics in headers and footers. For example, you can add page numbers, the time and date, a company logo, the document title or file name, or the author’s name.” One of the options immediately available is “Make the header or footer different in each section or chapter.” In a total of two clicks, she is looking at her solution clearly spelled out. If your document is divided into sections, you can vary the headers and footers so that they display different content for each section. For example, if your document is divided into chapters by using section breaks, the chapter title can be displayed in the header of each chapter . (2007, n.p.)

Additional instructions are available for how to divide her document if she has not done that yet. If your document is not divided into sections, you can insert section breaks where you want the header or footer to vary. 1. Starting at the beginning of the document, place the cursor at the beginning of the page where you want to start varying the header or footer.

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2. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Breaks, and then under Section Breaks, click Next Page. 3. Place the cursor at the beginning of the next page where you want to vary the header or footer, such as the first page of a new chapter. 4. On the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup group, click Breaks, and then under Section Breaks, click Next Page. 5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for every section break that you want in the document. (2007, n.p.)

Through the years, online help has always had the problem of demanding very careful writing. There are jokes about Microsoft giving users information without actually telling them anything they can use, but I feel these jokes are outdated. Naturally, any online help will be exceptionally complicated, and there will be places where users run into problems, but by and large, over time, Microsoft has developed increasingly useful online help. Rhetoric and Microsoft If we take a moment to explore the ethos, pathos, and logos in the above quote, we can see how rhetoric is applied. The structural pattern of Microsoft’s rhetorical stance in Office’s online help is “You can do X. This is what X gives you. To do X, do step 1, step 2, step 3, etc.” The structure is based on an understanding of the user. When coming to online help, users will often either have failed to make something work or they are doing something for the first time. In a situation where the software has broken down, users will often be agitated. They will already have tried everything they can think of and with no success—it is simple human nature to try to solve problems before asking for help. If they are trying to do something for the first time, there will be a different kind of anxiety. They may not even know if what they want to do is possible. Users can quickly become frustrated if they do not very quickly see there is a solution, and if they find nothing but confusion, they can leave angry. In any case, addressing and assuring the user is an excellent place to begin. Addressing and Assuring the User Microsoft’s content usually begins with the word “you,” which provides tremendous pathos. For decades, in sales and marketing, professionals have known that “you” can be among the most powerful terms for connecting with the listener. “You can do X,” connects in three important ways. First, it addresses the audience, then it assures the them, and finally it instantly lets them know they are on the right page.

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Reader Expectation The user expects two things from help file content. She expects it to be informative and she expects it to be correct. If she consistently finds the help file in an application to be confusing or otherwise uninformative, she will eventually quit using it and will find an alternative resource, maybe even an alternative application. In other words, if the help file is consistently confusing, it has no logos, and the user’s opinion shifts into the negative range, and then it has no ethos. Pathos (emotional connection), logos (logically meaningful content) and ethos (how much the user trusts the content and/or the author) are particularly important with user-centric writing. A good help file makes a good model. A help file with a logical progression that is consistent from topic to topic provides sense that a successful conclusion is consistently available. A logical progression also gives users a sense of what to expect when they call up a topic. That leads to significant and positive ethos. A cycle is created, where readers go to a page expecting to find what they need, and when they are well treated and fully informed, they leave satisfied, knowing that the next time they look for solutions, they will probably find them there. Breakdown in Ethos Many people trying to demonstrate their skill and knowledge, produce instructions and tutorials and participate in forums, presenting themselves as experts. These might be consultants or contract artists or professional photographers or even college students. As the saying goes, “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog,” and these people might or might not be experts. There is a large spectrum of Adobe users. With little or no apparent oversight, Adobe links its online help to these people. How is a user to know whether he is really following the instructions of an expert? Adobe has help files for its various programs resident on my computer, but they are surprisingly seldom useful. If I cannot find my solution in Adobe’s table of contents, I can type a search word into their search engine. The result will be links to Adobe’s community of experts. If I am searching through Adobe’s community of experts, Adobe has already failed to provide me with my answer, and now I am in a community I do not know and cannot trust. Ultimately, the only way I can know a chunk information is correct is to test it. In a recent search (I discuss this in detail later), I found half a dozen different tutorials, and none of them agreed on how to solve my problem. I use Adobe applications because I consider them the best, but when I have a problem, I do not expect to see my solution in Adobe’s help. Instead, I go to straight to Google or Lynda.com. Google will give me access to a larger community and Lynda.com gives me better tutorials and experts I trust.

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PERSUASIVE USER-CENTRIC CONTENT There may be something ironic about me making the point of separating persuasion-centric content from user-centric content and then immediately discussing user-centric content that persuades. Persuasion-centric content is a complex class of genres with a variety of purposes, although at the core, persuasioncentric content is designed to encourage the reader to linger and be persuaded. Persuasive user-centric content has only one purpose: sell a product, and right now if possible. Sometimes user-centric content designed to sell can be as simple as a name, nomenclature, price, and purchase button. More often, the most persuasive user-centric content has a well-written and quickly read description of some kind. On Amazon.com the novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is described as follows: A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here—one of whom was his own grandfather—were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive. (2011c, n.p.)

What makes this content generally good is the copywriters knew what it was supposed to do and for whom, and they wrote their copy with those issues in mind. Although there is no indication who wrote the copy, I suggest it was written by staff or support writers at the publisher. Amazon has an excellent template for its persuasive copy. They let the manufacturers do the copywriting. In that environment, when the copy works, it works well, but when it doesn’t work, it can seem amazingly dumb. AMAZON’S TEMPLATE Amazon’s sales pages are made of dozens of cells containing information maintained by computers. Each cell is auto-generated and contains a single chunk of information. The cells are produced and presented based on the search patterns of the user. The copy is seldom created by Amazon. It is typically produced elsewhere and plugged into the cells. The finished product, however, is precisely what the usability gurus recommend. A user can arrive at the site, quickly find what they want, order it, and go.

