The Interactive Voice

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1. Either create a LinkedIn page or post your resume to your blog. Again, these first few assignments are a bit awkward under a pseudonym, but I am more interested in the writing of your objectives and experience over any details of where and when. If your resume is mostly bullet points, write a few complete sentences about each job experience. Those of you being creative with the assignments can continue, writing a character history or using the LinkedIn format for something unexpected.
2. Write an About The Author page utilizing your bio, your subject credibility argument, and the comments you receive from the class this week. Your second assignment every week is a rewrite of the previous week’s work. For this reason, it is not required by the following week. It can’t be because you won’t get everyone’s comments on your work fast enough. The weekly rewrite is for your final review at the end of the semester. You will build up a portfolio of revised works. Your final post will review and link to these preferred drafts of your work. Don’t delete any previous rough drafts.
3. Read your assigned classmates’ bio and credibility assignments, and leave critique in the form of posted comments. Remember that the best critique informs writers how they are either succeeding or not succeeding in reaching you. Rude critique is not constructive, and neither is overly polite critique. Be honest and helpful.
4. Make one additional post to your blogs developing your voice further, or post here under the lecture with your thoughts.
5. Tweet five times this week trying different versions of a byline. A byline is a quick sentence or two at the end of a blog post identifying who you are and what you write about. For example: Robert Kalm’s lecture was written for The Interactive Voice, a course blog in Quinnipiac University’s Graduate Interactive Media program. Find more lectures at www.dotkalm.com/ivoice. (Use the #506iv hashtag.)
6. Read my lecture on Brevity posted below. Read Zinsser Chapters 8-10 and 14 and refer to Strunk & White with questions of grammar or style.

Good writing is a search.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

That’s Mark Twain, one of America’s greatest writers talking about his English, American English.

Mark Twain was obsessed with writing, as all good writers are obsessed with writing. He wrote so much, so often, under so many pseudonyms, that there is no complete catalog of everything he wrote, even in our Wikipedia age.

Twain’s real name was Samuel Longhorne Clemens. His most famous pen name has some history to it. It was a nod to his early years as a riverboat pilot.

Your average riverboat on the Mississippi needed two fathoms –equivalent to twelve feet– of water under the boat to move about unscathed. The depth of the river was measured with a line of weighted rope called a sounding line. When the line read two or twain fathoms, a riverboat man called to his pilot, Mark Twain, meaning safe passage.

Few words are more important to an author than his byline. Clemens was forever searching for the right words. When it came to the two words with which he signed much of what he wrote, he chose the words Mark and Twain to declare: here, in my words, and in the journey that you will take across them, is safe passage.

Here is the truth.

Good writing is a passion.

Clemens was beset by death his entire life. He encouraged his younger brother Henry to become a well-paid riverboat pilot like himself. Henry was then killed in an explosion when he was twenty doing that very job. Three of Clemens six siblings died in childhood and Clemens felt he was responsible for this tragic fourth loss for the rest of his life.

Are these the demons that made him write well? Is this why he was so obsessed all his life with finding the right words and safe passage for his audience? Every author’s biography can become this parlor game, but we all know how difficult it is to understand even our own motivations.

The why is inconsequential. The key is that restlessness. It is the same restlessness that pushed most of the immigrants across the ocean. Just like there is always a better life around the bend, there is a better word for what you are trying to say.

When we say American English, we are talking about words that, like Wall Street bankers, do not have time for embellishment or airs. If you are just blowing smoke or trying to impress, we all have better things to do with our money and our time.

American English is the voice of the preachers that reached out to their congregations before air conditioning. It is the voice of the advertising huckster trying to convince a customer to stop and look at his wares before moving on to the competition. American English is the voice of a scientist competing with scientists all over the country for the rare grant to fund her vision.

American English is made up of words with a fire in their belly.

When we rehearse pitching an idea to investors, we are doing the same thing that an author does wrestling with a giant novel over the course of years of his or her life; we are getting down to the essence.

Simplicity is difficult. How many times have you had a great story or an amazing dream to relate to someone only to have it fall apart in the telling? It is the same with ideas. If you cannot put the ideas in your head plainly onto paper or pixels than you do not really understand them yet. Many authors, of both fiction and nonfiction, cannot tell you what they are writing about until they are finished with their article or manuscript.

