TAP: Topic, Audience, and Purpose

When teaching writing, I often have to remind students to stick to the basics when planning and revising: remember your topic, audience, and purpose. If the piece strays too far off topic, the audience will be lost and the purpose confused. If you fail to consider the needs of your audience, confusion may likewise set in about the above trio. And, if you include things without a solid purpose, then they will likewise be distracting and relatively useless.

I keep this in mind as I create and research electronic literature.

For example, in "Digital Discourse: Composing with Media in the Writing Classroom," Karen Gocsik begins by pointing out that:

Those of us who teach the academic essay and its attendant critical thinking and research skills have long recognized that our students are engaging in increasingly diverse discourses, delivered to them by increasingly varied media. Our students typically don’t read newspapers; they don’t thumb through news magazines; they don’t watch the network news. Instead, they scan websites, from CNN to YouTube to Digg, where information is constructed via text, hypertext, video, and audio. Equally important to writing instructors is that students are writing with this new media, composing blogs, contributing to wikis, creating web pages, and crafting podcasts and videos.

I suppose this is something those of us on the digital divide must keep in mind. While I read news, most of it is from the internet version of the paper. I write essays, but I also maintain webspaces. And, while I love to sit down and immerse myself in a good book, I (apparently) can surf the web for hours on end, conducting research while simultaneously checking email and following links to work-related sites. For proof of this, just look at the tabs open in my browser: this is the future of reading (and the Western attention-span).


Gocsik explains,

New technologies have created a new type of audience—one that regularly interacts with the author and with other readers through message boards, wikis, and blogs. And they have created several new genres—each allowing the writer to structure information and reach readers in a variety of ways.

So, the question is, how does one effectively create "literature" for those native to "new literacies"?

This is not just a question of meeting the needs of a digital audience, but also fulfilling the purpose(s) of the piece. For example, if you are writing about a character's sadness, might a visual representation and audio enhance that effect, or is it sufficient to describe the action of crying? Is the addition of multimedia elements like animation, interactivity, video or audio effective at conveying the ideas and themes, or are they simply gimmicky?

To help determine this, in addition to putting myself in the position of my audience, I plan to read through the online version of Web Style Guide to find pointers on typography, graphics, and multimedia, and I will be reading through Picturing Texts (as soon as it arrives) to find additional information on multimedia authoring and interpretation.