Technical communication December 6, 2009
Posted by tammaro48 in communication, writing.Tags: techical communication, writing
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I have found many interested books of Laura Gurak focusing in technical communication: is this mainly the written communication? your Center for writing is evidencing differences in online writing?
As for my research, yes, I have focused mainly on written communication. My early research looked at bulletin boards, Usenet newsgroups, and email. More recently I have also looked at instant messaging, blogs, and social networking sites. In many cases, we do see major differences between paper-based writing and digital writing. In many online settings, we see evidence of what Walter Ong calls “secondary orality;” that is to say, linguistic features that blend speech and writing. Emoticons, lack of punctuation, shorthand spelling, and other features illustrate this characteristic. Digital “writing” also involves a very high use of visual information such as photographs and color. All of these features make writing in the 21st century quite different from writing in prior years.
As for humanities communities, I would say that yes, humanities communities (or community, in the singular) do have some unique characteristics. Humanities scholars in this century do indeed need to collaborate, but many humanities researchers were not trained in collaboration. Instead, they were trained in working on their own (writing a book, for example, which is typically a solitary task). Yet the Internet presents great possibilities for more collaborations in the humanities. Humanities researchers rely heavily on the written word, and in our age, written texts are available in digital formats, so such researchers also need to become as proficient as possible in the use of digital technologies.