Cesar Ruiz (ENGL 3360)

This week in class, we learned about SEO and its vitality in incorporating it into our writing online. According to this week’s reading on Mox.com , “ SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.”It’s the practice of increasing both the quality and quantity of website traffic, as well as exposure to your brand, through non-paid (also known as "organic") search engine results.” As a writer, it is essential to consider SEO when composing text as it affects the amount of traffic the website we post gets. We can improve the searchability of our content is to using keywords associated with the topic, updating information as much as possible, writing about the topic in-depth, and providing access to the content through different media forms.  SEO is thoroughly used throughout our search results. One example of my experience with it is when I searched for information regarding Queen Elizabeth II. After typing her name in the search bar and pressing enter, a wide array of articles reg...

  In Week 5's reading, Weapons of Math Destruction, by Cathy O'Neill, O'Neill discusses a phenomenon that most people have mixed opinions on---customized search results. At a glance, customized search results seem like a genius and all-around-positive feature for all Internet users to benefit from, but Cathy O'Neill pushes back on this notion by discussing how search engines take advantage of individuals by allowing companies to use personal data and show them things they're in desperate need of. She gives an example of for-profit universities like the University of Phoenix taking advantage of low-income students’ desire for education to grant them a degree with low respectability (O’Neill 69). Like the one above, O'Neill's examples highlight the negative effects that customized content can have on people. While it may seem like a beneficial and uber-efficient process at first, the decisions we make based on it can negatively affect our livelihoods.  In Mon...

In this week's class lectures, we talked about the concept of algorithms, and I couldn't help but think just how influential they are in how we use them. Similar to formulas in math questions, algorithms are a set of rules that take in available information and convert it to yield a particular goal. One primary way algorithms are placed into everyday life is through the internet, specifically within search browsers, e-commerce websites, and social media pages.  During Wednesday's Class, we tested our search engine's algorithms by searching three terms on different people's computers. We found that the results that appear are tailored to fit an individual's interests. Many characteristics are considered when algorithms measure consumers' interests, such as previous search history and geographic location. Although the concept of algorithms may seem creepy and invasive initially, they've helped make our lives easier by reducing options to only our most desi...

 This week in class, we discussed the importance of templates in online writing. From a writer's point of view, templates are used to ease the workload of creating a new reading format by using pre-existing ones that have been proven to work. By having universal formats across an entire writing genre like blogs, readers have an easier time navigating through the content due to its familiarity.  Furthermore, as these templates have been proven to work among the general population, writers continue to reuse them to effectively spread their message to as many people as possible. In our course textbook Update Culture , John Gallagher, the author, describes templates as “an empty vessel for communicating messages” (35). Unlike Word documents, where content is made to create a final product by an individual person, IPI templates were created to take messages from different individuals and have them interact with one another.  Examples of effective IPI templates are those used b...

This week's content in terms of our course's reading and the lecture was the difference between writing and content and just how they've overlapped in the last few years. In “When Writing Becomes Content,” Lisa Dush, the author of the article, discusses ways in which we’ve had to adjust how we write to keep our writing relevant and accessible to the modern-day user. The article’s purpose is summarized on page 14, when Dunst states, “No Matter how well a post is crafted as writing, it is unlikely to meet its rhetorical aims if it is not also prepared as computable content.” By way of explanation, even if a body of writing is excellent, there is no point in sharing it with others online if it does not meet the needs and demands of the digital world. I see the idea of effective online writing as content in news articles I read on Apple News every morning. Although articles typically contain tons of information, it’s short and attention-grabbing titles that catch my attention...