What are the rhetorical affordances of blogs?
It’s easier to form a community with distant people and easier to get your message out to distant people. You can link directly to outside information and make it much easier for your readers to view it, contributing to your ethos, logos and pathos. Stylistically, you have much more freedom because it’s easier to make a blog than an analog media and because you can link directly to outside information. Blogs today, however, are still largely text-based, must be read and are still used by people who grew up using traditional media and thus might not be able to conceive of their total potential.
In particular, how do blogs/bloggers involve their audiences?
Traditional media assume that the reader will take considerable responsibility in engaging with the text, but blogs, because there are so many and because the author can engage in real-time communication with readers, take much more responsibility in engaging the readers. Blogs have a comment section, allowing the blogger to develop a personal relationship with his or her readers. Bloggers can ask questions or for feedback and thus start a conversation with their readers.
List of suggestions:
- make the blog aesthetically pleasing
- ask questions or for feedback to encourage readers to comment
- make catchy titles and an eye-catching lay out
- make yourself seem like a real person to the reader by responding to comments, commenting on other blogs, sharing personal stories, or uploading videos
- deal with provocative topics which will inspire people to respond, but be careful not to alienate your readers
- make your blog easy to find and navigate with appropriate tags and a helpful archive
- post and comment regularly so that readers feel like it’s worth it to comment because they might get a response
- alternate long and short posts or post both to twitter/facebook and a traditional blog so that your readers remember you exist even when you don’t make a long post every day
- facebook especially can help make you seem human to your readers
- depending on the type of blog, ask people to send in information and pictures about their own experiences and creations and post the best to the main blog
No comments:
Post a Comment