Most of us remember when we didn’t know what that or the term “Internet” meant. Now, of course, most of us have had personal experience with the web and all its relations -- e-mail, streaming video, interactivity, etc.

Today, the web is our newest medium. Most companies, services, educational institutions, and organization have a web presence. Sales of books, airline tickets, stocks and even land take place over the web. People join chat rooms with others from China, Australia, Europe and next door.

The web is deeply ingrained into the lives of many people, and our dependence on the web and the expansion of its use will likely continue. It will employ more and more people in a variety of traditional capacities -- reporters, writers, editors, designers, etc. -- and probably in some ways that we haven't thought of yet.

A word medium

Many people think of the World Wide Web as something akin to broadcasting -- probably because we use the web (“surf” is the term) on a computer terminal that looks like a television screen. But that isn’t the way to think of the web.

The web is a word medium.

Unlike their use of traditional television, users of the web read and write.

Here are the main points of the lecture:

• The web is a word medium.
• As a word medium, it is used as an information medium; people go to the web to find things out.
• The web, and especially websites, are dependent on good information -- information that is well written and accurate, complete, efficient and precise.
• The web is interactive; it requires that users do certain things; in return, it should reward users by giving them the information they seek.
• Uses for the web are still developing. We still haven’t figured out all of the things that it might offer to us.
• Concision -- saying things concisely -- is an important concept for web writers to understand and practice.
• For your midterm, you will be asked to write an inverted pyramid news story.

More lecture notes, etc.

Concision

Concise writing is a must for the web. Look here for some examples of the types of concision that we have discussed in the lecture: labeling, headlining, summarizing.

Reading

Make sure that you understand the demands of the inverted pyramid story structure. That is a structure of writing that is very useful for the web. Read chapters 4 and 5 of Writing for the Mass Media. Then you will need to read chapter 6 on Writing for the Web.

Reading room

Accuracy. What happens when William Safire, columnist and word maven of the New York Times, gets it wrong? Not much, at least for a while.