Black Tie and Tails?

I've been trying to figure out how "formal" writing should be on a blog, especially as I begin to think about how I will use blogs in my classroom. I revised my first post: An Inconvenient Truth and sent it to the Lewiston Daily Sun as a letter to the editor. The process of writing essentially the same thing in two different formats for two different audiences made me think a lot without coming to any definite conclusions. In Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New Worldwide Web, David Warlick writes: "The difference that students see in blogging is that it is much less about writing as a set of rules, and much more about communicating." I actually felt far more aware of "rules" and the implications for breaking them when I wrote my blog post than when I wrote my letter to the editor. I knew what was and what was not appropriate to say in the letter; I didn't call anyone a crank, for instance, whereas before I published my post, my husband asked me all sorts of complicated questions about how anonymous I wanted to remain, questions for which I did not have an immediate answer.

In his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms Will Richardson points out that blogs have "obvious relevance" in almost all of the 12 NCTE standards (p. 33). On the other hand, an English teacher at my school believes standards such as the NCTE or the New Standards do not address newer types of writing. The question remaining in my mind then, is: which is it? Does blog writing require a new set of rules, criteria, standards, or what have you, or is it just the same thing in a new package? From my own experience this past week, I would have to say that blog writing feels more like its own unique thing, the skills for which must be taught and learned as methodically as we teach or learn more traditional types of writing.