Jour1111 Lecture 3 Monday August 6th 2012

This week’s lecture was about text, and we were graced with the presence of guest speaker, Skye Doherty (who works at the school of journalism and communication- JACS). She specializes in text and has worked everywhere from regional Mckay to Bangkok. The lecture began first and foremost with defining text. Text is a correlation or ‘forming’ of letters together to create words and sentences ect. Text is fast, flexible and able to be applied on many kinds of platforms. Unlike most forms of communication and media, text does not rely on technology and is completely and utterly portable, there’s no need for chargers or heavy equipment (for phones and cameras) just and pen and paper and you’re ready to go! When combined with technology however, text underpins the internet. It is the dominate communicational method online, and without it we simply wouldn’t be subject to Facebook, twitter and any of our new sites. Instead everything would be only photographed or heard and there would be no defining measure of taking notes, recording data or telling a story. I Track Study is a site that records how people read and use paper online and it found that dominant headlines were most likely to draw the eye in, not images. I found this rather surprizing being more of a visual learner myself!

Skye then began to tell us about methods in text and print using a simple triangle. Triangle organizing is a method that places all the important information on the top of an upside-down triangle, and all the nonsensical “fluff” goes on the bottom. This is a very efficient method when it comes to writing columns/ blogs and means you can chop off the story at any point and still have been subject to the most important pieces in that article. This triangle Method is also applied when setting out pages in newspapers and online sites etc. Companies position what they believe to be the most important stories and straps (strips of information/news that runs across a page) on the top and put the less important or articles that only apply to a niche at the bottom. Skye continued to discuss various articles and defined Hypertext: Text that allows for several lines of thought and doesn’t follow traditional notions of singular plots/ linear arguments, and Hyperlinking: linking and finding relations to several topics in one piece of text. The most interesting piece of information/advice Syke left me with though was to never repeat a single word in a heading, subheading or strap, something so simple, I’d never really thought about until now…

Image Origin : Isaiah. 2012. http://chronotext.org/Isaiah/. Accessed August 7th 2012