Factual Writing Evaluation

Sources of information:

Throughout the production of my work, I constantly asked peers what they prefer & what the would believe to look better. This al-

lowed me to critically assess the work I had done. For example, below, you can see two different images used in the same part of the Company Magazine layout I made. I couldn't decide my-

self which photograph looked better overall & which I should continue working on. My three peers all said that they preferred the first image on the left as ‘you can see more of her face’ & ‘because the sky is basically white, it allows the writing to stand out, compared to the other one’. My tutor would also provide a good source of information. Comments such as ‘be creative with the fanzine & show off different skills’. This got me thinking & I included hand drawn doodles within the images, as I believed this really made the fanzine more personal. I also included in the fanzine the opinion-ated essay I wrote about how Grace has become ‘lazy’ with her uploads. This was edited from a first draft that was less opinionated on the subject & gave a balanced argument. This came from the recommendation of my Tutor. This allowed me to really sound like a fan and work really well in a fanzine. You could even say that looking at Company Magazine before I started producing my own Company Magazine layout was a source of information for both the copy & the layout. I often referred back to this when I was writing my article. The most useful source of information was ask-ing peers there opinions on my work, as I know they would give me an honest opinion & they are also going through same thing as me, so they could also benefit from my own opinion.

Your time management:

I was very careful with the time I gave myself to produce the work. Usually we have different lengths of time to produce certain pieces of work. For example, to produce our Tabloid article we had around 3/4 hours to write this & have it redrafted overall. Some tasks would be shorter than this & others longer. If I have not completed the piece of work in class deadline, I will work on it outside of class until it needs to be uploaded to blogger. I also have a folder on my desktop that is

just my Factual Writing work, which allows easy access to the work. Time man-agement & organisation is very important to have whilst you're working on a project that includes a lot of aspects. Otherwise, you can become very over-whelmed & this can hinder your talents, making you not produce the kind of work you would usually make if you were organised & keeping to a timed schedule. In some other projects e.g. Recipe Cards, we were given a time management sheet to fill in so we knew how long we were spending on each section. We did not have to do this for this task, although I knew how I would have to work so that I was efficient in what I was doing. Another way I used my time wisely was having the ability to search for certain facts within my work using the find… tool on Pages. This allowed me to save time from searching through pages of research that I had done at the beginning of the project. Words like Camp Takota & Graces Guide are attached to facts I used within all of my pieces of work.

Reviewing work in progress:

With reviewing my work whilst producing it, I succeeded because I had my Tutor look at my first, second & sometimes third drafts of my work e.g. interview questions that needed to be edited, then written around & then checked over again. Something I did often was produce multiple versions of my work with different variations that will allow me to see how I can change and profess my work to its finished state. For example I reviewed my first magazine layout & found that it would fit in better with Company Magazine, rather than Cosmopolitan Magazine. This was also based on a comment a peer made when I asked if she felt it would work in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Below, you can see

where I began with the layout & where I ended up. I also first produced a two page spread for Company & then went onto produce a eight page spread as if she was on the cover of the maga-zine. One page spread also turned into two page spread the more I experimented with different

versions of the same elements involved. As I progressed, I found that my work would keep on get-ting stronger & stronger up until a point where I was happy with my work. It is very important to sit back & review the progress you are making & if what you are doing is working, which I believe I did very well, which has allowed me to produce high quality work.

Technical competencies:

When producing this work, I continued to use Photoshop. Although I tried using InDesign, I decided to use photoshop as a lot of my articles used a lot of graphics & images. I had the ability to change these elements easier as well. I haven't used InDesign very often, because if this, I was working

slower than usual. This affected my time management. The combination of the above statements led me to using Photoshop. I used the rulers on Photoshop to aline each element perfectly. As you can see from the two screenshots below, the amount of guides I used depended on the amount of elements that would feature in the work. Another way I made sure the elements were in the write place, was by creating templates with key parts that were on most pages e.g. page number, which is found on both Magazine & Fanzine. With the fanzine, I used the magic wand tool to select the different doodles & drawing to work alongside the tweets of Grace’s. Another element I used this with was to produce the YouTube logo for ‘You’ magazine. The Red scribble was actually a from a red pen & I used the same tool as the doodles to make it.

