TXT IT XOXO

The lecture last week focussed primarily on text, words, and more text. We were lucky enough to have a lovely (if wordy [HA. HA.]) lady called Skye Doherty in to lecture us this time, telling us all about the wonders and versatility of text.

NOT THAT SORT OF TEXT.  Pfft, who even uses a fliptop anymore?
Also, there is no signal in my basement. No help is coming.

But what is text? What is one of the key features of text?

Text is:

·      Fast

·      Flexible

·      Offers Complete Control Over the Content

·      Portable

·      Searchable

·      Dominates Online

Pretty basic right? As Skye told us, text is in everything. We can’t escape it. Learning to create and manipulate language (text) will be an incredibly important part of our education.

But where do we find text? If we’re just talking about in a news context, we find text in the:

·      Story Content

·      Headlines

·      Standfirst (the little paragraph at the beginning of a story that tells you everything)

·      Captions

·      Pull Quotes

·      Break-out Boxes

As usual, every lecture needs at least one futuristic buzz word, and this week the hyper/meta/warp drive/super-techno future word was:

Hypertext

SET ENGINES TO HYPERTEXT.
But sir! That phrase won't even be invented until long after this episode has aired.
JUST DO IT DAMN IT. THERE"S SOME HOT GREEN BABES I NEED TO SEE.

Hyper text from what I understood was those little links you get at the top and sides and bottom of an online news story, that lead you to different stories. Somehow they always end up at the stories about babies found in dumpsters outside hospitals in China. That one time man. As Skye said, they can lead you somewhere completely off topic.

But back to the present day text.

Skye next chose to scare us by telling myself and the cohort that, once we’ve finally written our story, not only will we have to come up with a headline, but we may have to come up with a different headline for the same story multiple times. Now, I’m fine with writing a story, maybe even coming up with one title, but three?! The explanation for this is that there are different values need in a headline depending on whether you’re writing online content or offline content – online headlines need to tell the story in a line, print newspaper has the option to be clever and play around.

You remember how earlier I said “text… in a news context is…”? It’s was only about three paragraphs ago? Well, text is also…

·      Emails

·      Blogs

·      Tweets, etc

Text is also, also

·      Metadata

·      Excerpts

·      Tags

As always, the most important facts to incorporate into your text early on are the who, what, when, where, why and how.