Screenwriters too have to boil down their stories in Hollywood because producers are terrified by the volatility of their market, but it is also this same good writing lesson. A screenplay is as spare as a blueprint. It is a blueprint. There are no long passages or monologues about the protagonist’s inner most desires. Fade up. The White House. Three silhouettes. Silhouette One: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

There is no time to waste. Every screenwriter knows you start as deep into a scene as possible and then you get out as fast as you can. This isn’t just callous Hollywood; it is every good piece of literature in your library.

It is every memo and business proposal that might actually be read.

It is clean, brief, plain and true American English.

Such simplicity is hard work. Athletes who practice the same movements over and over until their efforts look almost casual are just like writers rewriting and rewriting until their sentences appear elementary. Go look at any good columnist’s work. Go open up Steinbeck. You think I’m not being honest? It cannot be as easy as simple?

The truth is: simple is never easy.

Bad writers, and there are plenty of them, don’t take the time to edit. They go on and on and on and on.

If you don’t have a restlessness within you to pick apart every one of your sentences, then you need to emulate that passion until you find it, because there are plenty of voices who already do.

Good writing is specific.

Simplicity doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy language –that you cannot describe something as succulent or perspicacious or say her eyes were like pieces of sea glass tumbled smooth by ocean-sized storms– you just need to choose your words wisely.

Mark Twain, the pseudonym, is not only good writing because it is simple, but also because it is evocative and tangible. Clemens could have just said he wanted to tell his audience the truth, but that is both vague and dubious. Instead he gives us a detail from his own life and a metaphor for the ages.

His truth was that he was a working man who knew the muck at the bottom of the river. His truth was that he cared enough to pay attention to the details of his life. His truth was that he was obsessed about the truth. That is what you want in a writer.

None of us can hold onto abstractions like truth or love as easily as we can hold onto Mississippi mud.

Don’t tell me that you love your wife; show me that you remember the color of her fingernails the first time you met her. Show me the love through the specifics. It is the same with business. Don’t tell me this is going to be the best website ever; show me why, who, what, when, where and how like an investigative journalist.

That sounds like work? Welcome to the writer’s world.

The best love story is going to investigate the main characters, and their pasts, and how their specific details bring them together, just like a business proposal is going to show me, step by step, what is to be done, how it will be done, and who is going to do it.

Next week I’m going to talk more about you as individual voices and your credibility to have those voices and how that comes from your personal stories.

Writing is a tricky thing. We are utilizing pen names similar to Mark Twain to separate your work here from your public personas and this is a reasonable precaution at this point. But as communications students, you should also realize that the best communicators reach people with the specific details of their lives, and not only the successes of their lives, but often the pain and the setbacks and the very things most of us learn to hide away.

No one writes; they write it down.

Good writing is edited.

Michelangelo said that in every block of marble he could see a complete statue looking out at him and he just had to remove everything that was not the statue. Mark Twain felt the same way about sentences.

Here is a block of marble for you: I believe that the fact of the matter is we are all definitely wordsmiths of some sort or another; it’s just a question of whether or not we take the time to practice.

Here is the statue within: Everyone is a writer; not everyone writes.

Take out your chisel and omit extraneous words. Why is this so difficult?

It is difficult because writing is always personal. Business memos and business concerns have done a great job convincing us that there is no life or us within our words, but this is not the case. Writing reveals who we are and what we know. I said it earlier: if you cannot articulate what is in your head, then there is probably not much there yet. Our writing reveals better than anything else how much we fulfill and how much we fall short of who we want to be.

And here is the trick: no one is a good writer.

Writing a bad paragraph and reading it is gut wrenching for most people. The poor writer pretends that the writing is not that important. The veteran writer knows it is important and recognizes this is simply part of the process.

Twain, despite being an innovative, revered and reviled artist in his time –he didn’t have to die before becoming a national treasure– still wrote, in his final days, poorly. Then he edited his work. His poorly was a lot better than our poorly, but he still used clichés, which he then had to cut. He still had bad habits, which he then had to fix.