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For example, I bought my wife a new camera from Amazon. The page marketing that camera makes an excellent example of a good approach to guiding me to a product and making the sale. I arrived at the page via Amazon’s search engine. That took two clicks. The first click leads from a search engine to a navigation page with a list of links Amazon thinks I will find useful based on my search input. The second click leads me to the page I need to see: Canon PowerShot SX20IS. At the top of the page (2011a), Amazon introduces the camera with, “Canon PowerShot SX20IS 12.1MP Digital Camera with 20x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch Articulating LCD.” This introduction was written by Canon, not Amazon. I know this because I can enter the above text into Google’s search engine and find it on more than 100,000 different sites. On the camera page, I can quickly scroll down through a variety of topics: pricing information, a slide show made up of photos submitted by customers who have presumably purchased the camera from Amazon (383 photos at the time of this writing), the opportunity to buy this camera bundled with something else, and links to a number of similar cameras that others have purchased after examining this one. Down to this point the entire page is assembled by a computer, with no apparent human intervention, and we are well below the fold. Also, until this point, we still have seen no meaningful information about the camera other than its name, image, and price. Persuasive Copy Next I see technical details followed by about two pages of marketing copy produced by Canon and designed to be scanned by the user. The copy is effectively chunked and each chunk has a descriptive title. Note that this copy is not necessarily designed to be read carefully. Although it can be read carefully, and many readers will read it carefully, it is designed to be scanned. At this point on the page, I have a great deal of information about the camera, but still nothing written by Amazon. In the end, after passing through no fewer than forty links offering opportunities to buy batteries, memory, other cameras, extended warrantees, and accessories (this is all bait, not obstruction), I come to 261 reviews. Many people who buy things from Amazon are prepared to describe their experiences with those products, and, in my opinion, this is the strength of Amazon’s marketing plan. They depend entirely on others to sell their products. Why would Amazon presume to describe the camera when Canon knows its target audience much better? Even better, Amazon’s customers are prepared to share their opinions of the camera. These reviews are a very powerful marketing tool. Consider the following: People who love the camera will write a good review. People who are indifferent will write nothing. And people who hate a product will write a scathing review. A scathing review is a problem for the product, not Amazon. If too many people dislike the product, Amazon can simply drop it from their line.

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A tour of Amazon’s entire site will uncover relatively few bad reviews of a product. This camera, for example, has 18 poor reviews and 221 good reviews. If someone (me) comes to the site inclined to buy the camera, the reviews will support that inclination. For example: The articulating LCD (pull out, tilt/move) was a key factor, as I wanted to be able to shoot from many different angles. It came in handy very soon— the second time I used the camera—I was able to whip out the LCD and get some decent shots at a football game when I had to raise the camera high over my head to shoot over the folks standing in front of me. (2011a, n.p.)

. . . and . . . So, why the SX 20? Recently I’ve been asked to do more and more little video snippets for clients and for my publisher and while I like the results from the SX10 I wanted real HD video for the times that a medical practice has asked for video clips for both their website AND for power point and other uses. I wanted the extra detail for the times that they use the clips in projected presentations. (2011a, n.p.)

Most of the reviews are very short, but Amazon permits readers to evaluate the reviews by clicking, “Did you find this review helpful?” The ones with the most found this helpful clicks are always the longer ones with the most information. In the case of this camera, the most popular review runs more than two single-spaced typewritten pages. It is possible that Amazon wrote nothing that appears on this page. Everything was written by Canon or by reviewers. Everything is automated. This kind of automation—complex and complicated information systems (CCIS)—is becoming increasingly common in Internet content. NEW PARADIGM—COMPLEX AND COMPLICATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN USER-CENTRIC DESIGN Amazon represents a new paradigm of information systems. Writing for these systems is much more complicated than writing for traditional websites. The site itself (as opposed to its team of web managers), maintains most of the relationships with its users. Buy something (or even look at something) and the site takes notice. The next time you visit, Amazon will try to entice you with comparable purchasing opportunities. The site keeps track of your every move and updates you appropriately. For example, when I returned to the page I used to purchase my wife’s camera, Amazon notified me, “You purchased this item on May 25, 2010,” and offered me an opportunity to look at the order if I wished.

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Communication of Complex Information In Communication of Complex Information (2007), Michael Albers describes six complex information characteristics. I list them below with added descriptions for each characteristic. • No single answer: Assumes the needs of different users will vary, the available information might range from simple to comprehensive with a voice ranging from childlike to expert. • Open-ended questions: Users may ask simple questions, yet expect access to complex material. • Multidimensional approach: Users might want tutorials, documentaries, text, or different combinations of all of them. • Dynamic information: User goals will change as they become more informed. Information necessarily changes to meet those goals. • History: The site knows who has been there and adapts over time as the relationship between site and user evolves. • Non-linear: Users may choose from a variety of paths. (see pp. 24-25) Albers contrasts complicated information systems differently: • All possible paths to a solution can be identified: The entire hierarchy of a site can be mapped. • Multiple paths to a solution can be defined: It is possible to map a variety of paths to a single solution. • The situation is closed: The informational requirements and actions can be predefined. • Changes are predictable: A change in one place has a predictable effect on the rest of the system. When compared to these two systems, Amazon.com fits somewhere between them. It manages the history of transactions between the site and users, but falls a bit short on “open ended questions.” On the other hand, “all possible paths” cannot be identified. This, as it turns out, is a common situation I run into when trying to place a site in “complicated” or “complex” categories. Few sites fit well in either of the two systems. Moreover, I am not certain (since the two systems behave so much alike) the distinction matters a great deal for professional writers. As I examine the topic, I realize it is important we recognize this impending future, but whether dealing with complex or complicated systems, we may find any difference between then unimportant, particularly in face of confusion over which sites might belong in which groups. For my purposes, I have combined them into Complex and Complicated Information Systems

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(CCISs), which can be effectively contrasted with the simpler information systems found on the older tradition of websites. Building on Albers’ description, I suggest CCISs will do some or all of the following: • Maintain a history of relationships: Once users have interacted with a site (e.g., logged in, paid a bill, ordered something) the site maintains a running history of the relationship. • Dynamically provide paths from anywhere to anywhere: A user clicks a link and immediately gets access to dynamically generated links leading to information the user might not yet know he wants. • Provide multiple answers to any question: A user interested in cameras might also find out about lenses, tripods, filters, and books on photography, and even XML, AJAX, etc., based on current and past navigation practices. Both complex and complicated systems found on the Internet seem to fit within these heuristics. Amazon.com (which is as likely to be called a complicated system as a complex system) fits particularly well. On the other hand, an obviously complex system I will discuss in the next chapter (NASA.gov) fits just as nicely. In short, writing for the WWW is no longer as simple as writing well-formed and informed texts that can easily be navigated. There is a growing trend is toward CCISs, and it will sometimes be impossible to know where the content on a given page came from or where else it might be seen. New rules for writing and maintaining user-centric copy need to be considered. Where Does Amazon Get its Texts? If we return to the camera page I discussed earlier, we see a large number of different texts. We can identify the authors of only a few of them. For example, as I pointed out earlier, the headline for the page was written and distributed by Canon. The source of the price of $399 is less obvious, but it was probably written by Amazon. The Amazon site uses JavaScript, JQUERY or its own AmznJQ to control its content. It extracts content from remote files (typically XML, script, or HTML files). With these languages, Amazon.com can retrieve content, copy it, move it, and even integrate it into existing texts. It is possible to track that activity (to a limited extent) as it occurs in the 14,556 lines of source code for the camera page. The following is a segment of source code for the camera page discussed above.

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ready: function() { return true; }, get: function() { try { return parseInt(sessionStorage.getItem( ‘B002LITT3Is9_simh_gw_p23_d0_i1purchasepageValue’) ); } catch (err) { }[emphasis mine] (2011a, n.p.)

