Week 13: Writing for Online Publications

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 that could potentially publish my work. I’m starting to work on applications for grad school and each of the schools that I’m applying to asks for a writing portfolio—with some requiring creative writing only—so, I’m really excited to be able to stretch that part of my writing out because I haven’t in a while. I’ll be able to write three different pieces that will cover a variety of submission methods and formatting and be able to piece together something creative for my grad school applications. So, I’m excited to get started!