Use organization, interactivity, and links to make your Web text work as effectively as possible.

Organizing content

Whether you are creating a layout for a Web page or storyboarding a video essay, you should develop a clear structure for your text. Some types of online texts are organized in standard ways—most blogs and social media sites, for example, put the newest posts at the top. Others allow you to make choices about how to arrange materials. Choose a structure that makes sense for your purpose, audience, topic, and rhetorical stance. Arrange your text to allow readers to find what they are looking for as quickly and intuitively as possible. (For more on organizing and planning your text, see 3e, 3f, and 4g.)

Allowing interaction

The possibility of interaction with readers is one of the great opportunities of online writing, but you can consider different levels of interactivity. While wikis are full-scale collaborative efforts and frequently allow contribution from users, you might also include something as simple as a thumbs-up / thumbs-down or LIKE button to allow users to register their reaction to a text. Online texts can incorporate polls, comments, and links for contacting writers.

Linking

Academic and formal writing follows guidelines that tell readers the sources of other people’s ideas and research through notes and bibliographic references (see Chapters 32–35). Some less formal online writing includes links to external sites. You can also link to content that helps prove a point—complex explanations, supporting statistics, bibliographies, referenced Web sites, or additional readings. Links also help readers navigate from one part of a text to another.

Each link should have a clear rhetorical purpose and be in an appropriate location. If you put a link in the middle of a paragraph, be aware that readers may go to the linked content before finishing what’s before them—and if that link takes them to an external site, they may never come back! If it’s important for users to read the whole paragraph, you may want to move the link to the end of it.