THE WEBSITE GENRE
The material on the Web we look through every day is amazingly heterogeneous and most people could find it difficult to classify it within a specific linguistic genre. According to the linguistic patterns that often characterize them, in his book "The Language of Websites", Mark Boardman divides websites into two different groups: institutional websites and personal websites. Here I’m going to analyse two websites taken from our del.icio.us collection from a linguistic point of view.
The first website is an Online Library. As its welcome message highlights the aim of this website is to provide students, teachers and the classic enthusiast with a large amount of free books. The way the creators of this website address their audience is through a formal English; they use short, complete sentences to describe how to use this on-line library, together with links made up of noun-phrases (e.g. author index) or imperative forms of action verbs (e.g. drop us a line) to guide their audience through the site. However, once you click on the name of an author, the language changes. It becomes even more formal and the information is divided into medium-length paragraphs just as in a literature book. Then there are a lot of hyperlinks to all the authors or books you can find in this online library.
The second website I chose is English Listening Practice. It defines itself as an updated self-study guide for teachers and students. The difference with the audience of the first website is that the audiency of this site is mainly made up of students that are learning English as a second language, while the first website also addressed English mother-tongue students. The aim of the website is to give its audience material to practice English listening and comprehension. The language is formal but there are not sentences put together into paragraghs, just very short sentences alone, sometimes even only noun-phrases. These are to describe the great amount of links of this website and the list of conversations it offers for the listening practice.
On the whole, what I have seen from analysing these two websites is that their main structure is made up of formal, short, complete sentences and a lot of hyperlinks, which in my opinion are the ones that better sum up the general attitude used by the creators of websites of this kind. The information given in these websites is organized in a completely different way than it would be on paper: everything is more schematic and concise. Short sentences substitute long paragraphs and noun-phrases become hyperlinks as if to tag additional information in a very short way.
Hope I have been clear enough!..bye, Isabella
Boardman, Mark (1990). The Language of Websites
The material on the Web we look through every day is amazingly heterogeneous and most people could find it difficult to classify it within a specific linguistic genre. According to the linguistic patterns that often characterize them, in his book "The Language of Websites", Mark Boardman divides websites into two different groups: institutional websites and personal websites. Here I’m going to analyse two websites taken from our del.icio.us collection from a linguistic point of view.
The first website is an Online Library. As its welcome message highlights the aim of this website is to provide students, teachers and the classic enthusiast with a large amount of free books. The way the creators of this website address their audience is through a formal English; they use short, complete sentences to describe how to use this on-line library, together with links made up of noun-phrases (e.g. author index) or imperative forms of action verbs (e.g. drop us a line) to guide their audience through the site. However, once you click on the name of an author, the language changes. It becomes even more formal and the information is divided into medium-length paragraphs just as in a literature book. Then there are a lot of hyperlinks to all the authors or books you can find in this online library.
The second website I chose is English Listening Practice. It defines itself as an updated self-study guide for teachers and students. The difference with the audience of the first website is that the audiency of this site is mainly made up of students that are learning English as a second language, while the first website also addressed English mother-tongue students. The aim of the website is to give its audience material to practice English listening and comprehension. The language is formal but there are not sentences put together into paragraghs, just very short sentences alone, sometimes even only noun-phrases. These are to describe the great amount of links of this website and the list of conversations it offers for the listening practice.
On the whole, what I have seen from analysing these two websites is that their main structure is made up of formal, short, complete sentences and a lot of hyperlinks, which in my opinion are the ones that better sum up the general attitude used by the creators of websites of this kind. The information given in these websites is organized in a completely different way than it would be on paper: everything is more schematic and concise. Short sentences substitute long paragraphs and noun-phrases become hyperlinks as if to tag additional information in a very short way.
Hope I have been clear enough!..bye, Isabella
Boardman, Mark (1990). The Language of Websites
posted by isaperini at 3:41 PM
3 Comments:
Dear Isabella,
As you I think that the main feature of the structure of websites is using short sentences, and above all noun phrases, in order to make communication more successful and easier. But in my opinion in general they use a more informal rather than a formal language, this is my personal impression.
See you Monday
Have a nice weekend
Lara
Hi Isabella.
In my analysis I have only found web sites using informal language.
Reading all the comments made by our coursemates, I realized that most of them think that the language of web sites is usually informal, so, your considerations are quite different from theirs.
However, I’m convinced we can’t generalize. In my opinion, language depends on topics, purposes and audience. This is not true only for web sites.
A book can be written in a colloquial language or in a very formal one. It depends on the author’s style.
Francesca
Hiya Isabella,
speaking about the genre of websites means that one really has to see again how communication works nowadays. Online pages have to be well organize and they must attract surfers at a first sight. It doesn't matter in which way: thought an 'only-text version' or with a lot of pictures. This depends above all on the topic and on the kind of audience that comes over it.
Alice
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