Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

The past four months have been an interesting experience in web writing.  Coincidentally, I started writing web articles just a few weeks before the beginning of the semester and Writing for the Web, making many of the topics we studied and wrote about more than just academic interests–they were issues I had a genuine investment in.  Up until this point, my blogging was limited to fairly flavorless news posts and the occasional LiveJournal entry.  I feel like I’ve come a long way since then, but I definitely have just as far to go before I can make a living as a blogger.

Writing for the Web has driven home one point that I’ve considered for a long time, but was never fully forced to face: print media is in trouble.  Sure, newspapers may continue on for years or decades, but the web is becoming increasingly essential for any publication.  This is doubly true for gaming and other forms of media, where my primary interest lies–these fields are focused on the newest technology, and magazines and other paper-and-ink products simply can’t compete with the speed at which Internet news spreads.

While I still hope to be able to write for a publication after college, establishing myself as a blogger who knows how to address a web audience is absolutely critical.  I need to be able to cut it in both worlds, and that means developing a new set of skills particularly suited to each medium.  I feel like the biggest issue here is establishing a consistent, appealing blogthorial voice.  I’ll freely admit I’m still working on that one.

Blogs strike an unusual and far-too-often ungainly balance between the professional and the personal.  They’re continuing to expand past their infancy as simple online journals, but the difficulty still remains in knowing how to address an audience.  People like personal, but not too personal.  That’s just sloppy.  The key is sounding like you know what you’re talking about and seeming friendly — and at least modestly eloquent.

Of course, some of the greatest authors of print media have been successful precisely because their own authorial voices so perfectly combined these two elements.  Hunter S. Thompson, for example, can come across as both brilliant and conversational in a single sentence.  Mark Twain was as deftly witty as he was colloquial.  Writing a blog obviously pales in comparison to authoring a work like Huck Finn, but the similarities are there.

The pieces I’ve gathered for this portfolio represent the greatest expenditure of my time in Writing for the Web.  I’m proud of the hard work I put into each piece,  but I feel like the most important aspect of this portfolio is its variety.  The Internet demands that we become modern-day Renaissance Men, and my portfolio ranges from casual blog posts to scholarly writing and beyond the written word to other forms of interactive media.

I present this portfolio as a representation of where I am as a writer — my concerns, my interests, and my style.  But it’s also here to show my potential.  I’m not confined to one medium, and I feel this portfolio reflects that I will continue to improve my skills as a writer, designer, and beyond — wherever the web takes me.

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Rhetorical Analysis – A detailed look at the popular gaming blog Joystiq, discussing a variety of issues around the subject of web design. This rhetorical analysis covers the content of the site, the audience it’s trying to reach, the visual design, and more.

Scholarship Analysis – The objective of this scholarship analysis was to perform a critical analysis of a piece of scholarly writing. I wrote about the article “Plagiarism goes by a different name on the web” by Judy Muller, originally published in the magazine Nieman Reports. Muller examined the way secondary news sources on the web are changing the way we think about plagiarism. My scholarly analysis creates an argument about her position and the evidence she uses to support it, as well as the format of her article and the context in which it was published.

Wiki Project – What’s more Web 2.0 than collaborative writing? Our class wiki project focused on the subject of the web itself–more specifically, “Web 2.0 for Professional Use.” As a group, we created several pages about blogs, e-mail, and other forms of social media. I was responsible for formatting and writing a significant portion of the “Blogs and Blogging” section.

Remediation Project – To mesh our experience with old and new media, we took a previous sample of our own writing and adapted it for web. I took a short essay about the film Lone Star and modified it for the format of a blog.

Website Project - You’re looking at it!  While I had originally planned to design my own site in Dreamweaver and host it on my UGA space, I decided to take this project in a different direction.  I knew I would eventually (and likely sooner rather than later) want to redesign my site.  Instead of waiting for the inevitable, I chose to buy a domain and set up a more extensive and professional website.  I decided to go with a CMS, which makes it much easier to add content and keep up an integrated blog.  Since I already had experience with Wordpress, I decided to stick with it, and did some CSS modification to customize the theme.

Multimedia Project – For this project, our limit was, more or less, the great blue sky. We developed, wrote, and formatted a script, and then created a piece of multimedia. The medium was of our own choosing, and I decided to try my hand at creating a short animation in Flash. However, my animation furthers its webness by incorporating an interactive element–think of it as the net version of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, albeit in a considerably truncated fashion.  The title of my film is “Slightly Doleful.”

On Malwebolence – Few topics are as important or fascinating as trolling.  As more and more people begin to use the internet, the ranks of the anonymous continue to swell.  Malwebolence is an extremely well-written article, with content tapped straight from the souce — some of the most notorious trolls and griefers on the web.  As a web addict and blogger, the internet’s seedy underbelly attracts my attention and study.  It’s as interesting as it is frightening, and with my reading response for this article I did my best to sum up my own opinions on the issues Malwebolence examines.