INTRODUCTION
Writing
style refers to the manner in which an author chooses to
write to his or her audience. A style reveals both the writer's personality and
voice, but it also shows how he or she perceives the audience. The choice of a
conceptual writing style molds the Writing style refers to the manner in which
an author chooses to write to his or her audience. A style reveals both the
writer's personality and voice, but it also shows how he or she perceives the
audience. The choice of a conceptual writing style molds the overall character
of the work. This occurs through changes in syntactical structure, parsing
prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of thought into usable
frameworks. Overall character of the work. This occurs through changes in
syntactical structure, parsing prose, adding diction, and organizing figures of
thought into usable frameworks.
A writer’s
style is what sets his or her writing apart and makes it unique. Style
is the way writing is dressed up to fit
the specific context, purpose, or audience. Word choice, sentence fluency, and
the writer’s voice — all contribute to the style of a piece of writing. How a
writer chooses words and structures sentences to achieve a certain effect is
also an element of style. When Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try
men’s souls,” he arranged his words to convey a sense of urgency and
desperation. Had he written “These are bad times,” it’s likely he wouldn’t have
made such an impact!
Style is usually considered to
be the province of literary writers. But journalists have distinctive styles, and they need to know
how to vary their styles to fit different audiences. For example, the
first-person narrative style of a popular magazine like National
Geographic is quite different from the objective, third-person expository
style of a research journal like Scientific American, even though
both are written for informational purposes.
Writing for the Web and the writing for traditional print
media is quite different. Web users do not merely read online content, they interact
with it, because unlike print media, online media are not static or one-way, or
at least they shouldn’t be. Hypertext allows this interaction, or “reading,” to
be non-hierarchical and non-linear, more like entering a matrix and moving
around within it than reading left to right, line by line. “Writers of
hypertext . . . might be described as the designers and builders of an
information ‘space’ to be explored by their readers,”
WRITING STYLE OF NEW MEDIA AND CONCISION, TONE & NUANCE
When we write on new media, our natural
ability to express ourselves may remind us that writing per se isn’t always the
problem. Formal academic writing for an audience that seems both inscrutable
and implacable can easily undermine our confidence. An opportunity to write
more freely—with less anxiety about audience—can be a great reminder of our own
writing ability. Similarly, blogging allows us to find smaller topics and
articulate what we want to say about them in a compact format.
But is there
also a relationship between new media and the act of composition at the
sentence level? Using social media often means learning to use language in a
somewhat different way: our register is different; our vocabulary is different;
our grammar may even be different. We embrace certain forms of informality
(because Twitter). We develop a store of short words—‘apt’ is particularly
handy when space is tight—and a greater appreciation of strong verbs. We treat
grammar in ways that we daren’t in our academic writing; that is, we assume a
sympathetic audience who will know what we mean even when we bend the rules.
Even though we don’t turn around and write these terse but friendly sentences
in our academic writing, the process of writing on new media can give us great
insight into the boundaries of a strong sentence.Even in the more spacious
confines of a blog, our style may be affected by the fact that a blog post is
written in a compressed time frame
CONCISION
The first thing
that will come to anyone’s mind when we think of writing on social media is
brevity. Trying to say something in less than 140 characters, for instance,
requires that we bring a whole new level of attention to concision. Even if we
don’t always use those strategies in our everyday writing, we are forced to
notice the potency of concision. If you regularly write extremely short
sentences, you are inevitably honing your brevity skills. In doing so, you are
bound to experience some of the benefits of limitation. Sometimes we will
encounter the limits of limitation—i.e., the point at which something can’t be
any shorter—but we will also learn the value of expressing ourselves in fewer
words than we thought possible.
TONE
One of the best
ways to understand the role of tone in writing is by having to shift that tone.
