Blogging & Writting Styles

In writing a blog entry for an assignment in my Humanities Technology Integration class I was thinking about how to use blogging in my own instruction. My background in in teaching Junior High School, specifically Grade 9. In Social Studies I've focused in teaching the art of the argumentative paragraph or position paragraphs. This demands developing a very specific writing skill set in our students. The end goal is to build a base from which students can begin to write position essays. In fact, Language Arts 9 teachers typically teach two forms of writing - the functional business letter and the essay. Each of these demand the learning of a specific writing skill set.

There is a big 'but' here. Given that our students are increasingly becoming Internet producers, the question is now whether we are teaching the 'right' kind of writing skills? I noticed that in completing my assignment, I had to change how I wrote for the blog entry. What I wrote and how I was writing was influenced by this little 'box' for text entry. The box seems to hold one large paragraph or two smaller paragraphs per screen. This on its own limited how much of my writing was available for me to review at one and pushed me to limit and compact my thoughts. Suddenly, the 'design' and structure of my text had to change (something that I obviously need to work on). In the preview, I was struck by how long my blog entry seemed. I definitely was unsuccessfully at creating a 3 paragraph response!

The new writing skill set may be something like writing 'sound bites'. Short, to the point text crafted to efficiently make a point the move on. In a system where students are often writing to meet length demands (word counts or page counts), this is not necessarily what we are teaching in our existing writing formats. I'm not advocating that we modify out existing writing skill sets, rather we may need to teach a third writing style for Internet publishing. (Could the business letter, or functional writing component evolve into an email letter?) There is research into how people read websites, and the volume of text that gets read on websites. Can we apply this research to developing writing skill sets for blogging etc.?