Throughout the period of this course, I learned a lot about and improved my ability to
brainstorm and post content to an audience. It goes much deeper than just posting things on
social media, even though that is something I learned a lot about with all of the tweets sent
during the semester. However, there are many more skills involved in tweeting or posting any
sort of effective social media post. The main learning point was just knowing how to appeal to an
audience in any situation. This can be useful for any sort of writing, whether that be for a future
profession or another class. Understanding content, critical thinking, communication,
collaboration, and creativity are all ways to improve writing that is guided towards an audience.
Having skills and knowledge that will transfer towards things in the future is a key part of
learning and many of the concepts in this class did that.
The two areas where I improved the most this semester were my critical thinking skills
and creativity. Going into this course I was not great at coming up with creative ideas and had
room for improvement on my critical thinking skills. Most of the assignments in this class
required me to use those areas because many of the assignments had loose guidelines and needed
a lot of thought and creativity to complete. I often struggled with figuring out how to complete
assignments because I was unsure of myself. Many assignments did not provide a lot of detailed
guidelines, however that was vital towards building those skills. By doing this week after week I
gained confidence in my ability to critically think and come up with creative ideas that helped
me become more successful in the class and hopefully in my future. I think that the most
valuable part of this course was improving those skills rather than any concept or idea that was
taught. Tweeting constantly also helped contribute towards developing my critical thinking skills because most of the prompts required some reflection to provide insight to the rest of the class. I
think my skill development with critical thinking and creativity from this course will serve me
well in my future career.
Web writing is such a different style of class from other Millersville University courses
and provides a lot of lessons that cannot be learned in other classes. I think the interaction with
other students through twitter was unique and was the best tool for me to learn. Constantly
seeing other people’s opinions and ideas made me learn so much about the concepts and projects
that we were working on. Twitter is a much more effective way to learn from others compared to
classic discussion posts because of the concise messages that are used. Also, the ability of
Twitter to have images to make interactions with others more engaging. The assignment where
we pretended to be a tv show’s twitter account forced us to practice using gifs and images to
respond to upset fans. This helped me learn about when to properly use gifs and images when
responding to people. This was an overall lesson on how to interact with an audience that will
serve to be very useful in the future. The way in which this course taught concepts was helpful
but to me twitter was the best learning tool. Not only was it a place to learn concepts from others,
but it was an area to practice those ideas to better understand them. Learning in this course was
unique, but very effective.
My theory on writing is simple and easy for me to understand. I think the most important
part of it is understand the audience and how to appeal to them. If you are able to do that then it
gives your writing a purpose. The audience dictates the style that is being used, the language
involved and the content as a whole. For example, if the audience is younger it will be more
beneficial to use language choices that are more popular with the youth or if the audience is
educated in the area you are writing about then you can use more jargon. This is always the first thing I focus on when writing. My theory in writing has also helped contribute to many of my
working definitions. My working definition for content is just any form of media that is designed
to be consumed by an audience. This again shows that importance of an audience and how they
influence a writing process. For my working definition of content strategy, I think it is the
planning and process of posting content to an audience. An example of this would be the people
running an Instagram account for a professional sports team planning out what they are going to
post for the day with specific goals in mind, then actually posting them to Instagram. Content
would not get any attention if it did not appeal to the audience, so the planning would consist of a
lot of how to make appealing to an audience work. These definitions and ideas directly show
what my theory of writing is and how much audience plays a role into it. Some of the other ideas
I have towards my theory of writing is just having purpose and value to the people reading.
There are many other factors that go into quality writing, but I think if you are able to fully
understand the concept of how to appeal to the right audience then it will make every other part
of writing so much easier.
My writing process and approach is not very strict but usually consistent. I do not
typically outline or organize my thoughts to start unless that is required by an assignment. I
usually begin my writing process by understanding first what I am trying to accomplish. Whether
that is reading the guidelines of an assignment or brainstorming ideas for what I should do.
Brainstorming ideas without many guidelines has happened a lot in this course and occasionally
in some other courses. This is one of my least favorite things to do in writing because I
constantly question whether it is the right idea. It often is frustrating and exhausting. However, I
always come up with an idea and commit to it even if it is not the best one. This leads me to the
actual writing process where I just start working. Sometimes that is an essay on a word document, a tweet or on a PowerPoint presentation. I then usually make most of my corrections
to the writing as I am going. Finally, I read through it and revise it as it is needed before
