Writing

Writing is important because it is predominately how our society, communicates. It gives us the ability to share our ideas with others. Writing not only changes how we think, but how we have developed as a society. In a world, full of many different types of people and languages, writing gives us a way to all connect and share our thoughts. According to author Walter Ong, it was writing and recording information that allowed humans to be able to express more complex thoughts by compiling layers of visual and oral ideas together. Through the writing of his book, he creates a perfect example of this. Writing gave Ong a way to organize his thoughts, gather samples, and then preserve them so that people could read, learn, and expand upon his ideas for years to come.

Before print technologies, writing had to be hand-copied to publish a duplicate version of it. The amount of time it took made it prohibitive to produce mass amounts of any written work. It was not until the technology of the printing press was invented, that publishing information to share the message with the mass public became possible. According to Professor Barber, printing is a technology that makes it possible to create mass reproductions as well as preserve writing; therefore it allows us to preserve a form of speech that is beyond the normal range for one’s voice. As the use of the printing press spread, so did the creation of newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and books as ways to communicate through writing. Published writing has since flourished. With the advent of personal computer technology in the mid-1980s, desktop publishing was achievable by everyone allowing for the individual to produce their own publications. Then it was the advancement of technology in the 1990s when the internet and the next evolution of tools for publishing written work were available. With these new tools, what used to take months to produce, could now take as little as a few minutes to months, depending on if it was a tweet or a book that was going to be published. Even the most thoroughly formed or poorly conceived message can now be instantly shared with the world.

With so many different mediums available to choose from and before they even begin to write it, someone wanting to publish their written content has to make decisions about how they want their content presented. The author Marshall McLuhan said, “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and the print is the content of the telegraph.” So, do they want to tweet their message or do they want to blog about it? Do they submit an op-ed to their local newspaper, or publish their ebook? Whatever choice they make will affect how the message is perceived.

With regard to writing, each space the work is published in changes the way it is written as well as received by the audience. Generally speaking, the electronic space of a website, does not have restriction on the length or amount of written information it displays. However, if someone wanted to write a book, the content they chose to write about would have to have enough information, details, and length. Considerable amounts of time would have to be invested by not only by the author but the editor, the printer and those in charge of distribution of the book. A visual space could be in the format of an article in a magazine. Before writing that article for a magazine, one must know their audience so that the tone of the writing and imagery chosen can get their attention. It is also mandatory to get the word count down so that the article fits in the space it has been given.

For online writing, it is important to make sure that the written work is in a format that is easy for someone to scan to rapidly find the information they are looking for. Information should be content blocks with headings, subheads, and bullets. To help guide the reader. In many cases the writing can be produced quickly, knowing that changes can immediately be made if needed. If the general information is the same in all three spaces, the format and structure must change in accommodate each specific space.