Understanding the Rhetoric of Research

Related Resources
Print-Friendly Page
Authors & Contributors

Some of what exists on the Internet amounts to no more than paper text articles transferred to the World Wide Web, with no revision to their presentation or content. Articles are displayed in their entirety, much as they would be in a print journal. Initially, this was how the research methods units on this Website were presented. Since the fall semester of 1997, they have been presented in hypertext format.

As in all hypertext publishing, the goal of revising these research units is to make them more "user friendly." Users, confronted with large blocks of text when opening a unit may be daunted, and end up printing the essay out to read on paper. If hypertext is to be widely accepted by readers it will have to succeed on the strengths of its own unique format. According to John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen of Sun Microsystems, who collected data from four years of Web usability studies, "users do not read on the Web [but] scan the pages, trying to pick out a few sentences or even parts of sentences to get the information they want" (1997). Further, as many readers of these research units are quick to discover, "users do not like long, scrolling pages: they prefer the text to be short and to the point." In the end, Morkes and Nielsen (1997) recommended that on-line "texts" should be "concise, scannable, and objective."

Presenting a document in hypertext creates a new type of text which is broken up into nodes of smaller amounts of information with clearly marked links to those nodes. The advantage to this scannable system is that it gives the user control over which sections of text he or she will read based on the reader's interests. Instead of scrolling through long strings of text, the reader quickly links to the bit of information desired. According to Jack Lule, in the August 7th, 1998 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, "hypertext will encourage non-linear narrative-blocks of texts that readers pursue in the order they choose, depending on what aspects of a story most interests them." The introduction of hypertext changes the way writers approach research writing, the way readers approach research texts, and the way publishers present research findings.

Read about the Differences between Print and Hypertext

Read about Specific Online Journals