The “get” command in the code above goes to a JQUERY function that loads the content from a specific cell in a remote file. All of the Amazon pages are filled with similar commands. Writing for a CCIS Environment You might imagine how difficult it would be to write for such an environment. Anything you wrote might find itself pretty much anywhere. Amazon’s solution seems to be twofold. First, what the developers at Amazon write is audience neutral. They depend on others to write the persuasive content (e.g., Canon writes the descriptions of the camera and reviewers write the descriptions of what it is like to use the camera). A great deal of what Canon writes is designed to be single-sourced, so Canon’s product description appears all over the Internet. Moreover, a search of the Internet demonstrates that much of that product description applies to a whole collection of cameras—often the only difference between the copy of one camera and another is the name and nomenclature. Amazon writes things such as the number of stars the item has received in reviews (auto-generated, of course). This material is sorted and assembled by computers where it is posted in the appropriate spots. Go to any other page that sells a physical object (e.g., automotive thermostat) and you will see exactly the same template. Adobe’s Template Amazon’s template works well because it costs them little if the manufacturer writes ineffective copy (and they often do). Adobe uses a surprisingly similar template when providing online help. Their template, however, does not work at all well, at least not for me. For example, although I have used Photoshop since there was a Photoshop, I have never had the occasion to use (or even examine) their displacement filter. Having no idea what it does, I call up Filter > Distort > Displace and find the following. The Displace filter shifts a selection using a color value from the displacement map—0 is the maximum negative shift, 255 the maximum positive shift, and a gray value of 128 produces no displacement. If a map has one channel, the image shifts along a diagonal defined by the horizontal and

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vertical scale ratios. If the map has more than one channel, the first channel controls the horizontal displacement, and the second channel controls the vertical displacement. The filter creates displacement maps using a flattened file saved in Adobe Photoshop format. (Bitmap mode images are unsupported.)

The above sentences are meaningless to me. For example, I cannot determine whether an image is being shifted or the image’s color is being shifted, and what map? Am I supposed to have a map saved that the software can access? What channel am I supposed to use, and how should I use it? There is no way I can tell from this copy. The instructions for how to use the filter follow: The filter creates displacement maps using a flattened file saved in Adobe Photoshop format. (Bitmap mode images are unsupported.) • Choose Filter > Distort > Displace. • Enter the scale for the magnitude of the displacement. • When the horizontal and vertical scale are set to 100%, the greatest displacement is 128 pixels (because middle gray produces no displacement). • If the displacement map is not the same size as the selection, specify how the map fits the image—select Stretch To Fit to resize the map or Tile to fill the selection by repeating the map in a pattern. • Choose Wrap Around or Repeat Edge Pixels to determine how undistorted areas of the image are treated. • Click OK. Select and open the displacement map. The distortion is applied to the image.

The filter creates displacement maps using a flattened file? What am I supposed to make of this? If I were to rewrite the introduction, it would look like: You can use the displace filter (Filter > Distort > Displace) to place one image onto another image so that the first image seems to conform to patterns and textures on the second image. For example, you can, • Put an image onto a T-shirt someone is wearing in a photograph. The logo would conform to the bends and folds of the T-shirt. • Put a logo onto a golf ball. The logo would conform to the dimples and curve of the ball, • Put a pattern on a flag in the wind. The pattern would conform to the curves of the flag.

In general terms displacement maps permit Photoshop users to map images onto backgrounds so the images take on the contours of the background. Even knowing what the displace filter does, I still cannot see a meaningful description of how a displacement filter works in Adobe’s description above.

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Worse—Adobe’s Community If, still not knowing what they do, I type “displacement filter” into the help file search engine, I get ten pages of links to resources. The first link takes me back to the help file example I used above. The second link is to a list of all of the distort filters. This page defines “displacement filter” as: Displace Uses an image, called a displacement map, to determine how to distort a selection. For example, using a parabola-shaped displacement map, you can create an image that appears to be printed on a cloth held up by its corners.

This barely hints at what the displacement filter is or what it does. The third link in the list of links I received goes to a site called “Photoshop Café” (2011) and a tutorial by Colin Smith. Smith is a writer of “how-to” books and not an Adobe employee. The first step of his tutorial is, “Begin with a texture, you must be in RGB mode. I have another tutorial under textures that shows you how to create this rock surface. You can also just download it if you wish.” Begin with a texture? This looks nothing whatsoever like the Photoshop information above, and without more information, stops me at the first step. The fourth link takes me to Layers: The How To Magazine for Everything Adobe (2011), and another tutorial that offers excellent step-by-step instructions on how to create displacement maps using an older version of Photoshop. Even so, with this tutorial, I am able go through the process of placing one image on another and getting the first image to conform to the second. Four links into my search for help and I have found some help, but not from Adobe (and not for my version of Photoshop). Three out of four links, so far, have turned out to be useless. The next link goes to a discussion forum (PhotoshopGurus Community Forum), where I read, I was just playing around with Photoshop until I noticed the existence of the displace filter again, only this time I wanted to know more about it. It turns out that it’s a quite amazing filter. I found an interesting link that explain the “displace” filter in more detail.

The link the author mentioned goes to a page that says, “Welcome to the Gurus Network tutorials section. This is currently a work in progress.” Having come to this dead end, I click the sixth link in the Photoshop help file. I find myself in another discussion in PhotoshopGurus Community Forum. In this case, someone is having trouble with making the displace filter work and is asking for help from the community.

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Displace Filter Not Working in CS5 I used to apply the Displace filter all the time in previous versions of Photoshop so it’s not like I am unfamiliar with this filter. But in CS5, all the displace maps I have in a folder no longer work in CS5.

This is yet another blind alley. Moving on down the list of possible links, I find two more useful tutorials. Out of a total of ten links, three go to tutorials of which two are actually helpful. On the next page of links, I find a pseudo tutorial (that is actually an ad for a commercial tutorial site), another discussion forum, a repeat of one of the tutorials I have already discussed, an ad for an Adobe product that does displacement, and finally a series of links to tutorials for Photoshop CS (an old version that does not behave like mine). Imagine that you are trying to place a flag image onto a banner in the wind. You know it can be done, but you do not know how to do it. After as much as an hour of browsing through all of the options made available in Photoshop’s online help you might have the information you need. At what point do you become frustrated and at what point do you become angry? The Fundamental Problem with CCIS CCISs are created to reduce cost and increase efficiency by making multiple texts accessible for a variety of venues. It can be highly efficient for Adobe when instructions already written for one product (Photoshop CS4) can be applied to another product (Photoshop CS5), and it can be efficient when copy written for online help can also be used in a manual or guide. These are all examples of single-sourcing, and they have been in common use for the past ten years. With Amazon’s marketing pages and Adobe’s online help, it is less expensive when people outside the company (who are not being paid) create the content. While it is less expensive, it can be damaging to a corporation’s reputation if the system offers readers confusing, self-promotional, misleading, or incorrect information and nobody in the company is paying attention. In short, increasingly, sites are becoming more complex, and writing for them is going to become increasingly difficult. Many contemporary writers no longer write a block of copy and plug it into an HTML page. They write chunks of text and plug them into XML pages or database matrices. You may soon find yourself writing in an environment where any chunk of anything you write could end up anywhere—if you are not already in such an environment. Moreover, you could become responsible for the quality of content and have no idea where it came from or why it is there. Writing for Amazon-Like Sites Not all sites are so complicated, but still have similar conditions—some of the content can be audience neutral, but much of it must be persuasive (and short).

