refLECTURE III: "All Things Textual"

Text. It's more than just words. It's all about the visual. (Maybe not as much as a picture, but I'll discuss that next time). And our guest speaker, Skye Doherty (check out her bio here), knows all about it.

But what is text? A simpler question might be what isn't text. It's the story content, the headlines, the bylines, the captions, the quotes, the break-out boxes, the links... It's pretty much everything. It has the ability to be fast, flexible, controllable, portable, and most importantly, particularly in terms of new media, it's searchable.  And it's ability to dominate the online realm is only helped by more text: links, URLs, domains, metadata, excerpts, and tags. Our beloved Google only searches keywords; not 'keypictures', not 'keysounds'.

But there are several key differences in the use of text, depending on the media platform. Your traditional newspaper is read from top left, down to the bottom right of the page. Pretty straight forward.   It's organised into several distinct sections; news (often separate national and world news), business, entertainment, sport, etc; so you know what you're getting. This allows for a greater creative license, especially regarding headlines. Reading news online, however, often looks a bit like this, thanks to the wonders of hypertext:

Not nearly as straight forward. Because depending on the article you first read, your offered other similar ones, what other's are reading, and the current top stories. Online, more than in print, headlines have to draw reader attention. But they also have to be search friendly. This leaves any metaphorical, or play on words headlines for print.

Check out the all differences for yourself:

Though there are similarities. Most news is written according to the same formula regardless of platform. The Inverted Pyramid (which is actually just a triangle) is the holy template of news. I have an image below (taken from here) that will explain it to you better than I can.

The reason why it's structured like this is so when it comes to setting the layout, particularly with print where there's obvious space constraints, a story can be edited easily and without losing any important details.

But if you're not worried about space, then there's another, entitled 'The Whale' (don't ask me why). Generally used for feature writing, or longer news stories, it uses a hook, the catchiest part to lure in readers. Keeps the context and details concise, before leading into the story development. Then bam, hits the climax of the story. And it's all over.

Pictures verses text. (Ding, ding) When it comes to news, pictures come second. They are there to accompany and compliment the text, and to help the readers' understanding. Text must be able to stand alone. After all, it's the headline that ultimately draws reader attention, not the picture. Sure a picture might say a thousand words, but so does a thousand words.

I've been talking about news, but text is more than that. It's emails, blogs, Tweets, Facebook updates, comments, and forums. Shorter. Concise. Often making use of other forms of text (links to URLs, and hash tags), these have become important features in journalism. And in the lecture, Skye Doherty also spoke of online games as form of journalism. I'm still playing researching. I'll get back to you on that.


It's only suiting that I mention a man who has sparked my enthusiasm and love for words, writing and all things language. And leave you with his wise words on language, 'word snobs', and all things textual.