due: Thursday, 2/3 at the beginning of class
length: 500 words (approx. two pages, double-spaced)
points: 25
After exploring examples of blogs already on the web and written your blog analysis, take some time to develop a brief design plan for your proposed blog. You need not answer every question below, and you may address each aspect of the design plan in whatever order you wish. Also, remember that this is an exploratory document–you don’t need to have every aspect of your blog project worked out right now. Blogs often evolve based on the comments readers provide, so your ideas might change throughout the semester.
Your design plan should begin with an analysis of purpose, audience, and context:
- Purpose: Why do you want to communicate to an audience about the issue, topic, or subject you have chosen? Do you want to inform on an issue or provide factual information or instructions or advice? Do you want to offer informed opinions or persuade your audience to adopt your viewpoint or take action on an issue? Are you offering social criticism, for example critiquing American eating habits or television programing? Is your purpose to entertain and if so, why do you think this form of entertainment will be interesting to your audience?
- Audience: Who is your ideal audience? What is the audience’s demographics (age, gender, race, etc.)? What are their interests, hobbies, political and/or social leanings?
- Context: What background knowledge are you assuming your audience will bring to your blog? How do you imagine the situation in which they will read your blog posts: will they be drinking their morning coffee in a comfortable chair, sneaking a break at work, sharing your blog with friends or family?
Next, consider the following:
- Medium: Why will your idea work well in a blog space? For example, why do you want to communicate with your audience over an extended period of time through many short posts rather than through one single, unified piece of writing?
- Arrangement: How will you visually organize your blog? What colors, graphics, and organization of information appealed to you when you were exploring the blogs you looked at in class? How might you arrange your posts? For example, if you are writing about music, will you provide audio clips? If you are writing about events (your job at a bookstore, for example), what information do you want to provide in your first post (you might establish recurring characters such as co-workers or regular patrons)? What information might you save for a later post (that your boss is a dunderhead and always features terrible books on the display tables)? Also consider how you will use the category and tagging functions of your blog—these functions help readers search your blog to find the information that they are looking for.
- Strategies: How will you establish your authority or believability as an author? Will you write in a formal, academic style or is it more appropriate to be conversational or funny? Will you provide evidence that you’ve been thinking about and/or researching your topic extensively such as quotes, links to other information on the web, embedded audio, video, or still images? Do you want your posts to appeal to your readers’ sense of logic and objective reasoning or to appeal to emotion or to both?