Cyber Rhetoric

It is stated in the article "Second Language Cyber Rhetoric: A Study of Chinese L2 Writers in an Online Usenet Group" that writing on the internet liberates students from the constraint of the classroom. The internet liberates writers by the fact writers can write to express an assortment of opinions in which they will likely not be willing to express in written form in a classroom environment. Writing online also blurs the boundaries between different languages as in a classroom environment a student writing an assignment is expected to write in a certain form, without the freedom to switch between languages at will and combine the languages to form a writing style incorporating aspects of different languages. An example can be seen in the article by Lam in which two girls who emigrated from China interacted with other Chinese emigrants by typing in both English and a romanized version of Cantonese. This shows how the internet can effectively blur boundaries of languages and allow online writers to form a style consisting of elements from different languages.