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The key is not to write to some recipe but to recognize the different needs of the different genres involved and respond to those needs. If we revisit a typical Amazon product page, we will discover a variety of different genres serving a variety of different purposes. For example, the product has to be introduced. There is a section specifically designed to do that. On Amazon this is usually done with a title, photograph, price, and a reviewers’ quality rating. Although there is little text, this is still a persuasive section and needs to be particularly well done. You are trying to interest the reader in this product enough to get him to explore a bit more—at least down to the product description. Between this introduction and the product description, the reader gets an opportunity to purchase the product plus something else, through “Frequently Bought Together.” This is also subtly persuasive though audience-independent. It is akin to the interaction in stores where clerks are counseled to offer the customer just one more thing. For example, someone purchasing a television might be offered appropriate cables or an extended warranty. Enough people buy that one additional thing to make it worth offering every customer. Amazon often catches me with this—if I buy the camera, I also need a memory card; if I buy a lens, I will need a filter. Below the “Frequently Bought Together” section is “What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?” This section is made up of product introductions much like the one at the top of the page, imported from other pages. It is not unlike bait designed to catch you if you elect not to buy this camera. Note that the purpose of this section is somewhat different from the previous section. In the previous section, Amazon is trying to sell the camera plus something else. In this section, Amazon is trying to lure you from this page to a different page selling a different product. You might make the leap if you have been looking at this camera for a while and are deciding you don’t think you want it. It gives Amazon another chance to sell you something. The next section, “Technical Details,” is simply an instant information resource. This is an absolutely audience neutral, and usually a bulleted list of details about the product. You could look at this and instantly see this is not the camera you want. But, hey, that’s OK, because immediately above it, in the middle of the screen, is that list of other things you might buy instead— Don’t want this camera? Fine, buy one of these. The product description is highly persuasive, but Amazon doesn’t write it. This section is always written by the manufacturer. The upside is this is cost-effective, the downside is there is no quality control. Canon’s page is good enough, but other pages may not even have a product description. Or have one like the following: AGM Electrolyte Suspension System Custom Built Military Grade Alloys Maintenance free Operation Fast Charge Delivery Capabilities Extremely Low Self Discharge Rate Extreme Vibrations, Heat and Weather resistant Sealed Non-Spillable Non Hazardous Construction Maximum Power Density and Deep Cycle Capabilities. (2011b, n.p.)

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This description is basically a list of apparently random words with a single comma for punctuation, and even that comma appears to be incidental. There is no effort in this content to explain why anyone would want to buy this product—or even explain what it is. An important question might be, “Is the text any good?” A writer might look at it and laugh, but the text is not all that bad. A good writer could fix the problems in a few minutes with little more than a few tweaks and some punctuation. The AGM (absorption glass matt) electrolyte suspension system provides maintenance free operation, with fast charge delivery, deep cycle capabilities, and an extremely low discharge rate. It is custom built of military grade alloys, resistant to extreme vibrations, heat and weather. Fully sealed, it is non-spillable and non hazardous (rewrite mine).

A writer knowing the purpose of the text could easily rewrite it in under five minutes. If Amazon had writers monitoring their content, they would not have so many awkward texts. In short, CCISs are going to become increasingly important. That means it becomes even more important that there be excellent writers producing the content and it and rewriting for effect. If we return to Canon’s copy, we see that they recognize what its purpose is—inform and persuade. If we look at the obscure copy immediately above and ask, “Does this inform and persuade?” we can immediately say, “No!” In the future, it will be important for writers to look at a selection of text and evaluate its quality because so much of the text will be imported from remote sites, and so much of it will work really poorly in its new location. CONCLUSION Writing user-centric texts is no easier than writing persuasion-centric or quality-centric texts—often, it is more difficult because a great deal might be needed in a small space. Usability prescriptions about what the structures should be like are useful, but the writer needs to recognize that they say nothing about the quality of writing. Poets often write within rigid structures. Following those structures, I could write a sonnet, but I can guarantee you it would not be a good sonnet. Writing well in a user-centric environment requires a good writer and not a good structure. REFERENCES Albers, M. (2004). Communication of complex information. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Amazon.com. (2011a). Canon PowerShot SX20IS 12.1MP digital camera. Retrieved February 5, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/Canon-PowerShot-SX20ISStabilized-Articulating/dp/B002LITT3I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296746591&sr=8-1

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Amazon.com. (2011b). Vmaxtanks AGM 100ah solar, wind, power backup AGM battery. Retrieved February 5, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ B004DR09Z2/ref=s9_simh_gw_p86_d1_i5?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_ s=center-2&pf_rd_r=0CYRSF5NE6VKXMX2AY2C&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=4709 38631&pf_rd_i=507846 Amazon.com. (2011c). Product description: Miss Peregrine’s home for peculiar children. Retrieved June 30, 2011, from http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004FGMDOQ/ ref=s9_newr_gw_ir05?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r= 1Z3VPZR254BWMEDMWJPM&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846 Baehr, C., & Schaller, B. (2010). Writing for the internet. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. Krug, S. (2006) Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Microsoft. (2007a). Record and run a macro. Retrieved from Microsoft Word 2007 online help. Microsoft. (2007b). Insert headers or footers. Retrieved from Microsoft Word 2007 online help. Microsoft. (2007c). Make the header or footer different in each section or chapter. Retrieved from Microsoft Word 2007 online help. Nielsen, J. (2006). Prioritizing web usability. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Parrish Books. (2011). The blessing way by Tony Hillerman. Retrieved February 17, 2011, from http://www.parrishbooks.com/prostores/servlet/-strse-1939/The-Blessing-Way%2C/Detail Powell’s Books. (2011). History of the expedition under the command of Lewis and Clark to the sources of the Missouri River marketing page. Retrieved February 17, 2011, from http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-2221135472252-0 Redish, J. (2007). Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works. New York, NY: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Smith, C. (2011). Wrapping objects with displacement maps. Retrieved July 3, 2011, from http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/dispmap/dispmap.htm Wikipedia.com. (2011a). Machine readable medium. Retrieved July 21, 2011, from http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine-readable_medium Wikipedia.com. (2011b). Recording medium. Retrieved 07-21-2011, from http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_medium#Recording_medium