Everybody has a voice inside that criticizes their behavior. When a writer lets this inner critic lead the writing process, that is what is called writer’s block. You cannot sit there and judge every single sentence you conjure or you will never write one down. All writers, even the great ones, have to write poorly, allow themselves to be less than they’d hoped for, and then correct it.

That is why most of us write something once and barely stop to proofread it. That is why most of the Mark Twains in history needed to be obsessive to get past that tremendous anxiety and rewrite and rewrite.

But if Mark Twain could admit he needed a rewrite, then so can you.

Good writing is egotistical.

Good writing never stops to say I think, I believe, or it is my opinion that. Good writing says the following. Democrats are insane. The only cupcake worth your time is a chocolate cupcake. I am the greatest.

Good writing is Muhammad Ali. We know who is speaking because we read the byline. You are speaking, so don’t be a wimp about it. Good writing doesn’t have to be black and white, but then it should be emphatic that everything, or at least a particular situation, is as gray as concrete.

Good writing never says basically. It never says very. When you say, it is very hot, at first glance you think you are emphasizing the degree to which it is hot, but in fact you are weakening the confidence of the word hot. When you simply say, it is hot, hot gets its respect back. The adjective can stand up for itself. It doesn’t need very, who looks like a rent-a-cop anyway.

He slammed the door loudly. Is there any other way to slam a door? All adverbs have to go. They are wishy-washy.

The door was slammed by him. This is another universal way we all show hesitation in our writing without realizing it. All verbs come in active and passive versions. Do not write in the passive voice. The subject of the sentence should always be in front of the sentence acting. How weak is your main character that the door was slammed by him.

He slammed the door!

When I write these lectures every week, I am making an argument. Some of the best fiction and television writers are lawyers for a reason. All writing is an argument that the author or the reader comes to believe or discards. Writing is the truths that you hold to be self-evident.

That brings to mind the greatest argument and piece of American English ever written: All men are created equal.

Good writing wants to convince the reader of its assertions by leaving no room for discussion. It wants to convince the largest audience possible. Therefore, it is timeless. It doesn’t suffer slang or too many cultural references. It is not cliquish. It puts as much jargon into plain English as possible. It wants to communicate, to reach out.

Good writing follows the grammar style guides like Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style or it makes a better argument for grammar.

William Strunk was famous for saying that the reader is an individual floundering in a swamp and that the writer should at least throw him a rope.

Good writing is online.

If the essence of American English is getting to the quick, than we are watching American English evolve yet again. If American English is born in the sermon and the pitch and the jingle and the tag line –in the short forms– than the status update and the tweet and the ttyl make perfect sense.

There is a trend towards thinking of writing as more functional and less the torturous art of the past. Everyone writes now; it is not that big of a deal. This, of course, is nonsense.

There are many, many people writing lines and lines of material online that will be instantly forgotten. But in this vast sea of texts and links, the passionate individual voice that writes to edit, writes to discover what he or she knows, and writes to speak clearly to the larger audience, will still rise above our new chatter.

What is your Mark Twain? What is your truth? These are the most practical of concerns now. Social media, the Internet, and technology are pushing all of us in the same directions that American English has always pushed the writer. We are all becoming more open, more passionate, more specific, and more succinct.

I used to think it was crazy that most HR departments would throw away a resume based on one misspelling or error. I don’t anymore. I am older, and again, I do not have the time. If I go to your website or article for advice or knowledge and the language is a mess, I am not going to bookmark you. I’m never going to surf near you again. You just put a sign on the beach that says Beware Of Dog.

Sloppy writing is like a stain on your tie. It tells me you don’t have the discipline to concentrate.

You have too many feeds going? You are too busy-blackberry-important to go over your writing three or four times? Well then you haven’t yet treated your life and career like a good piece of writing. You haven’t done the work it takes to boil down and select your priorities. You do not have focus, you do not know yourself, and you no longer have my attention.

It is a status symbol to be so busy now, but good writing can still stop people in their texts.

Okay, now argue with me.

How do you know it’s me?

I get this very practical question every semester, but few of you create such an airtight pseudonym that I cannot, by process of elimination, discover who is who. Those of you who do not post your real name or picture directly under your Twitter handle, still sign into WordPress with a school email address or have a Gravatar following you around.

