As a journalism major and someone who works within the field, I’ve pounded on the keyboard of my laptop on a near-daily basis since I first came to St. Bonaventure. If you look at my rubber keyboard cover you’ll find the letters are nearly faded from being pressed on countless times over the past four years.
As far as learning the craft of sound journalism goes, what we learn in our first two years within the major sets us up for the following two years where we use our skills in experiential learning and internship opportunities.
I thought I had turned over every rock that would reveal an element of my own writing potential, but this course had taught me that not every rock has been turned over.
In this course, I’ve been able to further develop my writing skills in a number of ways, all of which have helped me build off the skills I previously had and develop myself further as not only a writer but also as someone whose life and career path deals primarily with writing and delivering context within digital spaces.
One of the biggest things I took away from this course is just how interactive and concise digital writing can be.
As a sports reporter for the Olean Times Herald, I’m limited with my writing in the sense that the depth of what I can produce and put out as a finished product is limited to what can exist within the confines of the pages of a newspaper.
And when I say pages—I’m being awfully gracious. I think the lengthiest piece I’ve ever been allowed to write for the Olean Times Herald sat right below 900 words. Of course, the amount I can write on any given day deals mainly with how much content the paper will have the next day. A busy day—I’ll probably be limited to around 600 words. A day where news is slow—I can probably start pushing 1,000 words if the space available allows it.
Digital writing doesn’t have this issue.
No matter the day, not matter what’s going on in the world, digital writing allows us to write to our heart’s content and not be confined by word counts.
With that being said, digital writing doesn’t always yield for us to drag things out as far as we can. In fact, digital writing means we can be hyper-concise while possibly even delivering more in-depth explanations or things.
That’s because simply doing things like adding links, pictures, memes, gifs, etc., to our writing (something that’s become regular practice). By doing this, the writing involved in explaining something becomes shorter and instead becomes more in-depth. Doing something as simple as adding a link to a digital writing piece can open up a world of possibilities as far as learning opportunities go.
As far as my own site goes, I tried to include interactive elements as they were deemed necessary to help my readers get a better understanding of where I was going with my writing.
By adding things like funny videos, links to other pages and pictures, I was able to explain things to a higher degree while actually doing less writing. While this seems like a paradox, it’s probably the defining feature of digital writing and has been the biggest thing I’ve taken away from spending a semester in this class.
By taking this course, I was reintroduced to new ways of writing and communicating that I hadn’t touched on much over my career as a journalism student and as a working journalist.