Digital spaces offer unique advantages and challenges to more traditional writing formats. My first blog entry is a good representation of my analog composition process. Even though it’s in a digital space its structure is no different than a typical paper I’d write for class, complete with conventional citations. It didn’t use images, hypertext, or other affordances a digital space provides.
My second blog was when I started to make use of some of the digital affordances. As you can see in the screenshot below, I started the blog with an illustration of quill and ink to conjure in the reader thoughts and images related to the writing process before they had even read a word of text. I also made the interviews of the authors I referenced more accessible to the reader by turning the authors’ own names into hyperlinks within my post instead of providing conventional citations.
For my third blog the affordances I took of advantage of were embedding the photo that I’m commenting on in the post as well as providing hyperlinks for both the backstory of the photo itself but even Plato’s The Republic, which my instructor had referenced, in the assignment details.
The affordance in my fourth blog sets the mood for a podcast with the illustration and truly takes advantage of the affordance of a link to the podcast so the blog is no longer strictly visual but an aural experience as well. While it’s not that unusual to provide images in Word documents or with paper based assignments they would not be accompanied with audio within the text itself due to format and logistical limitations.
In this fifth blog entry I link to all my past blogs and provide photos to help document my journey up until now.
When composing a primarily text based post, like a blog, I want to take use the tools at my disposal to make the experience more enjoyable and easier for my readers. At the same time I think when I compose digitally I should avoid the traps some people fall into by providing all sorts of unnecessary bells and whistles. Many websites fall into that trap where they’re so complicated and have so many extra things that they don’t provide a good experience or even deliver their primary focus adequately. It reminds me of the Myspace pages of yesteryear. Some people went so overboard with animated gifs, blaring music that automatically played, and custom everything that it made an overwhelming and irritating experience for visitors. It’s no wonder that other more streamlined and uniform social media platforms eventually replaced it. It provided so many functions it lost sight of its true purpose.
The biggest shift in my composition process is the focus on the reader’s experience. When doing a normal assignment the only thing that matters is if the writing is good and that it meets the requirements the instructor outlines. When you make a blog post you have to worry a lot more about things like presentation, accessibility, navigation, and even entertainment value because of the presumed larger audience that goes beyond just the instructor or your classmates. There are multiple constraints in an environment such as this though. One is that brevity is important. People typically have shorter attention spans in digital environments. Second, WordPress has limitations related to the type of files you can embed in your posts because of security, bandwidth, technological, and even financial reasons. A third big constraint, as previously mentioned, is remembering to use the affordances available to enhance my posts and not distract from them. I think providing a good experience for the reader/user is paramount.
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