Writing for Interactive Media

Both technical writing and interactive media writing skills, in my opinion, are important for nearly any career. No matter which direction I go, I anticipate being able to take advantage of the skills that I have been able to further develop through the opportunities this course has given me.

I may continue to work at Dixie State University as an administrative assistant for quite some time. This job requires me to write succinctly; the writing I do in this field is almost exclusively technical in nature.
I may choose to start a daycare/preschool. This too will require me to have strong interactive media writing. This venture will benefit from me being able to write strong business proposals, annual reports, monthly newsletters, and grant proposals.
Eventually, I plan to open up a chain of ESL schools, with preschool-2nd grade during the day and adult education opportunities at night throughout the country and perhaps even abroad. Much like starting a daycare locally, this will require a similar skillset implemented on a grander scale. More than anything, achieving this goal will require a mastery of interactive media writing skills so that I can help teachers develop interactive curricula and market the company effectively.

I'd like to extend a thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read and interact with my blog. I will continue to appreciate more constructive criticism and the opportunity to continue the conversations my posts have started as anyone reads my blog in the future. I have enjoyed being able to interact with my classmates' posts and hope to read more of your work in the future.

Journal #5 Response: "What Do Technical Communicators Need to Know about New Media?"

The greatest structural change in the world --socially, politically, rhetorically, and economically-- in my lifetime has been the internet.  Uber, the number one transportation company in the United States, paid for no gas, changed no tires, replaced no radiator fluid last year. The number one transportation company in the U.S. has no vehicles.  Airbnb, the most used accomodation company in the world, has no rooms or motels. What they have is leverage--the leverage to effectively harness new media. 

Is "what I write..separable from the medium in which I produce it"? I'm not sure that it is. "New Media" is both more limited (in terms of content restrictions) and more unlimited (in terms of options for disseminating a message). It is both faster, and in some situations can be slower (creating, editing, and sending out a voice recording as opposed to talking to an audience in a physical room).  

Wysocki, Anne Frances. Solving problems in technical communication. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, and Stuart A. Selber, eds.  University of Chicago Press, 2013. pp. 428-453. 

Journal #4 Response: "Stories That Speak To Us: Multimodal Literacy Narratives"

In this article, Cynthia Selfe explores personal narrative by examining how digital narratives developed in educational settings express identity, knowledge, or meaning. While literary studies have always valued the context/background in which narratives are written, this approach is a shift from other, traditional literary studies which focus on style, structure, and analysis to a focus on how stories are tied to culture, identity, and meaning.

Digital Narratives accomplishes several things for the author:

• assist individuals with identity formation and self-understanding through what they choose to tell or represent. 
• identify a beginning point of an experience (why the author is who he is or the beginning point of how he became so) and a goal or end point
• give the author a place to express who or what they identify with, creating the author and author's experience as a reference point for user. Selfe identifies relational positioning as a "rhetorical agency." 

Digital narratives also accomplish several things for the reader:

• Gives the reader an opportunity to see things from the author's perspective.
• Helps the reader to understand, respect, and gain insights into an issue or person.
• They "speak." Readers learn from the author's experience and can compare it with their own. 
• View the author as an individual with unique and valuable experience and skill sets that we can learn from. 

For example, this narrative about Selfe coming to get to know students through digital narratives helped me to better understand the value of the digital narrative as a method for understanding people. One thing that I have found very helpful as I write for various audiences is to research the stories that my audience has published: for example, I might read what my professors have published, or I might review the kinds of stories that companies that I plan to work for have published or their "about us" narratives to better understand how they frame themselves and what their values are. 

My biggest take-away from this article was this quote:

Thus, story tellers situate themselves—both in positive and resistant ways—to parents and other family members who them help establish personal literacy values; to sponsors...who provide entrés and support for particular literate activities; to teachers who might punish, reward, or control their practices as readers and writers; and to peers who might share or resist a storyteller’s personal literacy values.

Telling your story in a way that represents how you want to represent yourself to your audience and not just what your audience expects --especially digitally-- is risky. When have you put yourself out there to tell your story?

Digital storytelling is not just beneficial for personal growth. Learning how to effectively tell a story digitally is key to marketing not just yourself, but a brand or product in the business world. Adam Weinroth, Chief Marketing Officer of OneSpot, developed the following infographic to guide users in telling a brand's story:

When has someone persuaded you or changed your mind about something through storytelling?

Journal #3 Response: "Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning"

Kress states that "each of the modes available for representation in a culture provides 'specific potentials and limitations for communication'" and asserts that text is being "replaced" by image
While he says that the modes of communication that we choose are motivated by "the social" and that the effects of representation and communication are outcomes of economics and politics, there are many instances in which the state of the political atmosphere and economy may motivate the social usage of text versus image as a mode of communication, or vice versa. For example, Kress himself mentions that the mediums for different modes of communication are a typically books for text and a screen for image; the limitations of the book and the advent of "distinct cultural technologies." It's not just society that has caused image to be preferable to text; the demands of the economy and the need to communicate efficiently and quickly demanded by political events. Economic interests drive society to need to convey and receive messages quickly, clearly, and in ways that are accessible to many people. 

