It occurred to me a moment ago that I wasn’t entirely sure what “Remediation” meant. Or, rather, I wasn’t sure what it meant in the context of the assignment we were given. Using the worlds greatest resource, Google, I found the following definition :
Noun
- The action of remedying something, in particular of reversing or stopping environmental damage.
- The giving of remedial teaching or therapy.
I found this definition somewhat lacking, however, so I dug deeper. Dictionary.com told me the following :
Noun
- The correction of something bad or defective.
Well, that was more to my understanding. But what does that have to do with a paper about technology and writing? Is this, perhaps, a subtle suggestion that there is something wrong with the current state of writing as we know it? An interesting thought exercise, perhaps. But, alas, we have a paper to discuss.
For my remediation paper, I chose the topic of Twitter. Twitter has become a pretty regular part of my daily routine. I use it as a general communications channel for random chatter as well as a news source, research tool, and even a troubleshooting companion. I have discovered, over the years, that a properly cultivated followers list is invaluable. Follow too many people and your twitter stream becomes overloaded where you can’t keep up. Too few and you miss out on important content. It’s a constant balancing act.
My experience with Twitter led me to write about the skill set required by modern day users. I presented the change in news reporting from something passively consumed to what is, today, actively engaged. Consumers have become part of the news cycle in an active manner, both reporting and commenting on the news in real time. And I covered some of the struggles encountered with this process.
For the design portion of my piece, I opted to lay the paper out in the form of a newspaper. I found this to be an ironic way of presenting this work. The initial layout was relatively easy. I used Google to find a newspaper template and simply added my text. It only took a moment to realize the folly of my ways. Newspapers typically have more than one article.
I corrected this problem by including other papers I have written for this class. I found that the inclusion of additional papers caused the articles to exceed the limits of the first page. And so, I went in search of a second newspaper template for my piece. In the end, I settled on three pages for my newspaper layout.
The next hurdle was the layout itself. While I found it fairly straightfoward to add my content to the first page, I found that the layout on the second page was vastly different from the first. I first had to learn how to flow text into separate text boxes. After accomplishing this, I discovered that the number of columns was different than that of the first page. This led me down the path of text frame layouts, gutters, and inset spacing. Over the course of my design work, I would come back to these properties again and again.
After I had finalized the content of my remediation paper, I worked on the final layout. I had to expand to three pages and make considerable changes to the layout of the templates I had started with. To my horror, I had almost one third of a page to fill after layout out all of the stories. I re-worked the layout again, playing a bit with font sizes and spacing and was able to close the gap considerably. The addition of a related comic to the final page was enough to fill in the empty space and complete the design.
Learning InDesign was interesting, but daunting. There appears to be a considerable amount of power in that program and it will take someone significantly better at design than me to unleash it. My strengths lie elsewhere and I’m content with knowing that.