Writing and Editing on the Web, Mobile and Social

Writing and Editing on the Web, Mobile and Social

It’s getting tougher to stand out. As our audiences adopt new media and technologies at an accelerating rate, we writers and editors have to adapt — and fast. This course is about understanding how readers’ behaviour is changing and maximising the impact of the copy we create or edit.

This course is for any writer or editor who wants to understand how to create effective copy for websites, mobile apps and social media. It will suit both existing writers and editors who are coming to grips with new technologies and those who already work in new media but want to sharpen their skills.

Course Outline

Today’s media landscape and what it means for the writer and editor
An overview of how our audiences are accessing information and how that continues to change. How this affects our approach to writing or editing individual pieces.

Measuring response to our writing and setting goals
Understanding what can be measured and what those metrics mean. Setting aims for your publication overall and for individual pieces of writing.

Structure: editing or self-editing to deal with the attention-span prob- lem, the credibility problem and the Facebook problem
The same piece of writing looks different depending on how our audience is accessing it. Structuring a piece becomes a huge challenge. We’ll learn some simple tricks and some more sophisticated techniques to overcome the problems online media throws at us.

Using personas to understand the audience and to make a piece of writing feel more personal
Increasingly, audiences expect the reading experience to be personal and tailored just for them. Working out who your audience is and how can best write for them gives you a massive head-start.

What to do about readers who skim (all of them)
Understanding how readers arrive at your material and what they do to process the information can help you create more user-friendly copy. This can see page view times go up and bounce and exit rates go down.

Optimising your writing for search
We’ll learn the basics of search engine optimisation (SEO) and how to apply it in day-to-day writing and editing.

Making a piece of writing more engaging
If it is simply read and forgotten, our writing is missing its potential. We’ll look at ways of engaging the reader so they comment or share or even get more involved with our aims.

Headlines and other page furniture — the curiosity gap
The things most likely to be read also have the biggest impact in achieving our aims. Headlines must be easy to understand, good for SEO and they must stimulate social sharing.

Rewriting the rules on editorial production
The people who create the most engaging and entertaining online writing
are trying out new and imaginative ways of producing material. Could we be achieving more if we went about the whole process of writing and editing in a different way?