Remarks on Text Typology (Part 2): A Text Typology on 'Webvertising'?
2007-11-04 01:46 | 08. Writing for the Web
Usually, texts can be classified according to the writer’s intention. The outcome of such a classification refers to the genre of a text, i.e. a text may be explaining, instructing, recounting, describing, arguing, or narrating. Moreover, genres are to be distinguished from text types, which may be letters, plays, sonnets, formal debates, and so on. It appears to be the case that print texts, which of course have a much longer tradition in linguistics, are better represented by such classifications. Thus, I will not attempt to classify Web texts in terms of conventional text typology.
Typological Analogies from Offline Media Texts Are Not Helpful
Another reason for this refers to my approach itself. I do not completely avoid analogies from comparable offline writings in order to help writing Web texts. However, I encourage authors to approach the production of Web texts from a rather naive text linguistic perspective. This is because Web authors will come across some very Web-specific requirements that texts from the print world never have to face (see the postings from category: 06. Characteristics of Web Texts). Modern text linguistics provides all the means you need to produce communicative Web texts for every possible context.
Basically, a Web author must be flexible enough to adjust his text to any given demands, whether from the numerous possible contexts of online communication, the readership, the design, or whatever. A comprehensive classification of Web texts would nothing but force an author to stick to conventional categories, being tied to what people know from other than Web texts. It may be possible to classify Web texts according to the author’s intention (genre), but it will certainly be hard to sort Web texts and their various forms according to conventional text types.
So, I assume that searching for analogies from comparable text types is not very useful for authoring Web text. In fact, there seems to be no fully exhaustive and universally applicable method of text typology in linguistics anyway; a structural and functional classification using linguistic concepts such as, text genre, text type, or text sort is all the more difficult on the Web, maybe even unsuitable at all.
Here is an example of a feeble attempt in presenting an alternative classification. 
Kana et al. (2003, pp 121-143) have claimed to describe “Textsorten” along the lines of text types such as novel, poem, or essay; but what they have then illustrated rather refers to typographic and orthographic realisations of texts, e.g. “Querlesetexte”1, “Mehrebenentexte”, or “Skeletttexte”. So, depending on the criteria adopted, there seem to be several possible classifications of texts. Plain to see that on the Web and even on the field of advertisement research there is no universal text typology available, as also Crijns (in: Handler 2001, p 277) confirms: “Von einer eingehenden texttypologischen Spezifizierung kann in der Forschungsarbeit nicht die Rede sein”. I therefore consider such a debate dispensable for my topic.
Read more in the next posting, as I will continue to explain why one must be careful in transferring what we know about writing for print media to the production of Web texts.
1 Nevertheless, I will refer to the concept of “Querlesetexte” ( Kana et al. 2003, p 122) in order to explain how to write for ‘scannability’ in a later posting. Besides that, their book is very good reading, too!
Published by Christian Kuhn
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