This is not a bad thing; it just shows how difficult it is to remain anonymous online.

The veneer of Internet privacy has been with us since we first created our chat room nicknames, but it was always artificial. There were always codes and coders behind the friendly GUIs. Now warped and peeling, the facade only convinces the people in denial.

Posting candid journals online under the assumption that no boss or friend will find them is still common. The impulse to write publically yet privately is a mixed message, but one that was in the first diary. Everyone wants to be famous and no one wants to be scrutinized.

I know many students who have put their thoughts and entire lives online next to their names since the day they could use a keyboard faster than their parents. They are cataloged and saved in numerous search engine servers whether they have reconsidered or not.

I was nearly convinced that a radical form of honesty was the rebellion that would separate the new generation from my own. Job recruiters everywhere would have to get used to hiring people whose nude pictures and flawed lives were only a Google search away, because that would be everyone.

You are already naked, as Mr. Jobs put it.

A few personal PowerPoint and Twitter scandals in the headlines over the past few years have all of us rethinking that revolution.

However, few of you have a detective searching every one of your quotes or tracking your tendency to split infinitives. If you comment on a web page and do not use your name, it will be difficult to associate the words with you. If you pay attention, create a fresh email account with a strange name, and then use that account to sign up with Twitter and WordPress, you can try a new voice.

It is enough of a mask to get a lot of people writing who would not have otherwise. Think how different you can feel in a Halloween costume.

Your writing should never be limited by the idea that all of it must be public. A pseudonym gives you opportunities to experiment, to focus, to reinvent, and to simply reconsider your byline, or what any byline can mean. It appears you can say anything and run for the highest office in the land, but it is up to you whether your byline or pen name is similarly blunt.

Your byline may mean nothing to you.

Your word can mean everything to an audience.

1. Write a one page biosketch and post it to your blogs by next Monday night. (With your pen names intact, this should not present a problem. No one can search for you. Keep it non-specific where needed. Bob worked for a local television station in the year 2000.)
2. Each of you has picked a subject that interests you this semester. Write a one page argument for your chosen subject and why you are the one to cover it. Post to your blogs by next Monday night.
3. I will post your group critique assignments at the end of the week. This week, read any classmates’ writing samples, and leave critique in the form of posted comments.
4. Make one additional post to your blogs developing your voice further or here on the course blog with your hopes for the weeks ahead.
5. Tweet at least five times this week generally on your voices and subjects. (Use the #506iv hashtag.)
6. Read my lecture posted below. Purchase and read Zinsser chapters 1-7 and refer to Strunk & White with questions of grammar or style.

What is Writing for Interactive Media?

When I tell people the name of this course, many look at me puzzled. You teach blogging and tweeting?

We could blame this on the writing of the name –on poor word choices– but this is a writing course for an interactive media program. The problem lies more in our confusion with the course’s subject matter.

Is interactive writing any different from basic writing? Does the former really represent the collapse of the latter?

The word writing appears in the Bible. The word writing must have appeared in some form at the birth of writing. Since that day, it has been thought of as a one-way medium. The Bible is a prime example of this. In the beginning was The Word and that word was law.

Words were first etched in stone, like Hammurabi’s Code and the Ten Commandments. Then they were hand-written or pressed in ink. The sheer effort of the task might be one of the reasons we considered words so permanent for so long.

The fifteenth-century word author has tyrannical implications. An author is an authority.

Alternatively, interactivity implies a balanced, two-way relationship where the concepts of author and audience almost disappear. Interactivity is a conversation. Interactivity is a nineteenth-century word. It grows in use and practice alongside the ideas of personal freedom and questioning power. It did not become mainstream until the Internet and technology allowed the individual the ability to publish and respond almost instantaneously to anything.

Since Johann Gutenberg invented modern book printing, a text has been an object. You gave feedback by writing in the margins of your personal copy of a text, and for some, even that was vandalism.

Now text is a verb.

We text one another. We take the texts of authors, cut them up, and remake them for ourselves. Every member of the audience is a potential author, while authority no longer has the power it once did.

