Inside View from Ireland: Writing Skills Final Revision

UNDERWAY -- A good portion of my daily activities centre on teaching college students how to write better. As I wrap up another academic year, I'm culling strands of information for review in revision sessions and for discussion with other lecturers. The Writing Skills course dovetails nicely with three other third level courses in our Multimedia Degree Programme at Tipperary Institute.

After reviewing my "dirty notes," I can make some timely observations.

The essence of good Web Writing embodies an ability to be clear, correct and concrete.
When preparing good copy, a writer must think like an editor and produce compelling memes, sentences, and paragraphs. Each of these elements has key metadata features.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves draws several lessons from the 1918 edition of The Elements of Style.
Throughout my course, students kept A5 journals. They extracted nuggets of information from these copy books and transcribed these nuggets into a separate section in the journals. Excerpts will appear online for Internet viewing. These excerpts provide clues to the personalities of the writers.
After lectures and practical sessions, students know how to write an effective press release. Students transferring into our degree programme from other institutions must prove their skills in this area. This coreskill maps directly to our Public Relations course.
There are elements of copyright in a Creative Commons license. There are rudimentary ways of establishing a claim to copyright.
Distinctions exist between ©, ®, and ?.
Specific characteristics distinguish a patent pending from a patent.
Both ISBN and ISSN documents infer traditional publishing has occurred.
Multimedia creatives can annotate digital files with identifying marks.
As Trinity College Dublin has shown, an owner of a listed structure can file a legal objection to the use of a listed structure in matters unrelated to the structure.
Finding Nemo succeeds on many fronts, including the technical achievement of simulating action in, under and on water.
Fixed identifiers include Date Time Groups and geodetic attributes.
Most project deliverables include elements of written project management documentation.
What makes something a signifuicant emotional event?
Distinguish between a fact and a factoid.
Know why the TITLE tag is important with regards to information architecture.
Describe how Google calculates a Page Rank.
Provide an example of white noise in print media.