SECTION III

Practice

CHAPTER 10

Professional Writer in an Agile Environment In the book up to now, I have discussed a variety of ideas that permit the writer to write and evaluate writing, but I have said little about the working environment where these skills might be used. Working writers seldom work alone— especially if they are doing digital media. Producing a finished website requires tremendous breadth of skills—probably far more and more varied than any one person possesses. The excellent website will demand extreme creativity; quality of design may make or break a site. But it will also demand just as much focus and attention to detail. Extreme creativity and extreme attention to detail are uncommon in the same person. The best new sites are interactive, meaning at least one of its producers is a master of JavaScript, Ajax, XML, CSS, and other complex content delivery technologies. Finally, just as important to the production of an excellent site is the quality of the writing. IT TAKES A WELL-BALANCED TEAM It should probably go without saying that an excellent site of any size can only be produced by a team with a variety of skills. This presents something of a problem for writers because IT departments so often see the IT professionals working on the site as the team, while the writer is an afterthought, brought in at the end of the project to perform her magic. Somehow, the writer needs to impress on the customer the importance of being involved from the beginning, but this is often not so easy. The whole system of web development, with all of its place metaphors, tends to lead corporations toward teams made up of exclusively of IT professionals, with the visual designers brought in at the beginning and writers brought in at the end. One possible way to overcome that inclination may be to demonstrate the point you need to make. It is great to have a team who can all program and tag, but while the code may work well, the site will not do its job if the content is flawed. In the past, 235

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I have sometimes been able to make this point by using the tables I presented in Chapters 6 and 10 to (diplomatically) demonstrate existing writing problems in the old site. For example, I was recently involved in a project where I began as an advisor on a committee examining the ramifications of building a new site. I spent time examining the old site, identified some of the writing problems in the site, showed them to the committee, and recommended that a writer be on the production team from the beginning. It worked, and I was assigned to the production team (see Table 1). Writers also have another door; the same writing and editing skills we use in writing and editing also apply to managing the metadata—a chore the IT professionals tend to shirk. In the past, the importance of metadata has not been particularly noticed, but as websites become more complicated, excellent metadata becomes critical. The person who can write and manage it becomes important and often unique. By suggesting that it could be valuable for someone to be there to filter quality as content is being moved from the old site to the new (evaluating the old copy as it is transported to the new site) and by pointing out how important the metadata can be, you will have a strong argument for being added to the development team from the beginning. Demonstrating the Need for Content Evaluation Being able to demonstrate you can effectively evaluate text, demonstrating where it breaks down or proving the text is successful, can be an important skill. There is an important difference between saying you do not like a particular body of content and being able to explain what is wrong with it. Running content

Table 1. Evaluating Copy on a Humane Society Site Intent

Actual content

Match?

Exigency

We at the humane society need Many people do not to inform the public about who know you can adopt a pet at Petsmart. we are and what we do.

No

Purpose

Introduce ourselves, our purpose, and our processes to possible supporters and users.

Explain how to adopt a pet at Petsmart.

No

Audience People who might become involved with our shelter or might provide support.

People interested in adopting a pet.

No

Rhetoric

Written for a onetime purchaser.

Write for an audience who can impact us in the future.

Appropriate? No

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through the rubric I demonstrated in previous chapters (in essence, being able to dissect it), makes it possible to present tangible and defendable results as persuasive as the results of usability studies or web analytics. It is possible that by demonstrating you really can explain why the text works or doesn’t, you can increase your currency, not just at that time but over the long term. Why Bother? You might be inclined to wonder why anyone would want to add more layers of work to an already busy schedule. I can suggest three answers: (1) by selecting the jobs I do, I find that I can select the more interesting ones, (2) by doing things that demand a broader skill-set, I grow more and faster professionally, and (3) in an environment where more than half of all professional writers are contracting or freelancing, it is a good thing to be highly respected by the company using your talents. I talk about this much more at the end of the final chapter.

EXPERTISE TEAM MEMBERS WILL NEED Typically, to be able to make effective decisions, a team needs demonstrate a number of different kinds and levels of expertise. There needs to be: (1) someone who can build a complicated website, (2) someone who is a good designer, (3) someone who can act as a fulltime liaison with the customers, and (4) someone who can write well. In addition, for highly technical sites there can be a need for (5) subject matter experts, and larger sites may need an (6) information architect and/or (7) design analyst. Combined, this team can handle virtually all issues that might arise in web design. If everybody carries his or her weight, this can be the makings of an excellent agile team.

AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT The guiding principle for an agile design team is to work toward a finished product in iterations. Rather than go away into a computer lab and come back a year later with a finished application, which can be very dangerous, the team focuses on the problems it can solve in a few weeks and makes effectively solving those problems the iteration’s goal. The team will then negotiate with the customer to determine what it plans to attack next. This way the customer knows what to expect and are never surprised or disappointed by what they get. To make things even smoother, the team and the customer (or a customer’s representative) interact as often as every day. At the end of the prescribed time, often called a “scrum,” the team presents what it has accomplished. The larger project is by no means complete, but a visible component of it is. Once the team

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has completed the project, it negotiates the next iteration—the result of that negotiation is often called a “story.” Suppose the team is creating an update to an existing application. When the team completes the iteration, it can be tested while the team begins the next leg of the project. In The Art of Agile Development, Shore and Warden describe a conversation between a hypothetical new employee and a long-time programmer. The conversation goes as follows: One thing I know from my course is that all development methods use the software development cycle: analysis, design, coding, and testing. Which phase are you in right now? Analysis? Design” Or is it coding and testing? Yes, Kim grinned. She couldn’t help a bit of showmanship. I don’t understand. Which is it? All of them. We’re working on analysis, design, coding, and testing. Oh, and we deploy software every week, too. (2008, p. 37)

Agile programming abandons the old tradition of the waterfall model and procedural programming and lends itself to object oriented (OO) programming. In OO programming, the program is made up of a number of different program objects. A button on an interface might be an object, with a tiny program defining its position, color, and behavior. One or two spaces under the button, there might be a text box with a completely different program defining its look, behavior, and contents. In OO programming, if the button program breaks, the button does not work, but nothing changes with any of the other objects. In contrast, procedural programming begins with line one and continues through hundreds or thousands of lines until the program is complete. Then they begin testing and debugging. In this environment it is virtually impossible to build it in iterations. If something in one of the lines is missing, the whole program breaks down. Break the button section of the program and the whole program fails. The Agile Process Rather than build some kind of train with a thousand cars, any of which could fail and wreck the train, agile programmers build individual cars that they can test as they link them into the whole. They do the train one car at a time. In such an environment, they are never actually finished building the train. Instead, they are constantly building and improving. One time they might build a car; the next time they might go back to an old car and rebuild it. In this environment, the company is continuously growing new products. When programming such large projects, the iterations might last weeks or months, but

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during the entire time, the customer is in the loop. The customers always know what to expect and are never surprised. Often in agile programming, the programming is done by pairs of programmers, not by individuals. Two people working on a segment of code are able to bring more skills and talent to the process, and the results are more likely to be positive.