I continually used high quality images that were actually taken for Grace’s books Graces Guide, but they did not make the cut. This allowed the images to appear to be exclusive. One way I pro-duced high quality work by constantly referring back to the Company Magazine I had beside me. Although I had to follow a strict look to the Company Magazine, I got to choose certain elements like the images used, which part of the text would be highlighted & the title of each section. The text was also my work, which really allowed me to show some of my own skills. Whilst this piece of work allowed to show my technical skills on Photoshop, the Fanzine allowed me to explore my cre-ative abilities.

Creative abilities:

I wanted my Fanzine to feature personal elements within it. As a creative decision, I decided to in-clude doodles that I made myself. I feel like these personal elements really helped separate the Company Magazine Article to the Fanzine. As the Fanzine is made by the fans, for the fans, these elements really gave the cover & two pages of work something personal. The drawings that went alongside the tweets is a personal favourite element I included as it took an element from online & turned it into something printed. If I had just included the tweet, the piece would not of drawn the same attention. The ability to be opinionated in the fan essay allowed me to be creative in my writ-ing, which is something that isn’t allowed often within the other pieces like the press release, Com-pany Magazine & Tabloid article. I was also creative during the obituary piece as I had to make up

a past for Grace that had not happened yet. This included coming up with facts to fill out the rest of her career e.g. ‘Who could forget her role in the 2030 film Girls, alongside friend Mamrie Hart’. I also had to provide a realistic way she died, which I ended up saying the pressure of fame became to much & she turned to alcohol, which then led to liver failure, which is what she died from.

To what extent have your intentions been realised?

During this piece of work, I produced a lot of final pieces. The first being the fan interview I did, which ended up being used for my Company Magazine 8 page, 1 page & 2 page spread (I used the same piece of work for each piece). The writing that I did allowed me to produce this many different variations of the same work, as it was versatile in the way it was written. When writing this piece of work, I was constantly referring back to the articles in Company & Cosmopolitan magazine, as they both have a similar way of writing. I also

used my fanzine article ‘Why The Move Didn’t Work’, as this was written from a fan’s strong opinion. For this reason, the essay would work well in there. Within this, I really wanted to use some design tools, so I produced a #SocialGrace section, where you could find her latest Instagram pictures & her best tweets from that week, which I produced my own doodles to go alongside the tweets, which added a personal design touch. Another piece of writing that I didn’t produce a piece of layout work for was a piece for a Tabloid newspaper. this piece of work was difficult to write as I had dumb down a lot of the words I was using & the amount of punctuation within the work. Grace really appear in tabloid newspapers as her work is usually overlooked by new media, especially in the UK (she has appeared in The New York Times with a full two page article). After redrafts, I eventu-ally got the work where I wanted it to be, after looking at other pieces of tabloid ‘journal-ism’. Another piece of writing that, again, didn't get it’s own layout work was the obituary. Although this was a slightly morbid piece of work to write, I believe it allowed you to pro-duce a well-informed & respected piece of factual writing that could be used within a piece of journalism. I was slightly harsh in my first draft of this work as I had to make up that Grace had died from alcohol addiction. For this reason, I had to tone down my piece to make it slightly more respectful, talking about her career & how she tried to fight liver dis-ease once she quit alcohol. The final piece of factual writing was a press release for Grace

Helbig, that would allow journalists to write about Grace’s book with minimal research needed to be done. This piece in particular showed the amount of facts & figures I found during preproduction research, which allowed me to work faster. I put quotes within the work from other well-established magazines, so that whoever the press release was given to, would understand that Grace has been talked about before & is relevant & deserved to be talked about in well-established mediums. Overall, I am happy with the final pieces I have produced as they are of a high standard & would not look out of place within there targeted medium.

Appropriateness of your work for the audience:

I believe each piece of work I produced was very appropriate as I throughout production would look at existing products to see how they were writing. This was important for writing for a Tabloid newspaper, as there is a specific socioeconomic audience that would read the piece I was writing (CDE1). For this reason, like stated above, I had to dumb down my initial writing to compensate for the audience sot hat it was appropriate for the platform. Layout-wise, it was important to produce a layout that fits in very well with the existing products. For the production of the Company Magazine articles, in particular the 8 page spread, I had the Zoella (another female YouTuber) article in front of me the whole time so I could replicate a layout that was appropriate for the audience of the mag-azine & the magazine itself. All of the pieces of writing I had to produce were specific to different

audiences. The fan article & layout was the easiest piece to write as I was writing it from a fans perspective & I am a fan myself. It was also the most creative I could be as it was all my won work for a fanzine, which you can see within the design & the writing as I finished the article with ‘You’re delusional’ & featured a graphic I made myself.

