“What do you want to be when you grow up?” It seems that question has been asked since student’s were in elementary school. It is interesting how that progresses everyone as a child says they want to be an astronaut, pilot, firefighter, etc. all jobs that sound awesome to a child or even an adult. As an adult that question becomes terrifying as it is essentially asking how will you pay for your house, car, marriage, children, etc. I’m banking on the fact I freelance write for quite a few companies and am proficient in SEO, data entry, and technical writing and got my foot in the door early. I have asked for full time positions with a lot of companies but it is cheaper for them to out source their writing to free lancers and that most full time jobs require a college degree. I have lucked out that I make a decent living free lance writing but I would love to get a full time position for data entry or SEO writing. I also have the option of starting an SEO company and I have a few friends who are proficient at SEO writing it would be an executive decision for us to decide to stake the capital and risk going into business for ourselves. I have had a lot of up and downs in my professional writing experience and I would like for it to continue in an upward path. I enjoy writing as it beats hourly jobs by a land slide. Knowing that once you finish the project there is a check in the mail is always a rewarding experience. I would love to get on a salary position to professionally write as I am a highly goal oriented person and writing jobs are always set on a deadline with a specific goal.
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All posts for the month November, 2012
Rhetorical Analysis: The Vitruvian Man is an image created by Leonardo Da Vinci to demonstrate the perfect measurements and alignments of the human body. His audience was scholars and intellectuals to demonstrate how science had worked to make an organism that was optimally suited for survival by being properly aligned. The image has been circulated for centuries and was even put on the side of satellites for if an alien race found said image they would have an idea of what we looked liked. The image is prized as a piece of Da Vinci’s intelligence in understanding how the human body is theoretically perfectly formed.
Design Analysis: Alignment is one of the most important but most overlooked facts in web design. Da Vinci mastered the art of alignment centuries ago and recognized that alignment does not only appear in design but in real life. The possible reason for why alignment is so important for web design is possibly because alignment is seen everywhere. People like what is familiar the Vitruvian Man may not be an advertisement but it reflects exactly what advertisements aim for. They aim to give you the same thing you have seen a million times before to make you feel comfortable than package their product in a slightly different way to convince consumers they need their product. Alignment is generally overlooked because it is simple to perform but it is important that items are aligned properly to draw the viewer’s attention to the right area. Imagine how the image would fail if the arms were where the legs were and vice versa the alignment would be wrong and you would no longer recognize the human body. The key to alignment is recognizing important information as it is aligned to where the viewer will look.
Rhetorical Analysis: The above image is the iconic intro to all James Bond films. The image is plastered in every action movie fans mind so they know they are about to see the action/adventure that is James Bond. This iconic image has been used for decades and the reason this image has a strong stickiness factor is it’s high contrast which makes it easy rememberable. The audience for this image is wide reaching as people of all ages appreciate a great action film but it can be presumed they are targeting 18-25 year old males who will be drawn in by sex and violence. The purpose for the image is simple every action movie that is part of a series has one and James Bond would be lost without one. There are people who will talk for days about how great the title sequence is. Also, James Bond is a British film in which they show the credits before the film hence they need to keep the audience entertained with unique title sequences.
Design Analysis: The image contains a high level of contrast as it forces the audience to look at the main character James Bond. He is the only clear figure in contrast to the blank space and the barrel of a scope which is shown in contrasting black and white. The iconic red filling in the screen starts from the top making your attention slowly go down the entire image but at no point does Bond move from the center. By making Bond the only clear figure the viewers eye is immediately drawn to him and the negative space in the inner circle only promotes that this picture is all about him. The winding colors on the scope also makes it hard to focus on the outer image drawing even more attention to Bond. Also, by having nothing else in the image besides Bond there is no confusion as to what should be focused on. The key to using contrast effectively is to make sure the viewers eye is drawn to the point you are contrasting against which the Bond image successfully does. Finally, by using the bright white and the dark black with a splash of crimson red the image is easy to process making it easily recognizable.
There were pros and cons to how I contributed to the wiki. Beyond what I was required to type for class I was put in charge of the formatting and editing. I am familiar with digital writing but building a wiki was a new concept for me. I picked it up quickly but I feel this wiki builder was not user friendly. I say this because a lot of the advanced design options I would have liked to explore were simply not offered. With this said it become painful going through all the pages trying to make them look as familiar to the other pages as possible. Since everyone was providing different content and posting it in a different way it became a tedious task. I gained an appreciation for the Wikipedia community as Wikipedia is highly standardized and everything is formatted relatively the same. I had trouble formatting and editing under a hundred pages I cannot imagine trying to fix Wikipedia with its hundred million plus pages.
The thing I am most proud of about the wiki is the fact we finished it. Most of us have never been involved in an office environment in which a large group of people need to collaborate to finish a project. From personal experience I have seen project groups waste a week or two deciding on what font and format to use in technical writing. Hence, the fact we even managed to pull this together is impressive as I have little experience with building a wiki which I believe I am not the only one unfamiliar with building a wiki. I was put in charge of making the wiki look presentable in terms of formatting and editing. Finishing on time is what I was most proud of again as I took on the task because I like the presentation side of digital writing. I am a firm believer that the presentation is equally if not more important than the content. I started to struggle when I realized the content being posted did not correlate to other pages. Wikipedia has a set model for people to follow we had a loose model which made figuring out an effective format difficult. Also, as a lot of online communities type like they are online the editing process requires a lot of work as rereading everything for spelling and grammar became equally tedious. I was proud not to offend anyone by moving content, fixing grammar, or correcting spelling. I think we did a great job on time management once again considering no one had built a wiki before. With more time I feel we could have made our jobs easier and clearer but as far as expanding out I don’t think much more content would have been added. In the age of free information it is easy to generate content it is making that content presentable and accessible that the problem lays. Not to be redundant the problem I encountered was trying to get fancy and use advance options that the wiki builder did not offer. The problem was easy to overcome as I just had to accept these limitations and make it work. I learned what I already knew I do not like collaborative writing. Not because I do not trust others to write but because I feel guilty about correcting others or taking a leadership role. I believe a lot of people have great ideas or could contribute more but choose not to because they fear the backlash of the group. I learned more that collaborative writing can be successful but it is difficult without a set structure to guide the collaborative process. The course outcomes are supposed to teach us about digital writing which even if our “wiki” failed it still does contain a decent chunk of information on digital writing. Also maybe we can learn more from our failures than our successes in this case we learned that online communities work harder than we anticipated showing that digital writing is a skill we need to learn. Digital writing is often overlooked as people now consider Facebook and Twitter digital writing. This project demonstrated there is a lot of merit to people who digital write and contribute to digital writing. The last part is not in the course outcomes but what I feel any course should teach which is how to apply these skills to getting a job. I have done a little technical writing in my life and deciding how to organize and summarize the information takes huge collaborative efforts and more emails than anyone cares to read. I learned maybe a wiki would be the best way to collaborate on these technical writing projects. Since, then we are all connected and can see what everyone is working on. The wiki did not “fail” in my opinion but rather showed us there is a lot we can take away from this class.
https://sites.google.com/site/odu307fall2012/system/app/pages/sitemap/hierarchy
From here I edited most of the pages and formatted them to be understandable and organized. I will admit getting acquainted with their software took a little longer than I anticipated but it is still easily usable.