Academic prose isn’t necessarily good or bad writing, but it is very particular
in its tone. New media writing, on the other hand, can give us a sense of a
different style of writing and thereby help us see the distinct contours of a
piece of academic writing. While people
worry that the unique demands of Twitter or the text message will undermine
writing ability, it seems entirely possible that the experience of writing in
multiple registers will actually strengthen writing overall.
NUANCE
Short-form
writing is also a great reminder of the importance of doing justice to
ambiguity. For instance, I find that Twitter is great for sharing things that I
like, but not so good for those things about which I have significant
reservations. Without room for caveats, we are left without an easy way to
disagree respectfully. Think about your average statement of scholarly
reservation: “While I found the decision to highlight X extremely helpful, I
was ultimately troubled by the reliance upon traditional categories of Y.”
That’s 145 characters, even without actual content. So I don’t share that link;
Twitter becomes for me a place to talk about the things I actively like or that
I like enough to forego qualification. The limits of social media writing thus
confirm one of the great strengths of academic writing: the creation of a space
expansive enough to contain both agreement and disagreement
Overall,
composing text for new media is
instructive for our non-social media writing. By writing things that are more
direct or casual or polemical, we are better able to understand how those
qualities may or may not operate within our formal academic prose.
WHY NEW MEDIA
WRITING IS DIFFERENT
People don't read information on the Web in the same way
as they read printed material. Print content allows us to 'control' the reader.
We can write from introduction to conclusion and carefully build arguments. We
know what they've read previously, and what they're going to read next. We can
present information in a logical sequence, supported by peripheral cues.
Web users skim content, they ignore details to read
content faster, they even modify ingrained left-right viewing habits in order
to drill down more quickly. There have been a lot of usability studies done
over the years, the most extensive of which were conducted by Dr Jakob Nielsen, and Stanford University/Poynter
Institute. All the reams of information produced by the Sun Microsystems/Jakob
Nielsen usability
tests, and the Stanford University/Poynter Institute eye
tracking studies, boil down to a few basic facts:
Web users generally ignore extraneous graphics.
79% of users scan the page instead of reading word
for word, focusing on headlines, summaries and captions.
Web readers are three times more likely than
newspaper readers to limit in-depth reading to short paragraphs.
Of those Web users who do read the entire page, most
only absorb 75% of the content.
Reasons for this behavior include:
Reading from a computer monitor is 25% slower than
reading from print.
Reading from a computer monitor increases eye strain
and fatigue.
Web users often scan centre-left-right, instead of
left-right.
Dr Nielsen also developed a number of content-oriented
conclusions:
Web users are active, not passive. If a quick scan
doesn't show them the information they need, they won't spend time
searching for it.
The longer the text, the less likely Web users are
to read it.
The longer the text, the faster Web users will skim
the scannable elements (headlines, summaries, and captions) - if they scan
the page at all.
Web users don't believe hype. Any claim needs to be
backed up by facts.
WRITING STYLES THAT ARE GENERALLY USED
There are four types of writing tyles that are generally
used and seen in new media and traditional media. There
are many sub-types of writing which may fall in any of those categories.
1. Expository
Writing:
Expository writing is a subject-oriented writing style,
in which the main focus of the author is to tell you about a given topic or
subject, and leave out his personal opinions. He furnishes you with relevant
facts and figures and does not include his opinions. This is one of the most
common type of writing styles, which you always see in text books and usually
“How – to” articles, in which the author tells you about a given subject, as
how to do something.
Key Points:
Expository writing usually explains something in a
process
Expository writing is often equipped with facts and
figures
Expository writing is usually in a logical order and
sequence
2. Descriptive
writing:
Descriptive writing is a style of writing which focuses
on describing a character, an event or a place in great details. It is
sometimes poetic in nature in which the author is specifying the details of the
event rather than just the information of that event happened.
Example:
In descriptive writing, the author will not just say: “The
vampire killed his lover”
He will change the sentence, focusing on more details and
descriptions, like: “The red-eyed, bloody vampire, flushed his rusty teeth
into the soft skin of his lover, and ended her life.”
