An overview of purposes and audiences for digital portfolios

Writing srategies for your digital portfolio

Writing for the web--that is, writing in an economy of abundant information and scarce attention--is tricky business. All those short, snappy paragraphs go against everything in us as English majors; especially after four years of long, double-spaced, Times New Roman papers! But on the internet, long, dense paragraphs of small text are not only hard to pay attention to, they can also be inacessible. It's also challenging to write with your reader's needs in mind and prioritize them over your own. The following strategies are a good starting place to help you help your visitors find what they need to find.

• Name categories, pages, and headings with short phrases that your reader will be familiar with.
• Use headings frequently, and try to break long paragraphs up into shorter paragraphs in your site's content. Long pages are no big deal, but long paragraphs are hard to read on small screens.
• We scan when we read on screens. A lot. Help your reader scan accurately and use the Bite, Snack, Meal strategy for all of the writing you do on pages/posts. Write titles and headings with key messages and write short summaries for longer pieces. If the tool you're using permits it, let users download or view embeds of documents that need to look like they're on paper (i.e. most of the class-based works you'll put here).

Example portfolios

Examples of TAMU-CC student portfolios

Anna: annamerissa.wordpress.com (Anna started hers in my Writing for the Web class but then kept it up after the course; note framing and invitation to interact on home page;. Use of categories on left for genres. Genre pages have descriptions and links rather than full text; Documents are PDFs downloadable from her Wordpress media file system.

John: johncantuportfolio.wordpress.com (John did this portfolio for his Writing for NonProfits Certificate. Note clear bite/snack/meal approach to basically everything: the landing page is a short overall summary of the site contents, and the Samples page (which has multiple sub-pages) orients readers with short summaries and takeaways for each item in the portfolio. Documents are Google Drive embeds, very easy to set up.

Not just students; professionals, too:

Travis Nichols: iamtravisnichols.com (This portfolio orgnaized projects across a broad array of domains. Note short descirptive summaries on pages such as http://iamtravisnichols.com/monstersafterhours)

Joe Coleman: getcoleman.com (Interesting interactive portfolio website that offers readers the choice of how "hard" a sell they want to read on the site.)

Sean Delles: seandelles.com (This portfolio uses a tool called Journo, which is a professional subscription service; check design: note use of categories on left, magazine-style on the right.)