In a press conference a number of years back, reporters asked George Lucas, an innovator of both narrative films and interactive games, when he thought his two worlds would finally unite. He said they never would, that they were two different animals.

He could take the audience for a ride or they could pilot their own. It was impossible to do both.

The Choose Your Own Adventure young adult book series, popular in the 1980s, tried to do that very thing. Written in the rare second person, each book told you what you were doing and at regular intervals gave you a choice on how to proceed. If you go in the haunted house, go to page 10. If you walk around the haunted house, go to page 15. You could not read the books straight through and there were multiple possible endings.

The series came back to mind for an entire generation when hypertext and first-person electronic games started to appear. It was one of our first introductions to non-linearity. Not long after Twitter was born, it paid homage to the books.

The Mystery of Chimney Rock, The Third Planet From Altair, and Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey were just three of my favorite titles that reshuffled the horror, science fiction, and mystery genres respectively. Sticking to familiar genre stereotypes and kid-friendly action-adventure plotlines, the stories remained uncomplicated while the formats introduced the radical idea of choice into text.

Now all we have is choice.

Consider how you took in the news this morning. If you read your local newspaper or watched one news program –essentially one narrative– you are part of a diminishing demographic. Most of us read a variety of authorities online, mixing a few paragraphs from different articles in The New York Times with a few columns from the HuffPo and clips from Fox News, NPR and/or The Daily Show.

When the earthquake occurred in Virginia last week, my personal Facebook feed scooped the national papers for a good fifteen minutes. When the earthquake occurred in Haiti, one of my best sources for weeks was the Facebook of a friend whose extended family lived on the island.

The Times, and John Stewart, and his team of writers, and even my friend’s family members, are all authors. And I am one too, simply by assembling my own narrative from portions of theirs. We have always exchanged ideas this way, but never has there been so many sources fracturing both the audience and the narratives.

Would we ever want a Pulitzer winner to participate in this? The same trick would be difficult to accomplish with a Philip Roth novel. If the mention of the informant Deep Throat triggers your subconscious mistrust of the government, go to page 247.

Yet someone might write a bestseller in the future for trying that very thing. Author Heather McElhatton’s debut novel was a gamebook with 150 possible endings. Movies like Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow or the television series Lost explore their protagonists through non-linear timelines and parallel universes with great skill.

Lucas was right though. He had to create Star Wars for the rest of us to play within that universe. Authorship of a novel or a game or any form of art must start with an author. But the audience is choosing their own adventures now. They are gaming the narratives, which means they are no longer just the audience.

They are voices too.

Just because everyone can publish, doesn’t mean they will craft their work. A lot of people are happy throwing rotten tomatoes, or snark. Others write poorly, creating a glut of thoughtless expression and rants.

The mass audience, with the means to express itself, but not the discipline, is restless. They no longer like someone else making decisions for characters with whom they identify. In our era of sequels and remakes and adaptations, many creative efforts come with the voice of the original author and the voices of the fans.

The filmmaker Peter Jackson arranged for all of the interested J.R.R. Tolkien disciples to have their names inserted in the credits of his movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, while the creative decisions and the eleven-hour motion picture remained his to execute. Some might say he paid homage to the fans; others would say he got around them.

This anxiety between author and audience, between a narrative that controls us versus a game that we pilot, is enhanced by the immediacy of the Internet. Everyone was a critic, but now we all have a forum.

When Amazon’s Kindle appeared, some were predicting novels written by committee, but I don’t know a single author who understands how writing could be anything more than a solitary effort. Fans, fan fiction, and fan hate only appear once an individual has created something unique, off on their own.

When I think of the author and the audience like this, I also think of Bob Dylan when he decided to pick up an electric guitar. The fans that thought of him as a folk artist, their folk artist, were livid.

As far as Dylan was concerned, the beatniks and their claims to his work could go to hell.

Your writing voice is your most practical asset.

I appreciate ICM’s name for this course. I like that initial puzzlement and tension within those words. A course should be a question that the student must answer for him or herself.

An op-ed piece ten years ago, selected by an editor and published in newsprint, had tenacity to it. It was a solid argument from one voice selected to stand in place of many voices. It was a narrative that lasted.

