Introduces and develops a topic of broad public interest or concern, tied to a timely event or a local resource. Alternatively, it could touch on something whimsical or humorous. Keeping our homepage fresh with articles related to important or emerging issues demonstrates that UNH Cooperative Extension stays informed about and responsive to these issues.
Includes some local angle or aspect of specific interest to New Hampshire people. People give birth, raise children, attend school or not, get married or divorced, seed a lawn, resolve disputes with their neighbors, become victims of violence, take care of an aging parent, commit a crime, plant a vegetable garden, hire a pesticide applicator, sell timber, suffer discrimination, establish credit, buy a house or a horse, experience a septic system failure, find or lose a job, get diagnosed with a chronic illness, and die in a particular place.
The laws and regulations, physical environment, climate, cultural ambience, demographics, and the specific resources available (or not available) in that place typically play a substantial role in people’s ability to understand a situation, meet their needs, and respond individually or collectively to challenges.
Adding concrete aspects of place to an article connects writer and readers deeply and immediately, creates a direct emotional bond of shared experience and helps build a sense of community. We can use aspects of place to promote specific CE programs, promote the interests of our local partners, demonstrate our ability to integrate resources, give voice to our stakeholders, and allow site visitors to connect visually and locally to the topic (e.g., photo galleries).
Offers something of value readers won’t find anywhere else. Leading Internet economists suggest the Net will gradually bring an end to our current concept of intellectual property (proprietary content), in favor of intellectual value. UNHCE writers can create intellectual value by offering local perspectives on global, national and regional issues; by giving voice to (or inviting) unique local solutions to common problems, by presenting a wide range of perspectives not available in mainstream information sources, by promoting local events, and by hosting online discussions of many sorts. We don’t have to be the experts. We can bring outside experts to our Web site or set the stage for our stakeholders to develop and share their own expertise there.
Demonstrates awareness of the many dimensions of the issue at hand. Most every collection of empirical facts has moral, social, cultural, economic, political, gender, age, linguistic, and other dimensions embedded within it. Most issues also have a complex inside as well as an outside. The visible, empirical aspects of a topic (what we might call its outside) include raw data, measurements, and physical resources (things). Its invisible inside includes such aspects as perceptions, memories, emotions, level of awareness, cultural aspects, values and sense of self that both writer and reader bring to the topic.
Writers enhance their credibility and demonstrate expertise when their writing shows an understanding of the many dimensions and layers of the topic at hand, through word choice, writing style, embedded links, lists of links, sidebars, direct quotations, questions for readers, and other rhetorical techniques.
Offers opportunities for readers to make choices about what they need and want to know about the topic. Many professionals continue operating from the “broadcast” mode that positions the writer as the expert who determines what learners need to know, and readers as the relatively passive learner/novice.
The hyperlinked Web environment gives writers the power to introduce a topic, then open it to let readers themselves make their own travel plans. As noted in yesterday's post, links can lead readers to pages that clarify, offer history, add context, provide detail, reveal contradictory points of view, satisfy different learning styles, permit discussion, foster collaborative research, and more.
Links provide the glue that shapes, builds and defines the Web. Try writing two or three lead paragraphs, then use the rest of your time and your expertise to develop links that connect to related pages on our own site and links that point away from it.
Note: When you link, link deeply, not to a site’s homepage, but to the internal page or pages of a site that delivers the information you think readers might find interesting.
Don’t hesitate to change the name of a page when you direct readers to it via a link. When the page title alone doesn’t indicate specifically what visitors will find if they travel there, always provide annotation , a brief description or abstract that readers can use when deciding whether to click and go there or pass it by.
Posted by pboyles at June 23, 2006 6:19 AM