Gregory Wickliff and Janice Tovey (1995) state that students of hypertext "must develop the same physical and cognitive skills that writing paper texts require: research, analysis, and synthesis" (p. 51). Nonetheless, as William Horton (1994) contends, creating online documents demands new knowledge and skills, in effect, a new literacy.
This new literacy is necessary because writers need to learn how to incorporate new media within their online documents. As Gary Heba (1997) explains, students need to learn "how to compose and integrate print, video, and audio information into a usable multimedia product–that is, they need to become multimedia literate, capable of producing and reproducing information in online environments" (p. 20).
Literacy now means being able to communicate effectively using:
More visual media (charts, photographs, drawings)
Multiple media (animation, video, and sound)
Dynamic media (moving pictures and sound)
Mixes of media (combining various media)
Nonlinear media (hypertext) (Horton, 1994, p. 401)
Developing nonlinear media (hypertext) skills involves learning how to create effective links. It also involves learning online writing techniques, such as keeping words to a minimum, writing in active voice, and keeping sentence structure simple (Smith, 1998).
In addition, writers must develop new strategies to help readers envision the structure of their hypertext documents.
Becoming multimedia literate and learning effective Web page design
skills helps writers integrate these elements in order to effectively
present information to readers.
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Last Updated: May 2, 2001
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