TEACHING TIPS – A few rhetorical considerations for posting course materials online

As writing teachers, we know that it’s important to model good writing when we communicate with our students, and that includes paying attention to how we design documents so that they’re as reader-friendly as possible, whether they’re delivered in print or online. In other words, our own writing for students gives us the opportunity to practice what we preach about rhetorical awareness.

I’d like to encourage you to extend that idea not only to how we write course materials, but also to how we present them to students in digital environments, which provide us with a range of new rhetorical considerations. Even if you don’t focus explicitly on rhetorical principles for web writing in your class, how you write for the web will influence your students.

The tips I offer below are based both on my long history of experience with writing and teaching in web environments as well as on research into how readers navigate digital documents, which is now part of the study of rhetoric and composition. I hope to explore that topic further in a future post.

Take a moment to consider how your students are likely to use your course materials. Most students browse the web using a variety of devices, including their own laptops, campus computers, and mobile devices. On all of these devices, it’s relatively easy to read content that appears on web pages.

But it’s not always so easy to deal with downloaded files. For example, students may not have access to the appropriate app to open the file, or they may be using a device that doesn’t allow them to save files. Or they might download the file and then be unable to locate it, particularly if it has an obscure file name (see below).

Even if students have no trouble opening downloaded files, they may feel frustrated that they have to go through multiple steps just to read content that could’ve easily been displayed as a web page.

Also consider a few other advantages of web pages over downloadable files, such as the ability to provide hyperlinks, to embed audio and video, to invite commentary or collaboration, and to illustrate the principles of digital document design. It’s also much easier to update web pages without having to worry about whether every user has downloaded the revised version.

Note: By “course materials,” I’m referring to documents written by the instructor, such as course policies, assignment descriptions, and so on, and not to articles or book selections that are available only in PDF format.

When you do make material available for students to download, be sure to give the files names that will be helpful to students long after they’ve downloaded the file and forgotten where it came from. For example, consider which of these file names is the most reader friendly: article39be9.pdf or Jones-Value-of-liberal-arts-degrees.pdf

If you ask students to submit their work as attached files, you might also ask them to get in the habit of using reader-friendly file names. Consider this an opportunity to teach some of the practical applications of rhetorical awareness!

Consider the impact on students when they start to explore their course web sites and discover that many of the links take them to tools that aren’t being used or to pages devoid of useful content. It doesn’t take long before they’ve been trained to stop exploring the site. And that’s the opposite of what we’d like to have happen when we create digital learning environments for students!

Even if your students have already been trained not to explore the course web site by their previous experiences, you certainly don’t want to contribute to the problem. You can also use this as an opportunity to talk about some practical applications of rhetorical awareness. In other words, you can use the “links to nowhere” problem as an example to help them see why it’s a bad rhetorical strategy to set expectations for readers that you don’t fulfill.

If you’re using the institutional LMS (in our case, D2L), remove any tools you’re not using from your navigation menu as well as your home page.

If you’re using an external site builder, like WordPress.com, delete any content the system included by default with your new site, including the default text on the About page as well as any default links that wouldn’t be useful to your audience.

Give your online course materials a bit of personality by using whatever options are available to customize the look, without sacrificing readability.

Customizing also gives you the opportunity to experiment with the rhetorical choices writers have available when presenting information in web contexts and to talk about these choices with your students.

Even if you like the default look, consider that even a small amount of customization will suggest to students that you’re invested in the course and that you value the visual appeal of information.

Here’s a general rule: the less committed your target audience is to finding their way around your site, the easier you should make it for them to find what they need. Sites by celebrities or famous artists can afford to thwart the conventions of web design and provide viewers with cryptic navigational cues. Sites that feature course materials cannot!

A good first step is to remove items from the navigation menu that aren’t currently in use. The next step is to think about how your students will need to navigate your site, so you can determine what options should available on what pages.

Most web sites feature a primary navigational menu with links to the site’s main sections, including a link to the home page near the upper left corner of the site. In most cases the primary navigational menu appears in a horizontal bar across the top, typically under a header image, but sometimes the primary menu appears along the side instead. Primary menus often include drop-down menus that give viewers direct access to sub-sections of the site, which helps them visualize the hierarchical organization of content.

Most web sites also feature a secondary navigational menu, which typically appears in a sidebar. Often the content of these secondary menus changes depending on which section of the site the reader is viewing.

Consider that these customs for navigation menus have emerged through many years of trial and error with site design, as well as research into how readers make sense of web documents. So it’s a good rhetorical choice to follow the customs as best you can, to make your site as easy for students to navigate as possible.

See: Notes the Rhetoric of Web Design

Good document design should always be a consideration, whether you’re writing for print or the screen, and that includes aspects such as using a consistent approach to formatting to help readers visualize the structure of your document as well as making effective use of headers and sub-headers.

But one aspect that’s particularly important for web writing is to use short, focused paragraphs, which will make your text much more inviting for readers. Long paragraphs are not particularly inviting in any format, but a paragraph that appears to be a good length in your word processing document will undoubtedly seem much longer on the screen.

See also: Reader-friendly formatting for the web.

If you’re using a social media tool like Facebook or Twitter to share links, the customary approach is to simply paste the URL (or a shortened version of it) into the new message box. But that’s not the customary way of sharing links within a web document, so consider the value of modeling the conventions of web writing for your students.

In a web document, the customary way to share a link is to create a hyperlink, which is a word or phrase the reader can click on in order to go to the new site. Most interfaces for designing web documents include an easy option for creating links (see this handout for WordPress), but the HTML code is also fairly easy to learn (see this HTML Cheat Sheet).

If you think your readers would benefit from seeing the full URL, at least make it clickable, so that readers don’t have to go to the trouble of copying the URL and pasting it into the location bar on their browser.

You can learn a lot about how reader-friendly your course web site is just by observing a student as he or she tries to find something in particular. But you can also make the rhetorical nature of site design an explicit topic of class discussion and invite students to share their their thoughts on the site’s usability.

Do you have a tip that would make a good addition to this list? Please feel free to share it in the comment box below!