AGILE PROGRAMMING THEORY APPLIED TO WEB DESIGN Websites are so much like OO programs that even programmers will often describe them that way. In reality, some programming goes on, but the bulk of what we see in the code is markup language, designed to describe what the content should look like. Nonetheless, the production processes for an OO program and for a website are so similar that attitudes about OO program can be applied to web development. For example, websites are constructed of largely independent units that include small OO programs, with many pages drawing their content and the description of their content from even more pages. Other pages are designed to drive the look and feel of the final document. If one of the content pages is removed, the site remains largely unaffected. Just as OO programs can be produced in a variety of orders, so can a website. For example, in most cases the order of page production is not particularly important. The similarities between OO programs and website production are such that it is not particularly difficult to apply a variation of agile programming to website production—and a number of commercial enterprises do exactly that. Agile programmers insist they should meet with their customers frequently, and my advice to web developers is to do the same. Agile programmers insist they create their programs iteratively in bite-sized chunks, and I recommend web developers do that too. One important difference, however, is in what needs to be produced in the iterations. Agile programmers produce complete bite-sized programs that can often be taken to market independently or as an upgrade to an existing program. I suggest a slightly different approach in web design. When I build a site, I begin with something I expect to take about a week to do, and get buy-in from the customer. That first thing might be a paper prototype and a visual prototype. The paper prototype would be a prototyped architecture of the site. This prototype could be used to help make useful changes or additions. Perhaps the customers see that we are missing a section they would like to see included, or they see we have included a section for which they have no content. The visual prototype, on the other hand, is usually a Photoshop image that looks like a webpage but cannot be navigated. The purpose is simply to allow the customer to get an idea of the aesthetics. We usually produce three or four visual prototypes (in analog art, this would be called a “comprehensive layout,” or a “comp”) that can elicit customer feedback. This iteration produces two products

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and combines the skills of the designer, IT professional, writer, and stakeholder representative. Customer feedback leads to adjustments in the project. A second iteration might be two or three working navigation models integrated into the designs. This is a third and navigable kind of prototype. It is a tiny website with working pages and navigation issues solved. At the end of this iteration, the customer might see dropdown menus, accordions, and other navigational devices. At the same time, the writer can have spent the week evaluating the content on the old site and can produce a presentation describing strengths and weaknesses of many of the old pages. Decision-Making Major decisions are made at meetings held when each iteration is completed and results are presented. On the other hand, because of the nature of the iterations, practical or tactical decisions occur in real time as problems arise. With a stakeholder’s representative present, the team can make decisions and leave it up to the liaison to present them to the stakeholders. If the stakeholders are uncomfortable with a decision, there is no damage because the feedback is immediate. It is not possible to describe the step-by-step of producing the site, because iterations result from previous iterations and the more there are, the more choices the team can make. Maybe when the team works out the navigation solution, it finds a different problem, so the next thing the team does is go back and solve that problem. The advantage is that the customers are always fully aware of what is happening as it happens, and there are never any nasty surprises. The agile team is given a great deal of decision-making autonomy, but its decisions are largely tactical. The strategic decisions are made in consultation with the stakeholders. The team’s decision-making autonomy gives it the ability to progress, nonstop past decision points. The iterative nature of the process makes it possible for the customers to reconsider decisions in a timely manner if they become uncomfortable with them, and it makes the process of changing decisions easier if they do not work as expected. In a good team with broad expertise, however, the decisions are generally good, because the team makes them as a community. TEAM ROLES There are a number of different approaches to agile programming, but the two most common are extreme programming (XP) and scrum, the most common being XP. I should reiterate that agile programming is more about software programming, which is more about getting computers to do things than web design and development (which is about communication). Still, with a few modifications it works equally well in either environment. The biggest

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difference is that with software development, the point of the writing is to explain how to use the software or (in the case of internal documents) how to make the software. On the other hand, with web design the point of the program (using “program” loosely) is to present the communication to the public. Team Members In The Agile Samurai, Jonathan Rasmusson suggests (2010), “On a typical agile project there are no predefined roles” (13). This prescription does not apply to website publication. During the production process in programming and in web design (when everybody is deep in production), this is true, but because web design is all about communication and much of that involves quality of aesthetic experience, there are certain experts who are not as necessary in programming but are still very important to the project. So while the writer might find himself working with the code, and the IT professional might find herself involved with the writing, the writer is ultimately responsible for the quality of the writing, while the programmer is responsible for the code. In website publishing it should be clear that each of the team members has unique skills to contribute and unique jobs to do. In a sense, the team members are like members of an orchestra. I once saw the opera Don Giovanni with the entire musical accompaniment played on a piano—no violins, no cellos, no brass or woodwinds . . . nothing but a single piano. The experience was not unlike listening in surround sound, but having only one small speaker—most of the aesthetic experience was missing. In this metaphor, each team member provides his or her own voice. Together, they supply all of the skills necessary to make the website a complete experience. Customer’s Representative The stakeholder’s or customer’s representative is the voice of the customer. Virtually all agile programming gurus suggest that it is critical to work closely (even daily) with the customer. The customer’s representative makes this possible. If the website publication team is on site, the representative might be assigned from administration. This person should be a person empowered to make decisions, however, and not somebody drafted from the clerical pool. Ideally, this person will work full-time with the team, but for all but the largest projects this might be impractical. For example, the production crew might work under contract and may not be working in the customer’s facility. Then it becomes even more important to have a representative who can keep the company’s interests paramount. In this case, the representative might not work with the crew onsite full-time, but should be there several times a week at the least. Typically, this is the person who would manage the budget, coordinate production, act as liaison with the customer, and negotiate for both the customer and the team, and so should be as close to full-time engagement as possible.

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With in-house projects or very large contracts, since this is the person closest to the customer, it is reasonable for this person to be the project manager or coordinator. Designer The designer obviously considers various aesthetic issues. It is a mistake, however, to assume that once the look and feel of the site is done, the designer’s role is over. In addition to designing the site, skilled designers can produce additional animation, video, photographs, charts or graphs as the project progresses. Contemporary designers who are familiar with computer animation are necessarily computer savvy. In the best of all worlds, they will be literate in ActionScript, XHTML, and JavaScript and can contribute to development of the information architecture, coding, and programming. If putting together a team for a web project, I would recommend a designer with a full range of design and animation skills. Writer Any recent graduate from a complete technical communication program will have excellent writing skills, but may also be competent in HTML, XML, CSS, and JavaScript, and might have a background in ActionScript (I even know writers who can script in Mel and program with Visual Basic and C++). So, in addition to writing and evaluating writing, a competent technical communicator should be able to provide a full range of technical support for the IT professional (I think writers should practice life-long learning and make a habit of becoming competent with any new communication technologies as quickly as possible). The writer can evaluate quality of existing writing, develop new content, and edit, in addition to creating and managing the metadata. She may also have enough technical skills to assist the IT professional in developing the pages in the site. For example, the writer might actually create the content pages and add the content, while constructing the XML and/or SQL databases. IT Professional The ideal IT professional will be more than just a coder or programmer. This person will be an information architect, fully experienced with complicated and complex information systems. Even the simplest contemporary sites are driven by clouds of information—about how the pages should look, about how they should behave, about where individual chunks of content can be located and much more. Focusing on a single process (e.g., a site designed entirely around active server pages or PHPs) sacrifices many creative possibilities, and the ideal IT professional will avoid doing that.