Content, the style and the skills you have used:

In the article I did for Company Magazine, the content was fan & fact driven, as it’s tool to promote Grace on a different medium. Although we assume that the audience know who Grace is, it’s im-portant to talk about her new book & the other projects Grace has done. The style of this work was

very simple but effective for the target audience as it’s very stylish & modern. The MoonFlower font used was very similar to the one used in the actual magazine which really allowed me to produce a high quality, industry standard piece of work. The content & style for the fanzine allowed me to pro-duce my own design & work. I wanted to include a string sense of fan involvement, thats why I in-cluded a fan essay I had written & the drawings that came from ideas from Grace’s Tweets. This constant between digital & hand-drawn contrasted & worked well together to produce a unique section within the fanzine. I hadn’t had a chance to include actual physical drawings within my work for a long time, so it was nice to use these skills. Although the technical skill behind drawing a few doodles may not seem a lot, but the idea to use them is a skill. In all of the written work e.g. obitu-ary, press release & the tabloid article, I used my writing skills to there full potential, which hasn’t been seen a lot within the other units we have done. Although I used the same information, content wise, for each piece of work. For the Tabloid article I used a paparazzi photograph instead of a Photoshoot photograph as it is a typical convention of tabloid newspapers. Whereas, with the Company Magazine, I knew I wanted to use natural, high quality photographs from the same pho-toshoot for consistency, that had not been included in a publication before. The content changed depending on what the style of writing was required for each individual task, which is a good skill to have. For the fanzine, the photographs I used was one from the same photograph I used in the company magazine. I used this photograph as the red worked well with the logo I had produced & the primary colour YouTube

uses (tother than white & black) is red. The rest were from Instagram as that was a segment for the magazine. The Instagram photos made the piece feel more intimate, which works well with a fanzine publication.

How your skills have developed:

Before the unit, I had not really thought about how much work went into writing for different audi-ence. I have now gained the skills that will allow me to produce copy now that is specific to differ-

ent audiences, which is an important skill to have if I am producing work that needed au-dience specific copy (which is most pieces of work). I have also, again, improved my skills

on Photoshop. My skills on Photoshop improve from each project to the next. I used the tool quick selection tool often e.g. to put the doodles on the tweets & to produce the You Magazine YouTube logo. Another skill that also improves from each project from the next is my ability to produce high quality, industry standard work. Looking at my first piece of Photoshop unit work (left) to the most recent, you can see significant improvement.

Areas for improvement:

Like stated in previous paragraphs, my skills in Photoshop improve the more I use it, so a constant area in improvement for me is Photoshop. This will allow me to continue to improve & produce higher quality work in the future. One aspect that could be improved on is the way I redraft. I re-drafted & produced a lot of variations within my design for the Company Magazine at first because I initially produced a magazine article for Cosmopolitan magazine. If I had possibly researched my magazines better, although I had given good reason as to why I used Cosmopolitan, I would not of had to of produced so many redrafts of my work. I feel like I could of done something with the In-stagram pictures, by making little comments that would make that section a little more interesting & also separate it from the above twitter section of the fanzine. Other than that, I feel like the amount of redrafts I did allowed me to be happy with the results & which allowed me to feel like I had im-proved enough. I still need to learn how to use InDesign properly so that I could of used this pro-gram instead & it may of made me produce a different kind of piece of work & it would also allow me to have different options of programs to use in future projects.

Comparing my work to existing products:

My work can easily be compared to existing products that are out there. During the pre-production work I had to look at existing products beforehand so that I knew what kind of style I would be writ-ing in. For example, with the tabloid article I had to write, I looked at various articles that were writ-ten for the celebrity section of these newspapers e.g. 3AM in the Daily Mirror. They write gossip columns for a C2DE audience. These articles typically are less formal & add drama to a situation by using adjectives & words that add hype to a situation e.g. in the headline below you can see that they put the word ‘refuses’ in all caps to draw attention to the headline and the word refuses is a strong word in itself so that has been used to fuel the drama. They also use the word ‘rescue’ & ‘mysterious’ in the title which makes you want to read on about what these are about. In my own work I used sentences in my own work like ‘This kind of channel change is never done in the YouTube world.’ & ‘Two million subscribers is a lot to lose’ to add drama and speculation, which is very typical of this kind of tabloid work. I also had dumb down a lot of what I was saying to fit into the style that they target towards in C2DE articles like I changed the word large to big because it’s a much shorter and simpler word. I have to say though that you usually would not see someone

like Grace Helbig being written about in a tabloid magazine, so it was difficult to write at times due to this. There were no sites I could find myself that write actual gossip articles on YouTubers, so I had to read the style of other tabloid gossip articles first.

