Writing to the World-Wide Web: Metatext Writing Prompts/Questions
Some "writing prompts" ... use these as starting points for your metatext
if you're stuck. You do NOT have to answer ALL of them, and certainly not
in any order; in fact, you don't have to answer ANY of them if you have a
different idea about the direction you want to go with this!
How can you describe this project in a screen or less? (essentially, this is
the same thing as writing your abstract) What about this description needs
clarification? Would lead to obvious linked nodes?
How and why did you decide to do *this* particular project? What spurred
the idea? What convinced you it was do-able? Worth doing?
How does the project look "different" now than it did when you first
started thinking about it? How have you narrowed or broadened the scope?
Why? What led you to those decisions?
What other sites are out there on the WWW that are similar? Related?
Supplementary? Complementary? What other resources are online? Offline?
How can/should/might these be incorporated?
How would you describe your audience for this site? Be specific. What
would you hope somone stumbling across your site, whether part of the
intended audience or not, would take away from time spent there? How will
you indicate to people that they ARE part of the audience? (Or aren't?)
What will keep them around?
How did you *physically* start putting the ideas you have from your
head on the web? Paper and pen(cil)? Word processing doc? E-mail?
Did you start coding right away? What did you do first? Why that first?
Imagine that you're in a job interview where the interviewer is looking
at this site and says "Hmmm. Interesting. How would I go about putting
together something like this?" How do you respond?
Imagine that I invite you to speak to the summer W-WWW class, which will
be made up of high school students, and one says to you, "I really like this
site you did? How'd you do it?" How do you respond? Is your response here
different from the previous question? Does it matter?