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Subject Matter Expert The subject matter expert (SME) brings extensive expertise in a single area. For example, a team producing a site designed largely for marketing would find a professional with a marketing degree invaluable. This person would not only know how to market, but would also know how to measure marketing effectiveness. In contrast, on a site designed for scientists, an SME who can make certain the site is appropriate for that audience could keep the publishers from alienating the audience. A team might need different experts to meet different needs. Typically, the SME will be an advisor and not a participant.

THE TEAM AND THE PUBLICATION PROCESS Processes will vary depending on the kind of site and the nature of the company’s exigencies. For example, if the team is looking at creating a new site, they might spend the first week figuring out all of the sections the site will need. On the other hand, if they are replacing an old site with a new one, they might spend their first few weeks identifying problems in the old site. I keep returning to my one truism, “There are no recipes.” I cannot give you a step-by-step; do this, now do that. All I can say is identify those first things that must be done and do them. Identifying the Goals In agile programming, identifying goals is done with “stories.” Well-formed narratives can guide you toward a good sense of what you need to do in the near term as well as the long term. For example, you may have just completed a working model of the navigation protocol that will be used in the site. Now you need to decide the next step. During discussion, the team might decide the next step is to put together a working template made up of empty pages that navigate effectively. You might plan (the story) how you can go about that, who will do what, and when you think you can have it completed. The customer is usually happy to negotiate those with your team. The questions you are looking for answering with the narratives are (as you might expect) those genre questions I have introduced time and again throughout this book: • Why do you need this and what are the conditions driving that need? • How many different things do you need this site to do? • How many different audiences will the site host? • How do you want to impact your audiences?

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What you are trying to do is find out how many different genres the site will need and where it will need them. Once you have developed that information you can identify what needs to be done first. “Under Construction” Those under construction signs you see on websites in progress (and worse, those 404 messages) are a true mark of the amateur. If the page is not ready, it should not be available. That said, it is still quite possible to put a site up in stages. Our department once waited for more than a year for a new site because IT refused to post it before it was completely done. I suggest there is no such thing as a completely finished website. It is quite possible to put a site up in iterations as long as the iterations are not unprofessional. Which Hierarchy? Websites are often depicted as hierarchical with the homepage on top, navigation pages down a level, and content pages down yet another level. The hierarchical model is simply an invention. Another way of looking at a site is as concentric circles with the critical pages at the core, with less critical pages in lower priority levels, and rich support for the content pages out yet more levels (see Figure 1). From my point of view, the advantage of this model is it allows me to see the site as something that can be staged. Keep in mind that webpages are reasonable

Figure 1. A hierarchical model based on concentric circles to establish production priorities.

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examples of object oriented programming. With object oriented programming, the program isn’t necessarily at its final stage when released. The biggest advantage of agile programming is that the program need not have achieved its final stage before release. Many websites can be created using the same model. Using this model, the first stage contains the critical things: homepage, critical navigation and content pages, and supporting material. This provides a map of the first priorities. In agile programming, the programmers try to very quickly produce something the company can take to market. They want immediate ROI. The same model can be applied to agile web publishing. Get a product that can be called finished up and running as soon as possible. Perhaps the final homepage will have a carousel showing really great photos of really great products. There is no reason the homepage cannot begin with a single really great photo of a really great product. Perhaps the company wants a section for investor relations, but there is no reason the first iteration must contain such a section. Perhaps every product page will have excellent video reviews for potential customers to view. There is no reason the site necessarily has to begin with those videos in place. Just as a site can be seen as constructed of concentric circles with the most critical things in the inner circles, it can be produced the same way, with the most critical things first. The site never looks unprofessional because everything the public sees is highly polished. After the first iteration, things are added that make the site progressively richer. In a sense, that’s how site management works in the first place (if things are well done), the manager or master is constantly improving the already existing site—updating and improving information and navigation, and creating new sections as the need arises. The idea of rapid prototyping a working site and making it publicly available is not particularly different.

EXAMPLE SITE 1 If we examine a hypothetical site, I think I can make my point. Suppose a new company is formed to repair old photographs, scan and archive old blueprints and product designs, and capture and archive critical production skills on video for just-in-time instruction. This might be a small company made up of only a few people in a single space. It might begin with a single person with strong Photoshop, Flash, and Premiere skills who already does these things for a major manufacturer—her only client at this time. The capturing and archiving of the critical skills (as just-in-time training videos) is actually quite complex and will involve a long-term marketing agenda, so the early ROI from the site will come from image manipulation and archiving, not process preservation. The site can easily be built in iterations, each laying a foundation for the next.

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Exigencies, Purposes, and Audiences Under these circumstances, what are greatest exigencies for the site? What are the most important purposes and who are the most important audiences? We should have no difficulty seeing the exigencies. We have a single entrepreneur operating on a shoestring, who needs the fastest possible ROI. Since the company is Internet-based, its most pressing need is to get a professional site up and running in front of its community of customers. Of course it needs a polished storefront, but it does not need a lot of bells and whistles. It initially needs its audience to know what it does and how well it does it, ASAP! Who is its audience? In this case, the audience is a collective of corporate historians, archivists, and maybe HR executives tasked with protecting the corporate legacy. People producing histories, annual reports, corporate brochures, and so on (and so need damaged photos repaired), would also find its services useful. Such a site might go up with no more than five or six pages, perhaps initially containing static before and after photos. It might contain embedded CSS tags but no JavaScript. It could be published in under two weeks. In the agile tradition, that would be the first iteration. We would have version 1.0, so to speak, up and running in about two weeks. First Two Weeks The team might be somewhat truncated, including the entrepreneur as the stakeholder representative and the designer, working with a writer, and an IT professional—a three person team. Interacting with the team for continuous feedback, the designer might quickly produce example pages in Photoshop, demonstrating the possible look and feel. The designer might spend a few days developing half-a-dozen different interface designs while IT assembles possible structures. In the next push, the team might slice the images and load them into HTML pages to produce a first working site. In two weeks the customers can see a professional site—a working storefront posted on the Internet. At this stage, there are a number of things that shout AMATEUR that should be avoided. Those silly “under construction” signs, 404 messages, and hurriedly built, unnamed pages look totally unprofessional. Although the site might be incomplete, it should never look it. Next Iterations The next iteration might be to make the homepage richer. Perhaps the team installs a carousel with rotating images so that an old image is displayed and morphs into a repaired version. In addition, the team might add a dozen pages that show the techniques the entrepreneur has used in the past to repair the most damaged images (e.g., converting photocopies back into excellent black and