Fig 1. Flow of cause and effect for motivation of what mode of communication/representation to use. 

I think it's ironic that Kress is discussing how people are moving away from the written word, and yet the author writes with a style that may alienate many readers. For example, on page 291, he has three sentences spanning 4 lines. Many of his sentences are of such a complex structure that they would be difficult for an ESL reader to understand. This being said, how can we even make our audiences aware of these issues or open to our ideas about the usability of text, without communicating it in a way that they can participate in the discussion and engage in the ideas?

I have taken two classes on the juxtaposition, disposition, and comparative usage of text, static image, and video: Document Design from Dixie State University's English department, and Comic Books and Graphic Novels from Coursera. The issues surrounding text and images as modes of communication, whether discussed in the context of supplementing and enhancing one another, or--in the context of the Ullman and Kress's articles--competing with one another, is one that evokes a lot of emotional bias in almost any discussion of the two, and even crops up in prescriptive discussions such as when professionals and academics discuss the usability and best practices in using the two.

Kress, Gunther. "Gains and Losses: New Forms of Texts, Knowledge, and Learning." Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Claire Lutkewitte, Bedford/St. Martins, 2014, pp. 283-301 

Journal #2 Response: "The Museum of Me"

Ullman' describes a billboard that she saw which read "Now the world really does revolve around you," which she identifies as "the ultimate baby-world narcissism we are all supposed to abandon when we grow up." When she discovers that the advertisement is for a company in the computer industry, she decides, "Who else but someone in the computer industry to make such a shameless appeal to individualism?"

Throughout the entire article, Ullman makes some great introspective points and gives some social commentary that I think that anyone who was born between 1980 and 2000 could generally identify with and agree on. However, I do not think that she emphasizes enough the fact that she herself states: that "the web did not cause [asociality and disconnection with reality], but it is what we call an 'enabling technology.'"

This week my phone began to shut off at random times, and sometimes would not power back on. After fighting with it and coming to accept that I would have to get by without it, I began to realize how much I relied on it as a short-term memory storage device. I don't have to memorize birthdays, phone numbers, passwords, or other information when I have my device. I don't have to clutter my desk with post-it notes or papers, nor do I even have to save important or sensitive information in hard copy when I have a smartphone and a personal computer. In this sense, I do live in a debilitatingly virtual world.

What do you think?

Ullman, Ellen. "The Museum of Me." Ed. Catherine Lattrell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. 

     pp. 639-645. Print. 

Journal #1 Response: The Evolution of Writing

The evolution of writing can be seen through a variety of disciplinary and philosophical lenses. 

In recent years, humankind has experienced what historians call a "creative boom." We now live in an "Information Age." The text stated that ideas and technology evolve in connection with each other (21). That being said, coupling images and text allows the reader to engage and form more complex ideas about what s/he is presented in the text. 

In the age of interactive media, the line between writer, reader, and text is blurred as reading becomes a less internalized practice and becomes more externally engaging via increasingly easy methods of sharing and interacting with writers and where texts are published or re-published. 

Do you feel that the increased interactivity and externality of text and other forms of recorded communication allows us to engage in more complex thoughts (25)? 

Reid, Alex. The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2007.

Images courtesy of Shuttershock.com, dreamstime.com, and Alex Hinds Photography.

Digital Literacy Autobiography

I remember the first time I saw a computer. I was about 3 years old; my dad had just bought it to do his homework for graduate school. I remember seeing my mom get to know it. Although I was first jealous of how much time she spent on the phone, I was even more jealous of how much time she spent on the computer. I would sit in her lap and watch her as she learned how to navigate Windows 95. The first times that I really got to explore the computer was when I would send my grandma emails. I remember discovering Yahoo eCards and showing my mom and brothers. I learned how to use MySpace from friends at middle school who encouraged me to get an account. By the time that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Weebly, and Blogger came along I was familiar enough with technology and user-created web space that I was able to walk myself through them. The nice thing about doing popular things on the internet is that my generation is pretty familiar with researching how to get what we need to completed without purchasing technical manuals or calling support lines like our parents did.

However, receiving supplementary online support can also have its disadvantages. Web sites are constantly updating and changing their policies and methods. Even information published online and updated in real-time can be outdated if it is not released by the company. However, the help websites of companies are not as user-friendly as supplementary online support can be, because they are run by tech companies, not professional writers and fellow users of the online products.

One way to limit the disadvantages of not-up-to-date online support is to research what version of the product you are using or to see when the product was last updated and compare that with when the online supplementary material was published. By making sure that the supplementary information was released more recently than the product or website was updated, you can save yourself a lot of time.

My daughter, when she was 1.5, mimicking me.

My daughter, Elia, learns to multitask.