What I Learnt Teaching Writing for the Web at FH JOANNEUM

It’s 8.59 in Graz. I am late in the sense that I couldn’t arrive earlier to my “Garden of Concepts” web writing workshop for the FH Joanneum Content Strategy Master’s program. Yet all is okay.  There I am. On a mission: save humanity from mediocre text.

I am about to leap into the unknown by asking my students to put away their electronic devices and get a pen and a piece of paper for the web writing workshop.

I have nothing to lose. Only to win. Hearts and minds.

The Beginning: The Journey of a Thousand Glossary Entries Starts with the First Mess

This year (my sixth at FH Joanneum Content Strategy Program) I decided to be brave enough and focus on one single thing in my web writing workshop. I didn’t have anything prepared in the sense of handouts and theory-heavy slides. I went “barefoot.” No checklists, no overdesigned decks and class flow. All I had was the undeniable understanding that writing happens outside the device (even the paper one) and inside a shared space of understanding, doubts, and unravelled mysteries through the noosphere.

So here I was, standing in front of my new class (#cos205 cohort), ready to hold the space for them as I asked each and every one to leave their phones aside and prepare to use the strongest, most beautiful tool – their awareness of what is. Of course, I did have something analog to get us “beamed” in the universe of exploration and heuristics. A set of sticky notes, pens, and colourful paper.

Thus equipped, we were to set off on a journey. A travelling across the meanders (and, as you will later see, the chaos) of our minds. We were to start something bigger than us. A neat calendar of 27 glossary entries about the Content Strategy discipline to be published, interlinked, and seeded into the ecosystem of knowledge at https://www.contentstrategy.at/.

This was something I had been dreaming of: build a bridge between my Web Writing class and the activities around the Knowledge Base of FH Joanneum. 

The building started from chaos. Instant and inevitable.

Imagine asking 27 people what they want to write about. What, what should we write about? That is the beginning of a black hole of everything. Literally everything. From data to goal, though SME and needs, all the way to tools and reliability, and, as I would later read – a tag called “next step” :-).

I, as a writer, am not afraid of chaos. I seek it, many times summon it, because this is where things are born. Yet, as a teacher, I am usually not so secure in letting my ship, full of 20+ people, go in the eye of the storm just like that. Before, I always prepared, overexplained, and flooded students with references, articles, lists, intersections, you name it.

But this year I learnt my lesson: I finally realized that teaching is not about me telling students what to do, or starting with solutions and a deck of tips and tricks (I have always resisted that, by the way, yet many times I still gave lists of shortcuts). It is rather about me holding space for them to experiment, to go through their own chaos, to allow themselves not to know, to seek, to find, to fail, unlike the linear, statistically clear path to a perfectly polished, soulless, bodiless sentence which is generated in the blink of a context-unaware AI tool.

That messy space gave us fruits.

It gave me fruits. There I was, having filled my theoretical containers about the importance of dialogue in marketing communication (link to the Intro of my book Being Dialogic) with dialogic experiences, thanks to my students. And there was our calendar – several months later! A living document where we worked on interactions, shared ideas for interlinking, and allowed ourselves to grow that garden of concepts organically. The soil being dialogue, the fertilizer being the trust developed over time through mutual understanding. All start from nowhere.

The Middle: Making the Mess Digital, Instant Chaos and the Coorientation Way Out of It

The seemingly small task to “create glossary entries for the Knowledge Base of FH Joanneum Content Strategy” was actually the eye of the hurricane of questions and doubts. What is it that we will write for? What terms should we write definitions for? How do we choose?

We moved the whiteboard instant chaos to its digital, even more prone to chaotic and random movements (of the thought and collaborative action) equivalent. A Miro board.

The mess grew bigger. We digitized the mess, opening more doors of confusion.

For example, we faced an explosion of wooly connections that were more than the number of concepts. So I had to come up with a rule – you don’t connect unless you can name the connection in a meaningful way 🙂

That was our first rule. And it worked. When I analyzed in hindsight, it worked because it was actually the beginning of a coorientation process.

Coorientation is a communicative process through which two actors (A and B) orient themselves toward a common object, issue, or problem (X), while simultaneously developing an understanding of one another’s respective orientations toward that object. (I learnt about that concept from a seminal (for my work and research) book called Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies. The place I refer to is Chapter 8, Dialogue as the Search for Sustainable Organizational Co-orientation, by James R. Taylor.)

What did coorientation have to do with the messy Miro board?

It was our way out of the mess and into the practice constructing a sufficiently shared understanding and representation of the terms we wanted to write definitions for.

And this is another thing I learnt. I don’t have to teach students only how to write. I also have to teach them how to work with stakeholders towards common understanding.

Writing then became epistemic writing (I learnt that from my student Angela Lau: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7474050022788153344/). Meaning the practice of using writing as a tool to actively generate, structure, and deepen knowledge, rather than just as a way to communicate pre-existing thoughts.

And that is exactly what creating (and, in the future, maintaining) a glossary of domain-specific terms is about. Writing the definition is merely the cherry on top of the Semantic Web Layer Cake (I couldn’t help but introduce the concept: https://medium.com/openlink-software-blog/semantic-web-layer-cake-tweak-explained-6ba5c6ac3fab. It lets us connect the dots. Before writing came:

• Context. Context not per se, but rather as the establishment of a common object or problem that becomes the focal point of communication.
• Interaction. Participation to hear, negotiate meanings, and coordinate actions.
• Translation. The work of bridging perspectives and building common ground.

And writing. Wirting itself, and weaving using the slow media of the pen and paper and the immensity of being alone before a blank page. This is something I would definitely keep on encouraging and cultivating as a skill in my students (and myself of course).

Before we wrap up, please enjoy a glimplse of the students’ weaves.

The End: It’s Endless

Having agreed upon the terms we wanted to write about, and tentatively on the relationships they enter and exist by, also having thought of metaphors for them, and having jotted down our first raw drafts, we were ready. With the first step of the thousand miles. 

Then, throughout our other classes and iterations, we had more steps to walk together. We had to work on metaphor conceptualizations, the gradual understanding that no text is an island, the alignment on how to tag with which tags, and why.

Another milestone we had ahead of us was a content calendar to be enacted.

As of today, I don’t see this as a content calendar. I see it as a living diary of human thought and forward-thinking. It is a snapshot of what we discovered (together!): words are never alone. They belong to networks of meaning and more importantly to experiences withing a given community. 

The glossary entries were no individual assignments. They were nodes in a growing semantic landscape. <3

That was perhaps the most important lesson of all.

Writing is rarely about writing. Writing is about coorientation, collaborative action, and sense-making. About finding a thought’s, a text’s, place in a web of concepts, experiences, and interpretations.

A glossary entry appears simple until one realizes that every definition points to another definition, every term opens another question, and every answer invites another conversation.

Web writing as par excellence coordinated action through words 

Writing is about cultivating connections. It is with that understanding that the project became a shared exercise in meaning-making. A garden of concepts that none of us could have designed in advance, but all of us helped grow.

Writing in the context of organizational communication (which writing for the web in the context of marketing communications is) is par excellence coordinated action through words.

The “Garden of Concepts” and the gardeners I had the pleasure to work with, taught me to be more assertive when enacting the understanding that the most precious “building material” for content is the space between words. It is the space where semantic capital is accrued through cognition and poiesis and further turns into value.

As a lecturer teaching web writing I cannot afford to settle for less.