Sydney Brooks ENGL 3360

Revisiting the topic of ethics when trying to balance writing for a personal brand and writing engaging content, I stumbled across this cool article that goes a little more in-depth about this struggle that many writers face. https://mytasker.com/blog/how-to-write-engaging-content . In this blog post, Victor writes “20 Effective Ways to Keep Your Readers Engaged to Your Article” and a lot of the methods he suggests have been covered in this class but also provide a way for authors to maintain their integrity. He starts off by saying the simplest way to make engaging content is to entertain your reader by writing high-quality content, to begin with. You want to engage with your readers through your writing style and story-telling abilities to make the readers feel like they’re part of your experience. If you’re able to do that with high-quality writing, then your writing stays credible, may get the clicks and views you want, and no integrity or ethical rules are broken in the process....

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...