Lecture Three - Text

This week when I arrived at the lecture theatre I was told that our topic for the next fifty minutes was to be Text. In my eyes it is pretty obvious what text was however I was already sitting down so escaping was no choice. We were however all fortunate enough to have a guest lecturer, Skye Doherty. I have never heard of Skye so I decided to do some background research of her career via her website (http://skyedoherty.com) which states that she is "an editor, digital producer and media consultant with more than 10 years’ journalism experience. She has worked for media groups in Australia, South-east Asia and the UK, including the Financial Times, where she was an interactive producer. She is currently an industry consultant at the University of Queensland and is a member of AIMIA and the National Union of Journalists." I now feel as though the lecture was not as pointless as once thought seeming we were to have the subject of text taught to us by someone so experienced and who understands the topic as much as Skye.

Skye Doherty

The main focus was not exactly what text was, anyone could say that text is just words on a page, but how one uses those words and structure and manipulate it as a person, or in this case as a journalist. There is a lot of skill required to author something that can effect people and make them understand the point they are trying to convey. We started with the basics of what text was and Skye seemed to sum up text in the clearest way, describing it as fast, flexible and portable. That is exactly what text is in my eyes. We were also re-introduced, or for some introduced, to the inverted triangle which is basically the structure to majority of new articles. the triangle starts with the most important things such as who, what, when, where, why and how and then weans down to the less important details.

Inverted Triangle 

This lecture was defiantly intriguing, I wish we could have listened to Skye talk more about her career and life experiences but unfortunately a fifty minute lecture is never enough time for that and the topic of text would defiantly stray.