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white photographs). This iteration might also include a price schedule, using example photos, describing how long it took to repair them and what the cost was. An agile team would look at what has been done and what needs to be done and would work out with the customer what it should do next. The result of each iteration should be something that adds to the site, can be made available to the public, and increases ROI. So far, nothing has been done about the blueprints or the process preservation capabilities. But the section concerning photo repair is complete. The most probable next iteration might be to add the blueprint repair and archiving skills, also in iterations. Finally, because the ideas are so complex, the archiving of critical skills would be added last. In short, the important thing is this: the site could have been built so that nobody outside the design team saw anything of it until it was completely done, or it could have been built making each new iteration available as it was completed. In the first case, the customer has no hope of benefiting from it until it was completely finished. In the second case, the customer has the opportunity to begin doing business almost immediately. EXAMPLE SITE 2 In my experience, most new sites are developed from already existing sites. In fact, in the past three years, I have built no new websites completely from scratch—all have been rebuilds of old sites. The process for developing a new site to replace an older site is different from creating a completely new site from scratch. When building a new site, the idea is to begin impacting ROI as quickly as possible and so make content available ASAP. Unlike the small site I describe above, developers cannot rapid prototype a working site and quickly replace the older site. Instead, they need to improve the old site so it can continue to contribute to the ROI while the new one is being built in a staging server. Just as importantly, however, the old site needs to be tested and improved because, unless the new site is being built completely from scratch with all new content (an expensive proposition at best), much of the old site will be imported into the new site. The team does not want to import faulty content into the new site. The Team With a new site, especially a small site, three or four members on the team is a good number. On a large site being rebuilt, four or five team members may not be enough. The IT professional may have assistants who help with the programming; the design may be assigned to a professional studio that may have ten or more members; the stakeholder representative may be reporting directly to a vice president with a committee of subordinates all voicing opinions; each major section of the site might have its own SME. In all that, there may still only be one

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writer. Even if the number of people working on the site is large, the number of people making day-to-day decisions should still be small—four or five people. Large committees often slow decision making to a crawl and the best ideas and designs are often quashed before seeing the light of day. The decision makers should be the lead IT professional, designer, SME(s), writer, and stakeholder representative. Naturally, the stakeholder representative works closely with the VP and committee. Workflow Particularly with a huge site, the idea is to create a pace the team can sustain for a long time. As David Anderson explains it, “Large scale software development is a marathon, not a sprint” (2010, p. 2). One of the most important contributions from agile development is that it breaks the project up into workable steps that one-by-one lead to a published website. Doing the work in iterations makes a particularly effective approach. First Two Iterations The first week might be used just to identify what tests need be done on the old site, with the second week (or few weeks) applied to running the tests. These tests include usability, but more important from the point of view of the writer are writing quality and reader cognition tests (discussed in detail later in this chapter). The next iteration is dedicated to repairing problems with the old site so the old site is not languishing while the new one is being built and so you know you have good content. Again, it becomes the writer’s job to repair any problems in the content. Here the writer can do some of her most important work. Third Iteration Based on problems you find in the old site, the team can begin designing the architecture of the new one. It might begin this with pencil and paper and Post-it notes on a blank wall. This allows team members to build a storyboard of sorts. The team can sit back and visualize where the pages can go and how they will be linked. Typically, sites are designed hierarchically with the homepage at the top, navigation pages in the next tier down and content pages below that. As I have already pointed out, it doesn’t have to be that way. The site can be visualized as concentric circles, starbursts, or any other patterns that permits you to see connections and priorities better. As a writer, you can help with this more than you realize. You are the one who knows where the content is on the old site, what it looks like, and how it interacts with other content. The IT person will see the architecture of the site, but you will see how the content fits (or fails to fit) in that architecture.

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Fourth Iteration This is also a good time to begin working out how navigation will be handled. Once you see how many pages you are going to have, you can identify the best process for managing that number. The larger the site, the more important it is that the team develops effective navigation. Often this is done with paper prototypes but it could be done with simple navigation pages linking to empty content pages. You can help with testing links and the language defining them. While the team works on the navigation, the designer can be producing page designs. In my opinion, there should be no fewer than four completely different designs of homepage, navigation pages, and content pages— twelve or more designs. There are two reasons for this: the customers should feel like they have a choice, and the final (and best) design is usually a combination of the best of the original designs. The team (including customers) might like how the navigation is done on one design but like the colors on another. At the end of the week(s) the architecture and designs can be presented to the customers for their critique. Often the customers will have good suggestions, and you can run a pairwise comparison by the customers getting their buy-in in the visual design. Additional Iterations With design and navigation accomplished, the team can begin building a rapid prototype of the site. This involves slicing art into pieces IT can use for the pages, integrating working navigation, establishing representative examples of all of the different kinds of pages with their parts all working, and (for the writer) producing or importing appropriate texts. The idea is to make sure everything works as expected and the aesthetics works under a variety of different conditions. The reason the writer uses actual texts and not lorem ipsum is so she can see how the actual text is going to look on the different pages. I have no problem with using lorem ipsum, but designers often use as much or little text as they need to make the page look right. If you use actual texts and find that the pages are consistently too long because the text column is too narrow, you can have the designer redesign to eliminate the problem in the rapid prototype stage. An important justification for using lorem ipsum is when you show the customers a real text, they can become fixated on any language they do not like or errors in the text. If you use the real text, you need to be certain it has no errors in it. One last point: while producing the rapid prototype, IT needs to keep in mind that the next step involves producing a style guide for the look and feel of the pages and for the manner in which the code is designed.

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Moving into Specializations Once the rapid prototype is finished and works well and looks good, the team will tend to apply more individual skills. The IT team will naturally focus on production of the structure while the writers and artists will focus on content. STYLE GUIDE FOR THE CODE, CONTENT, NAMING CONVENTIONS, AND METADATA While IT is working on structure, and working with the team and the customer, the writer can begin developing a style guide for the site. Creating cascading style sheets based on an existing style guide makes the whole process much easier later. Knowing what font applies to each of the text components (and assigning the fonts meaningful names in CSS) makes it easy to insert texts into pages and assign them correct classes or IDS. The writer and designer working together can establish the rules for the look and feel of the content. There is no one correct style. The best style guide will change from site to site. But not having a style guide designed specifically for a site will lead to the style of the site evolving with no direction. Styles used later in the process can be completely different from styles used earlier. The reader, however, does not use the site like the developers developed it. A reader moving from a very early page to a later page will see jarring differences. Code The style guide also covers the nature of the code. As you will see in the next chapter, IT has amazing flexibility when tagging or coding a site. The site can be set up using any combination of DIVs and tables and lists to control organization. The pages can also be tagged using different tagging formats. For example, the convention for tagging HTML involves indenting, but the convention for coding CSS can be indenting or stacking paragraph style, and exactly what “indenting” means changes, depending on whom you read. Naming Conventions At the same time, in many well-designed websites, you find all of the components on pages placed into especially well-named DIV containers—often called envelopes or wrappers or wraps. In the code, you can often see tags beginning with,