Now the moment something is published, a hundred responses are posted, choose-your-own-opinion style. The only reason people will listen to you over the boisterous din is if you have something clear, concise and interesting to say, and then the audience wants to take you on.

Writing has not changed with technology. The hierarchy of authorship has evolved. You will only survive the competition if you first write well as people have always written well. The passion for words and ideas once found only in a Philip Roth or a Hemingway is now finding its way inside all of us.

It is easy to lament that there is more garbage out there. Blogging gives everyone the opportunity to publish unedited diaries, but it also gives many people the incentive to write often and improve.

Previous audiences, faced with the best works, from the most ambitious talents, honed by the best editors, looked at their own diaries and became nauseous at the comparison. They didn’t automatically write beautiful sentences, so they avoided writing.

People wrote only when it was required in school and at work.

But our individual voices, given this new access, and given the growing variety and intensity of the conversations, are getting past our unreasonable self-expectations.

Writing has not changed with technology. It is more dynamic through technology.

Interactivity is not destroying literacy. Interactivity raises the stakes. Writing was always an important part of anyone’s career. At the heart of sharing information, conceptualizing ideas and convincing your colleagues was how well you could express yourself.

Handheld devices are making writing an integral part of every waking moment. Search engines are putting everyone at the end of a breadcrumb trail of words. Blackberry emails, Tweets, and Facebook updates are primitive forms of a new medium.

We are all two opposable thumbs away from a keyboard. Everyone is going to improve as a writer or be left behind.

Do you just share links, or are you a link?

The most practical thing I can teach you, the graduate communications student, is how to design your voice in this world of instant voices. The best tweeters never post a tiny URL or retweet anyone else’s words. They say something smart and relevant in 140 characters.

They don’t quote. They are worth quoting.

In this class, your tweets should be crafted. Quality, not quantity, is what counts. As everyone races to say anything, we are going to return to what you are saying and how well you are saying it. You are going to create content.

A friend of mine in college used to say, I write to understand what I know. Whether you are writing a memo, memoir or meta-tag, at the end of a good writing session, you should know more than you did when you started. This is not only true when you are researching a topic; this applies when you are writing off the top of your head.

Writing distills your thoughts. The more you practice putting into words what you know about yourself and what you have learned about the world, the easier it is to assert yourself and find your place within it.

I want to get each of you to the point where writing is a form of discovery. You can only reach an audience –you will only communicate– when you are creating knowledge. Sorting through the present onslaught of information, arriving at your own conclusions, and then distributing those thoughts succinctly are practiced skills. Some people are practicing less and less, and some people, more and more.

This course is a basic writing mechanics course executed online in online forms. Every writer should be eager for another mechanics course no matter what his or her level of expertise. We all write in drafts. We all need the basics again and again.

The interactive voice is the writer’s voice honed razor sharp.

This twelve-week course should challenge your ideas about writing.

Each week, you are expected to read a lecture like this one, a few chapters of Zinsser, and then complete one or two long form assignments, tweet some short form assignments, and post regularly to your blogs.

Each of you will create an online presence around a pseudonym. The long form assignments will be practical exercises examining how you present yourself, your system for research, your abilities to argue logically, pitch an idea, and utilize new media. The short form assignments will streamline these concepts further.

I will break you up into groups of three. You will critique two fellow classmates’ long form assignments directly on their public blogs every week. I want to see constructive analysis.

Your goal is not a clean, professional looking blog this summer, but an experimental lab that bares your trials, errors and successes. That is why you have your pseudonyms. I want you to make a mess.

I will grade and provide comments on your long form assignments. The rest of the assignments make up your class participation.

Everything you do will contribute in some way to your online presence. Everything should be content for your voice.

Again, I want to create an ongoing, online dialogue between all of us. (Always use the hashtag #506iv when tweeting.) The only way to improve as a writer is to write, get feedback, and write more. None of your assignments should be more than a page in length when they are posted. However, you should draft a few pages to arrive at your posts.

We will tweet and blog and generally write in the short form, not because these are the trends, but because good writing is short and sweet. Just do it. I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

President Roosevelt (and his speechwriters) wrote a whole inaugural speech around that last sentence – getting to that last sentence. How many drafts did they write? How many words? I imagine quite a few, since that phrase still reaches us in the current economic crisis, over seventy years later.

