ENGL 420Writing for the Web

3 credits · English · Penn State

Analysis and composition of informative, persuasive, and "creative" Web texts, based on rhetorical principles; no prior Web writing experience required. ENGL 420 Writing for the Web (3)(BA) This course meets the Bachelor of Arts degree requirements. This course, designed for writers and potential writers, will explore the unique opportunities and constraints of writing for the Web. As a writing course, it should appeal to students in the Humanities; however, because of the growing importance of Web texts in fields such as business and the social sciences and given the opportunity to compose/construct a variety of fictional and non-fictional "creative" and informative/persuasive Web texts, this course should be of value to students across the college.In this course, students will survey a wide variety of Web texts--webs, electronic journals and books, learning to analyze these as to their efficacy in light of each text's rhetorical situation. As students learn to compose and construct such texts themselves, rhetorically based principles of audience awareness and persuasive appeal will be emphasized. Rather than focusing on writing html codes and java scripts, this course will build on the rhetorical principles taught in first-year writing courses, teaching students how to apply those principles to more sophisticated, multi-sensory, multi-media hyper textual writing.The course will be taught primarily in a hands-on workshop environment-in a PC computer lab or laptop-equipped classroom. Although no prior Web writing experience is required, some experience with Web navigation and computer word processing will be helpful. Students will be evaluated on the basis of their participation/attendance in the course's workshop environment, written web analyses, and constructed web texts.