When I was creating my layouts for Company magazine, I followed the design of the 8 page spread, with simple changes that would make it my own work. I looked at the Zoella article that was written about her. I looked at this in particular because she is also a YouTuber herself. The photographs I had to find a set of images of Helbig that were from the same photoshoot and fit in with the look of the magazine. You could tell that the Zoella ones were all taken on the same day, so I needed mine to look like this to & I believe I achieved this.

I had to write a press release for Grace as well. For this research, I looked at the existing press re-lease for Helbig that is included in the About the Author section in her book ‘Grace Helbig is a co-median, actress, and YouTube personality. She previously hosted DailyGrace on My Damn Chan-nel, before leaving in January 2014 to create her own YouTube channel, it'sGrace which has more than 1.7 million subscribers and 150 million views. Helbig is the executive producer and star of the feature film Camp Takota. She is the winner of the People's Choice Webby Award for Best First Person Format and the Streamy Award for Personality of the Year and Best First-Person Series. Helbig has been named one of Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business, Forbes' 30 under 30, Time magazine's 140 Best Twitter feeds, and BuzzFeed's 11 Awesome Up-and-Coming Funny Ladies You Should Know’. This gave me the inspiration of what I need to include in my press release. Within mine I mentioned her YouTube channel, It’sGrace & how she moved chan-nels, her movie Camp Takota & awards she has won. These are all mentioned within the quote above. I went more in-depth with one chapter which describes what the book is about, which is a useful aspect to this press release because it will be sent out to journalists to write about this project of Helbig’s. It was important to include quotes from other people because this can show

that she has been written about before and she is worth being written about again. The quotes I in-cluded were from fellow YouTuber Tyler Oakley, Variety magazine & LA Weekly, which are all big companies in the USA.

I also had to write an obituary, which was itself a difficult task to write because Helbig isn’t actually dead so I had to make up a past & reason for death for her. This was difficult within itself because imagining someone that you admire to be dead isn't the nicest task to do. Reading other obituaries helped me understand what needs to be included. I read a few, from The Guardians one on Michael Jackson, Joan Rivers & to get a sense of a more celebrated person with less public back-lash/negative publicity, I looked at Robin Williams’. I found that all of these took a positive spin, which I feel is needed for something like an obituary. They typically look back at the career of the person and present them for who they are, they feel almost bitter sweet. The beginning of Joan Rivers starts ‘Comedian whose trademarks were her cutting wit and her cosmetic surgery’, which sums up the two main reasons why she was famous. Michael Jacksons was again similar to this, with a positive & negative ‘The self-styled King of Pop, whose musical gift was overshadowed by his private life’. Whereas with Robin Williams, was more positive as a whole by just mentioning his achievements ‘Actor and comedian who made his television breakthrough with Mork & Mindy and went on to star in films such as Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society and Mrs Doubtfire’. My Helbig one opens with ‘Grace Helbig: the actress & comedian has sadly passed away yester-day on her birthday (September 27 2060) at the age of 75. Grace died from liver failure. The ac-tress was born in 1985 & went on to become one of the biggest stars of recent times…’. It was im-portant for me to get straight to the point without reflecting badly on Helbig from the get go. The first paragraph of Robin Williams goes ‘When the notion of getting in touch with one's inner child entered popular currency, the standup comedian and actor Robin Williams, who has died aged 63 in a suspected suicide, was ripe to be its poster-boy. Partly it was his limitless energy and floodlight smile, or the frantic chatter that made it sound as if he were constantly interrupting himself or speaking in tongues. But he also resembled strongly a hirsute toddler who had broken out of the playpen to make whoopee’. It stated the facts but presented him in a positive light, which is how I felt Helbig needed to be presented. The obituaries usually follow a style where they go from A to B of their life, focusing on some major elements like award wins & successful projects e.g I talked about Camp Takota & Graces book (I also had to make up other movies she had starred in to fill in the gaps). I feel like I respected Helbig in what I wrote & thats how I felt when I read the three ones for the stars above.