Twitter’s 140 characters is not a fad, it is the long tradition of having a good editor.

This first week I will review all of your current online presences and writing samples and give you my thoughts. I encourage you to look at what everyone is doing and tweet and comment on one another’s work as much as you can.

I will point out particularly good conversations and moments of learning to all of you.

Let’s get to work.

Hello class and welcome to ICM506, Writing for Interactive Media.

I am your professor, Bob Kalm, and I run 506 as a mix between a writer’s workshop and an online message board.

Over this coming semester, we are going to hold a continuous, virtual classroom conversation with our desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones. You will contribute to class at anytime, from anywhere.

Utilizing various new and social media forms, you will each create and hone a distinct, written  online presence. In the process, we will revisit what is good writing and discuss how best to utilize good writing in the ever-changing online environment.

As graduate communication students, the best way for you to improve your ability to communicate in any field or medium, regardless of your skills, skill level, or interests, is to practice expressing yourself using the modern lingua franca of American English.

I will post the first class module next Monday night. You should do three things in the meantime:

First, pick a new name for yourself.

This class is a practice session. Your semester goal is to create a draft of an online presence to get you thinking about what that means to you and how you can communicate better using both words and the web.

Your voice is a precious thing. Once you say something publicly, it is very difficult to undo the connection between your byline and your words. We see examples of this on a daily basis. We will discuss the pros and cons of revealing one’s self online, but for the duration of this course you will do all of your work under a pen name or pseudonym, even if you are a veteran writer.

This will allow you to experiment freely.

Come up with a pseudonym this week and make sure it is something a good detective could not easily decipher and associate with you.

Second, come up with a topic to cover this semester.

I want you to develop a clear and unique written voice online. This means you have to edit yourself. The key to communication is having something specific and relevant to say. If I search for Jon Stewart or Martha Stewart or even Stewart’s beverages online, I know exactly what topics I’m going to find in their content. These are successful voices because I know their focus. I go to them for a reason.

What is your voice? What is its focus? Every piece of writing you do in this class, from essays to tweets, should fall under a single subject. You pick the subject. You can write about anything you want, but you need to concentrate on something. The topic can’t be you and all your many interests. No one is writing a diary. Imagine you are a journalist and you’ve been assigned a beat like the White House or Economics or Terrorism.

What is your beat?

Think about your capstone project for inspiration. If your capstone is going to be a documentary on fly-fishing, then a blog about fly-fishing and your pre-production and research for the documentary could be a tremendous help to you. Previous students have used this course to build their capstones from scratch.

Remember this is your beat for this one semester and course. I’m not asking you to pick your major or make a life decision. It is a brief experiment.

Think of a few options for your semester beat this week. Once you do, you might also rethink your pseudonym.

Third, post a sample of your work.

Each of you should create a blog account and a Twitter account under your new pseudonym. The blog should be separate from your ICM blog. Pick the simplest template – black text on a white background. Don’t use any elaborate themes, colors or graphics of any kind. We are starting with blank slates and devoting our attention to the words only.

The first sample you post shouldn’t be more than a page in length. It should be something you’ve written previously and not for this class. It should also be something of which you are proud.

It will be our first impression of you.

Post your new blog address and Twitter feed in the comments following this post once you register with me in the column to your right. You can use Blogger (or WordPress if you have a host) as long as we all have access to your work and can make comments. I will create a blogroll immediately.

Everyone should follow everyone else’s Twitter account. You can start with mine @bumpspark. I recommend using Tweetdeck as well.

If you search online, you will find previous versions of this course. Do not look back.

Writing is a process and so is this class. It will evolve with a new set of students. If you take your time with each module as they arrive, you will evolve too.

We will discuss how to critique one another’s work constructively next week. You will be broken down into groups to that end, but I want you to become interested in all of your fellow classmates’ goals as much as your time allows. The more input each of you gives, the more you will receive in conversation, and the more beneficial this class will become for everyone.

I will talk to you as the week progresses. Email me with questions.

A new class begins… May 14th.