Sydney Brooks ENGL 3360

This week we talked about ethical considerations for writing online by reading through Update Culture and having that fun discussion of ethical “commandments” in class. It was really interesting to reflect on the class as a whole to see what each of us would personally deem as important rules to follow when writing online. The five commandments that my group and I came up with were:  1. Thou shalt cite your sources 2. Thou shalt write for the platform 3. Thou shalt know your audience 4. Thou shalt use images in a smart way and  5. Thou shalt follow the rules and guidelines of the platform you’re writing on.  I felt that each of these rules was important to include because a lot of online platforms have their own unspoken rules to follow like following the rules of the platform and writing in a way that applies to the platform. Writing a social media post will look very different from writing for the online version of  The NY Times.  I also think it’s important t...

This week we talked about writing for an online publisher. This will be the project that I’m undertaking for our Unit 3 portfolio, so I was happy that we dove deeper into that this week. We looked at the major differences between traditional print publishers who transitioned to online and born-digital publishers. I actually don’t follow The NY Times or Huffington Post, but it was really interesting to see how each publisher had evolved over the years. Looking for the application to our projects, I noted the format, the use of hyperlinks, and multimodal aspects. Social media writing and blog writing also include all three of these aspects just in a different way. For this kind of writing, I’ll need to make sure that I’m aware of how my writing may be interacted with, the type of writing that I produce for the publishers I choose, and making sure that it follows their standards. I was looking specifically at Slate, Wattpad, and The Threepenny Review as the three online publications tha...

This week we talked a little more about writing for websites and blogs. Though I’m going to be writing for an online publication, a lot of the principles that we talked about this week I felt like could be applicable to my type of writing. Similarly, writing for online publishing on a blog or website usually revolves around a singular topic and you have creative control over the type of content that you can make. However, there are stipulations or guidelines that may be restrictive to the writing that you do if you’re publishing online. Blogs and websites may be restrictive if you choose to follow a template, but I feel like this kind of writing still is pretty easy to monitor and choose what you want done with it. I also really liked what we went over on Wednesday because each of the writing considerations that we went over seemed so simple but are things you sometimes don’t think about. I’ve now learned as a technical writer that using headings and subheadings to help guide informa...

This week we talked about textual management and how to write effective content for social media. We learned that Textual Management is how creators or writers will enact control over their writing through a series of actions. This could involve monitoring the comment section, controlling the way the conversation goes, and curating any comments that don’t help the writers achieve the goals they were wanting with a particular post or subject. Writers may get directly involved in the management of their section by confronting people and responding to what they’ve said or brought up as a concern. Other times, creators may just report the behavior of their audience so that the social media platform can take care of it. Writers may also just ignore, delete, correct, or update their posts based on the interaction they get from their posts. After watching some video clips from South Park of one of the characters battling with his profile on Facebook, we had a really interesting discussion ...

This week, we finished up our iFixit Projects and started Unit 3 which is crazy that we’re so close to the end of the semester already. We also started our discussion on platforms with our reading on “The politics of ‘platforms’ by Tarleton Gillespie. Gillespie talks about the various kinds of platforms that exist including computational, architectural, figurative, and political. Computational platforms involve computer hardware and operating systems; architectural platforms involve physical structures; figurative platforms involve metaphysical foundations, and political platforms are articulated beliefs. In class, we learned the key terms that Gillespie includes in his discussion on the various kinds of platforms and how the biggest platform, YouTube, is working to ensure its platform is fair to all of its creators. However, the discussion point of how YouTube tries to empower each individual evenly with their content was false. Like Cesar mentioned, I also have noticed how they will ...

Good news! We got the device we wanted, the Ridgid Pipe Cutter, our proposal was accepted, and we have already received feedback on our device page.  The only negative thing we need to fix is the wording used in the background section. The technical writing team said, "Because the primary purpose of this page is to help people with failing devices, you should avoid marketing language in this section. Please revise your text to be more informative than salesy." So we'll get that fixed. I also had a couple of questions on the use of the warranty page and if we should include that so that may also be a change.