I went the old school method and we brainstormed some aspects of blogs on the whiteboard. Here’s a bit of what we came up with…some of them overlap, some may be central to blogging and other peripheral, but they give a sense of some of the rhetoric of blogs. Special thanks to James Goldberg, Jeff Swift, and Gideon Burton for their thoughts.

The rhetoric of blogs:

Collaboration and interaction — in most blog platforms, comments are the norm, and it takes effort to remove them. Collaboration–developing ideas through discourse and discussion–is facilitated by these comments. Blogs admit that any communication is speaking to an audience, and interaction with that audience is encouraged. Many of the best blogs are conversational.

Visual formatting and emphasis — the visual design, the form, is an intrinsic part of the message. We even like the academic blogs that we read to be visually appealing, to have pictures and headings, to engage with us on a formal level. (Note to self: this is something I need to work on. I have only one picture in this post and bolds and italics are only marginally cool/effective.)

Length — while not nearly as short as microblogging and facebook updates, most blogs are not a long form. Often the entire post will fit on one screen, or with just a small scroll. In blogs we’re given palatable pieces of thought.

Personal nature — while there’s many genres (journals, political, satirical, academic, etc.) blogs tend to be a rather personal form of writing. We want to see the man behind the curtain, and for him to talk directly to us. Further, what you say matters and accumulates over time, helping to define your individual identity.

Conflation of author and audience — No longer is the ability to publish held only by large corporations or those with financial backing. The roles of author and audience are conflated, and we slip between them constantly.

Hyperlinks and connections — like many other types of new media, blogs take advantage of the ability to link and make connections between things.

Unpolished/in process thought – blogs celebrate unpolished thought, which sometimes can be a bad thing. But this can also be the blog’s greatest strength: we don’t have to polish something to see how an audience reacts, we don’t have to set our ideas in stone to have them worth sharing, and we become more willing to adapt our position and engage in true discourse when we recognize that the form is not about creating a permanent manifesto. To use Gideon Burton’s term, versioning is not only accepted, but encouraged.

Public spheres — blogs are one form that allow us to become involved and make a contribution in the issues that matter to our communities. By having a public blog, you join the conversations going on that determine the rules of the world we live in.

Literacy — Like with all aspects of literacy, there should be both consumption and production. Because of their accessibility, it’s quite simple to become thoughtful consumers and producers of texts.

How I use blogs in the first year composition/writing classroom:

I post class blog assignments online; students write blog posts 1-3 times a week.

Blog posts allow students to find rhetorical examples, develop their writing with the help of their peers and an audience, publish their writing, and reflect on the writing process.

Students engage in dialogue through commenting on each other’s posts and responding to those comments.

Every semester some of the specifics of what I do with blogs in the classroom change, but overall I’ve received positive feedback and more positive feedback (it still seems that students got things out of it even if they weren’t thrilled). Further, I’ve seen my students’ writing improve by leaps and bounds.

Further reading– Check out my recent article in the Locutorium journal: Opinion Editorials, New Media, and Participation in Real Public Discourse.