Key Points:
It is often poetic in nature
It describes places, people, events, situations or
locations in a highly-detailed manner.
The author visualizes you what he sees, hears,
tastes, smells and feels.
3. Persuasive
Writing:
Persuasive writing, unlike ‘Expository Writing’, contains
the opinions, biasness and justification of the author. Persuasive writing is a
type of writing which contains justifications and reasons to make someone
believe on the point the writer is talking about. Persuasive writing is for
persuading and convincing on your point of view. It is often used in complain
letters, when you provide reasons and justifications for your complaint; other
copywriting texts, T.V commercials, affiliate marketing pitches etc. are all
different types of persuasive writing, where author is persuading and
convincing you on something he wants you to do and/or believe.
Key Points:
Persuasive writing is equipped with reasons,
arguments and justifications
In persuasive writing, the author takes a stand and
asks you to believe his point of view.
If often asks for a call or an action from the
readers.
4. Narrative
Writing:
Narrative writing is a type of writing in which the
author places himself as the character and narrates you to the story. Novels,
short stories, novellas, poetry, biographies can all fall in the narrative
writing style. Simply, narrative writing is an art to describe a story. It
answers the question: “What happened then?”
Key Points:
In narrative writing, a person, being a narrative,
tells a story or event.
Narrative writing has characters and dialogues in
it.
Narrative writing has definite and logical beginnings,
intervals and endings.
Narrative writing often has situations like
disputes, conflicts, actions, motivational events, problems and their
solutions.
NEW MEDIA
WRITING VS PRINT WRITING
The first thing to keep in mind
is that writing for an online medium is night-and-day different from writing
for print. Why? Take a moment to think about the core functionality of a print
publication. Once an article is printed and circulated, it becomes a product
that may be read by the people who might come across a physical copy of it.
That publication is now a finite moment in time; the publication doesn’t live
or breathe because it’s in a physical form. Readership is dependent upon when
the article is released to ensure the highest amount of readers and whatever happens
when it hits the secondary market. Publishers can guess how many people might
read your article by their circulation numbers, but there really isn’t a
definitive way to track who read it and who didn’t.
On the web, not only can a
publisher track how many people have read your article, they can also see how
many visits it receives, where the visitors originate from, etc. over a long
period of time. For this reason, some consider web-based works to live and
breathe online. Articles that you may have written two years ago have the
ability to become popular again on the web, simply because of how the web
functions. Unlike a print publication, mistakes can also be fixed instantly or
articles can be changed, which is why some publications have rushed to produce
timely content without having all the facts.
In many cases, writing for print
allows you to have more freedom and more flexibility with your writing style
because you are writing for a captive audience. When you write for the web, you
are trying to capture members of a much larger audience.
Because of how the web
functions, when you write an article for the web, search engine optimization
(SEO) is a key factor in attracting what are known as “organic” visitors. When
applied to writing, SEO refers to a process in which the writer will use
specific keywords in a particular order on the page in the hopes that the
search engines will “pick up” the article and rank it higher in the search
results. If I was writing an article related to alien abductions, for example,
I might entitle my post simply as “new media writing vs print media?” A
potential visitor would then type in that keyword or phrase into a search
engine, find your link, and read the article. This visitor didn’t know about
the publication that I was hired to write for nor did they know that I had
written the article; they were attracted to my writing based on keywords within
it. This type of writing affects your writing style because in many ways it
limits creativity and word choice in order to achieve the highest amount of
readability possible while retaining the overall theme of the article.
Many, if not all, online content
providers know about search engine optimization and how powerful well-created
content can help lift a site in the search engine rankings to attract visitors.
This content, however, doesn’t come “free,” which is why there is such a huge
need for good content written with SEO in mind. SEO is one of the reasons why
there are places online that want your writing; many companies are looking for
good, keyword-driven articles that they can use on their website. Some of you
may feel that SEO isn’t really important all the time; in my experiences, SEO
is a component of your online writing toolkit but it isn’t the only one.
