The Rhetoric of Web Pages
You may be thinking that if all you are doing is writing blog entries, why do you need to think about rhetorical issues? And it is true that many blog templates offer you very little control over the look of your pages. Still, no matter how little control you may feel you have, you still can add hyperlinks, headers and subheaders, graphics and videos. Different genres of web writing offer different degrees of control over the rhetoric of your pages, but these issues are always present to one degree or another.
The Rhetorical Situation
As with your other writing, consider The Rhetorical Situation of your website. What is its purpose? What audience are you writing for? What is your central message or topic? What is the cultural context of the site? For example, will you be writing in English? Are you writing in your role as a college student?
When writing online, remember to consider The Rhetorical Situation in which you are writing.
WEB WRITING STYLE GUIDE
Version 1.0, June 2011
Edited by Matt Barton, James Kalmbach, and Charles Lowe
The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License.
