Five Strategies Internet Writers Use to “Continue the Conversation”

This article investigates the strategies web-writers develop when their audiences respond to them via textual participation. Focusing on three web-writers who want to “continue the conversation,” this article identifies five major strategies to accomplish this aim: (a) editing after production, (b) quotation, (c) question posing, (d) naming secondary writers, and (e) textual listening. Using the lens of writer-audience tension, I find that due to these web-writers’ perceptions of audience, one that is partially externalized via the website’s template, the term audience itself may not be a discrete concept, but a fluid, evolving, and recursive one, in other words, ongoing. These perceptions of audience reflect the unending nature of online texts and are exemplified by these five strategies.