LECTURE 3 REVIEW: TEXT

We had a guest lecturer, Skye Doherty, to lecture us on text today. What was presented to us was these varied definitions of text. We learned about the inverted pyramid, where what is important goes to the top and so on, and we learned about hypertext for online text where it is less organized and more random.

Every now and then, the meaning of text pops up here and there and I guess that was what kept the whole lecture kind of “fresh” and on the ball. Introduced in the lecture was how text in print and text online differ from one another. In print, text is more organized, whereas online, text is more random. With regards to headlines, a journalist is able to be more creative with it as opposed to online, where a headline has to be precise and straight to the point as it has to be search engine-friendly.

What we learnt in lecture was also how a journalist has to come up with different headlines due to the different mediums the article will be published in (e.g. one for print, one for the online version and one for the evening post). We then ventured into social media and text. Text for blogs, Facebook and Twitter differ in a sense that blogs hold the main article, Facebook usually has the healine and a short synopsis of the article, and encourages discussion via the comments thread while Twitter has just the headline and a link to the blog. We are also introduced to metadata and tags and how they are used to help people search for information online via keywords.

In essence, what I learnt in today’s lecture was how flexible text can be and how one can adapt it under different circumstances for different uses and mediums. All in all, it was a really informative lecture where I learnt so much about text I would have never thought I could learn about. Just one teeny complain though, Skye went really fast so it was kind of hard to keep up, but I guess that was what made it all the more interesting.

Oh, and before I forget, we touched a little on how gaming can be linked to journalism. Can’t say that I really got the concept but well, the game looked fun.