Writing for the Internet: conversations, short documents and collaborative wrting

Netcraft publishes a monthly survey of the Web. Their April, 2008 survey reports 1.1 million new blogs were created using Blogger alone.

Some of those 1.1 million are just tests, and they will be abandoned. Others are ad hoc blogs, set up for a single event or project. Others will go on for years. Regardless, it is clear that a lot of people are writing for blogs -- professionally and personally.

We should examine our writing curriculum with this in mind. What sorts of things will our students be writing after graduation? Much of what they write will be for the Internet or intranet. That means they will be participating in electronic conversations, writing short documents like blog posts or Web pages, and doing collaborative writing.

You can read more on this topic in a post on the impact of the Internet on the writing curriculum.

A student recently wrote "I will write 42 pages for class this semester ... and over 500 pages of email". How many pages will you write for your classes this semester? How many emails, blog posts, instant messages, twitters, FaceBook pages, etc. will you write for the Internet?