As a person who writes and published articles online a lot, I took away a bunch of little pieces from these readings. I believe that it takes a lot of practice and learning when writing in digital spaces. When I first started to publish things online myself, I felt very lost.
Editors would tell me to insert certain media from X or other platforms into my articles, and I had no idea where they were supposed to go or how to even begin doing so.
In Klein and Shackelford’s “Beyond Black on White: Document Design and Formatting in the Writing Classroom”, there were a few small sentences that resonated with me.
The authors state “graphics can convey concepts that you can’t express in writing”. This was something I had to learn as I wrote sports articles. There are certain graphs and charts that express how good 50 NBA players are within a certain statistic that could never be expressed in words, but are crucial to proving your point.
The article also goes into different styles of writing, the importance of images, spacing, margins, and how to overall make a piece of writing more appealing/digestible.
Gagich defined what text truly meant in their article, and I would have never known the word can have so many meanings. This definition reminded me of when we learned what a genre was. Both words are used so often in everyday life, and now 21 years into my life, I am learning that they can refer to something much greater.
Text can refer to media, podcasts, memes, essays, etc. Gagich defines text as “a piece of communication that can take many forms”
All in all, writing online and learning how to do it the right way is a process and these articles are a very helpful tool in understanding how to learn that process.
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