Sydney Brooks ENGL 3360

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 ...