Ashton Nafziger

What I liked most about my learning in this course was just how unconventional it was compared to other classes I've had. WRIT 318 has taken a very different approach to learning than most of what I've experienced here at Millersville so far and it gives me a broader perspective on just how flexible learning can be. This is especially true with the projects, as I was expecting pretty typical academic essays with this being an advanced writing course. Instead, we used all sorts of different forms of writing and multimodal elements and created projects that were unlike anything I'd done for school before.

One of the things I am most proud of with my writing process is my ability to get an essay to flow as I start writing. It make take m a bit to get the ball rolling in a given essay, but once I got on a roll, the words will just start pouring out. This (mostly) uninterrupted flow of writing, in its purest form, will allow me to breeze through multi-page essays in far less time than I initially anticipated. Just today, I managed to write the majority of a draft of a 6 page research paper in under 2 hours (and I'm actually happy with its quality).

I show I enjoyed from my childhood that got canceled Cartoon Network's original Teen Titans. The show ran for 5 season in the 2000s and was a lot of for me to watch while I was a young superhero fan. Now that I'm a slightly older superhero fan, I still look back at the show with fondness, but also some disappointment in its ending. The show ended by reintroducing an old character and starting a whole new plotline, only to be canceled before it could ever pursue this story. I watched the show after it had stopped airing, but I still resonate with fans of shows that get canceled enough to understand some of their mindset when creating this project. It's very disappointing to have something you love be left completely unresolved.

My favorite show for a little while has been Invincible, and it definitely can illustrate an angry fanbase. Amazon adopted an uncommon release strategy for Invincible's second season, releasing half of the season this past November and then taking a 4 month hiatus before resuming the second half of the season in March of 2024. Mid-season breaks are very common among network television that runs 22-24 episodes per season as a standard, but Invincible is a streaming series with only 8 episodes in a season. This meant that the fanbase got 4 episodes and then had to wait several months to see the next 4, and they were understandably upset and baffled by this decision. This strategy resulted in the hype for the show somewhat dying off during the hiatus and many viewers even being completely unaware that the fifth episode had released when March rolled around.

When creating short videos like TikToks or Instagram Reels, a good strategy for style is to have something interesting happening right of the gate. Make the first image your audience sees something intriguing so that they'll want to stay to see the rest of the video, rather than continuing their scroll in search for more engagement. One way I see this done is by simply including a title so that the audience can (more or less) know what to expect and can quickly discern whether it's worth watching. Another I see is starting toward the end of the video to show the most interesting part, only to loop back to the beginning to show the process leading up to this end.

A good rule of thumb for creating short tumblr posts that hook audiences right away is to include a visual element. Generally, audiences aren't as receptive to just reading a plain paragraph of text, but if you add an image or video, their eyes can latch onto that and it can quickly pique their interest. They will then be all the more receptive to reading the paragraph of text that you wrote to go with this image.

The appeal of long (10+ minute) YouTube videos for viewers is often the length itself. Generally, longer YouTube videos come with them the inherent promise of providing ample detail about the subject matter, meaning that the prospective audience can invest in a topic that interests them without having to worry about constantly trying to find more content that they'll find engaging. To expound upon that lattermost point, long-form videos are more convenient than scrolling through short-form content for the same amount of time, as you, as a viewer, can simply put the video on and let it play, versus constantly scrolling and making snap judgments on whether the video you see will engage you.