In the print world, content is
often written with a particular goal in mind, but those goals are often limited
by how expensive it is to print that publication and how many people the
content might reach. If you think about it, billboards are a great example of
how a message needs to be crafted very carefully in order to send the right
signal to the right people in a short amount of time. Most print publications
also need to generate enough income to cover their base costs, too, which
affects how they make decisions.
On the web, content can have the
same goals that print publications do. In many cases, ad-supported publications
want “eyeballs on the page,” so the writing may be inflammatory in order to
attract readers that they can show through their web analytics package to their
advertisers. In other scenarios, a business simply wants to have a professional
presence online that ranks for specific keywords or they need relevant content
on their site because they know that’s how they’ll attract and retain visitors.
STRUCTURE OF NEW MEDIA CONTENT
Content needs to be structured differently for the Web,
because the average Web reader scans
the first few headings/paragraphs to decide if the content is what they
need - and traditional content structure puts the most important information at
the bottom of the page.
In general the data presentation (pyramid) format, that
is:
Introduction > Details > Conclusion
The Web, on the other hand, needs what's called an
'inverted' pyramid structure:
Conclusion > Explanation > Details
The inverted pyramid structure ensures that readers see
the most important information first. This helps readers scan the page and
decide if they want to read in-depth and - if they do leave - at least they'll
have read the key points.
CONCLUSION
Writing for the new media is a totally different
experience from writing for the print media, whether we discuss here essays,
press releases, marketing content, technical material, or journalistic
articles. The core difference between the media lie in the properties of the
media as electronic and dynamic - webbish, vs. static and portable - print on
paper.
Naturally, the
characteristics of each medium and its limitations impose some rules on the
writer, and the designer of text and visual image. Such characteristics also
dictate some methods of work, styles, and tools. The two media, online and
print, also address the readers, who likewise, live by the standards of the
media, in a very different fashion.
The printed
format is usually limited by size, and thus, usually contains more text,
describing and explaining the theme, with little emphasis on visuals. Whereas a
web post, embedded with hyperlinks, allows the writer to compose a concise
description, and demonstrate the idea with a strong visual image that can spare
thousand words and add a significant impact.
Nonetheless,
hyperlinks do not limit the text, as much as they serve as content dividers, or
organization utilities. Through using hyperlinks, the text can be better
divided into topics, sub topics, and sub sections. The division is thus,
modular, and pretty much thematic. The readers are active in selecting the
content to read, and they are the ones to decide on the reading order, not the
writer. In this way, the presented theme can be more understandable—compared
with the printed text that is usually used to convey all the bunch of
information in a linear fashion.
One of the most
prominent advantages of web writing compared with print writing is the
interactivity with the readers that the media imparts. Allowing the readers/users
to select options, vote, fill in info, submit content—affects the writing style
and the visual presentation a great deal. That said, wherever the readers
become involved in the content and the features that the site promotes—the text
changes according to their selection, and sometimes also dynamically, during
runtime. Such a thing would be impossible using static print.
Writing for the
web and for the print requires different tools for handling text and images.
The printed medium usually uses desktop editing tools, such as MS Word, and
desktop publishing tools such as Freehand, InDesign, and Illustrator or
Photoshop for image treatment; while web design can be created with different
writing and editing tools (similar to print) or use Photoshop for image treatment--
however with no need to page and layout the text or format it physically on
paper, another big plus.
Despite the great added values of new media writing over
print writing, print writing is still considered a more
"formal/official" choice, and therefore, it is the current standard
in “serious” publications of books, scientific articles, academic essays, and
legal publications. The printed result/product is permanent, less suspect to
changes or amendments, and not less important, portable. Whereas, web text and
visuals are more dynamic, changeable, updateable, durable for life, and more
and more portable as well, thanks to handheld mobile devices, notebook PCs,
PDAs, Tablets, iPhones, i-Pads and the like.
REFERNCES
