Turco 1 John Turco Professor Eakman ENGW 1302-18 3 May 2016
Reflection Writing in a digital media business is memo after memo. I found writing in my discipline was similar to that of composing a tweet or Facebook status. Over the course of the semester, I found that writing in the digital media discipline bothered me a great deal. I am an active user of social media but I am not outrageously tweeting and using social media apps every waking hour of the day. With that being said, over the course of this semester I learned and adapted to what my ideal image and use of social media is. In the early weeks of this semester I took over the St. Edward’s Club Lacrosse team’s Twitter account. The account had been silent for almost two years and I thought it was a perfect opportunity for me to get a taste of writing in the digital media environment. I became a better and more experienced writer in my discipline after taking over the team twitter account. The rejuvenation of the St. Edward’s Club Lacrosse Twitter account was extremely gratifying because it was me behind all of the comical and important tweets. Lacrosse means a lot to me, therefore I took great pride in representing the team on a social media platform. Prior to claiming the team account, I had my own Twitter account for several years, so I spoke the Twitter language. Through my experiences with my own account I learned that comedy is always a go-to for positive attention. I filtered through tweets as if it were research, testing what our followers liked and did not like. Memes and comical tweets proved to be the most popular tweets but our statistical and information tweets made some noise as well. I learned that formality is not completely ineffective on Twitter, but it is most definitely frowned upon. The genre of writing that Twitter consists of is short, memo-type writing purposed to maintain a status in subcategories of media. In other words, Twitter is used as a news source for those who don’t read newspapers or are not regular television watchers.
I have become a more experienced writer in the digital media discipline because of the adaptations I have made to the St. Edwards Club Lacrosse Twitter account. Based on my early tweets, it was clear that the account was not updated to the current writing trends in Twitter’s genre. I had to improve the follower base of the account and I had to follow some popular accounts in order to further modernize the team account. I started following every St. Edward’s student I found on Twitter and began to tweet about current events on campus. Such events did not only include the lacrosse team’s agenda, I tried to bring awareness to other sports teams, clubs, and factuality based events to catch the eye of the St. Edward’s student and factuality bodies. It took several weeks to receive feedback from the St. Edward’s community but eventually the account began to see great results. Students and other accounts started to give great feedback, saying that our account was putting St. Edward’s on the map again. Taking over the St. Edward’s Club Lacrosse Twitter account allowed me to become a better writer in several different aspects of literature. The clarification of what kind of writings are accepted and unaccepted on social media platforms proved as a great example as to what is customary to other genres of writing such as research papers, memos, and other academic writings. Writing, like everything else in world, must be written according to what it is set out to prove. As we said in class many times, a Honda Civic was made to be a first car, a set of wheels to get you from point A to point B. Honda Civics were not made to be luxury cars for the rich and that is absolutely acceptable because it did what it was made to do. The same concept proves to be true in writing. A tweet is not made in order to hand in as a paper or be studied closely. Tweets are written to inform in the shortest way possible. A research paper is written for academic reasons and such papers prove to hold their own purpose in class. The same concept applies for all products, foods, television shows, to the genre or field it was meant for. Throughout this semester, the different kinds of writing genres became more and more clear to me in my discipline.