Hi, Everyone,

For those who teach web design and authoring, this sprint event (and eventually product) may be of interest.  There's a lot available online about coding and some on web design, but not as much about how to actually write, organize, and deliver web content.

Heidi
________________________________________
From: [log in to unmask] [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matt Barton [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 10:08 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [techrhet] CFP: The Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide Writing Sprint

It’s becoming a common feature in open source project conferences and
unconferences alike: the code sprint. Open source unconference attendees get
together and produce a much needed programming resource for their community
by the end of their conference. Digital rhetoricians can do this, too, by
focusing on building teaching resources we could use in the classroom.
Instead of a code sprint, we can conduct a writing sprint.

Over the duration of Collaborvention
2011,<http://computersandwriting.org/collaborvention-2011-cfp>Writing
Spaces will host a collaborative writing event to produce a Creative
Commons-licensed web writing guide for undergraduate writers. We invite all
writing teachers--graduate students and faculty alike--with experience
incorporating writing for the web in their classes (e.g., first year
writing, business communication, web design, multimedia writing, etc.) or
who write for the web regularly themselves, to participate in the
construction of this open educational resource.

What will the focus of this guide be? Our goal won’t be to produce yet
another HTML/CSS coding tutorial site like
w3schools<http://www.w3schools.com/>or HTML
Dog. <http://htmldog.com/> Nor is it to create a full web design manual like
Web Style Guide, 3rd edition.
<http://webstyleguide.com/wsg3/index.html>Rather, the Writing Spaces
Web Writing Style Guide will focus on the writing
that writers do when they create content on the web, such as best practices
and style rules for writing with social media or creating web page content
for an organization. The guide could cover anything from how to write a good
blog post; audience and genre considerations for composing tweets;
principles for resizing, cropping, and saving visuals; or whether or not to
include ending punctuation in a hyperlink (as is the rule with using italics
in print). These are only a few ideas about the development of this
resource. What the text will ultimately consist of is up to the writers who
decide to participate in the project.

During *Phase 1: Drafting* (April 22-May 2), we invite the computers and
writing community to engage in a garage band style writing jam via Google
Docs to create and revise the manuscript. Drop in at anytime. Add some text;
revise other text. Revisit the manuscript as many times (or as few) as you
like during this drafting phase of the project.

Toward the end of the 2nd week and through the 3rd week of the unconference
(May 3-May 13), we’ll feature
freeze<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze_%28software_engineering%29>the
text and invite community review and discussion of the best practices
offered in the text for our *Phase 2: Refinement & Review.* At the end of
Phase 2, Janice Walker, the writing sprint’s content editor, will review the
discussion and make the call on what passages and best practices from the
draft to include in the final version of the text.

Following the f2f confererence, in *Phase 3: Copy Editing and Final
Production* (May 21-May 22), we’ll finish the writing sprint with copy
editing and final production, publishing HTML, PDF, and epub versions of the
document under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
license.

Assuming this writing sprint is successful in producing a resource useful to
teachers in the computers and writing community--whether the final Writing
Spaces Web Writing Style Guide is five, ten, or twenty pages--we’ll look
forward to hosting a future event to produce new versions.

Thanks for your participation,

*Matt Barton, Writing Spaces Web Writing Style Guide Editor*
*[log in to unmask]*

For more information about the Web Writing Style Guide Writing Sprint and to
learn how to get started with the writing sprint, visit
http://writingspaces.org/writing-sprint-info.<http://writingspaces.org/writing-sprint-info>
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