Writing documents or notes by hand can be tedious and messy. Pens and pencils can smudge, make marks that can not be erased, and can end up disorganized, not letting you put all of the things you want onto your paper. Digital spaces have opened up a new way to further peoples composition processes by letting you insert audio, hyperlinks, pictures and more. For me, the thing most helped with digital space is my class notes. I prefer to bring my computer with me to classes and type my notes, letting me put highlights over words, insert pictures to help explain definitions better than what I could have drawn myself, etc. My composition process is neater as well as easier to organize and look through. By utilizing digital spaces for writing, my typing has also improved, allowing me to write and take notes at a faster pace and letting me go back to correct mistakes without the mess of erasing and making a mess of my words.
The affordances that I have taken advantage of, especially with my blog, would be audio inserts, picture inserts, and hyperlinks. While I only have about five posts prior to this one, hyperlinks are used in almost all of them, and I have used an audio insert and a picture insert in two of those five posts. The one that I use the most would be hyperlinks. I tend to use them a lot in my posts in order to give links to websites where I get my information, as well as putting citations at the end of the post. I enjoy using hyperlinks, because it gives the option of going to that website, without it taking the space of the link itself in my writing. I have also used an audio insert for the “Writing for Aural Delivery” post. This lets readers listen to the audio without having to leave the blog post to go to a different page in order to listen to it. I have also used a picture insert in my “Visual Literacy” post about the 9/11 picture, which lets readers and audiences view the same picture my writing is about, which lets them make and come up with their own ideas about it along with reading my response.
Some constraints that have limited my composition processes in a digital space have been file types, automatic positioning of images or files which can mess up the formatting of the writing, and simply not knowing how to apply the affordances to the digital space. There have been times that I have tried inserting a file, be it picture, audio, etc, and it does not work with the platform that I am writing on. In that case, if I can then I will try to change the file type to one that will work with the platform, however there have been times where it simply does not work and I can no longer use it. Adding pictures or audio files can also mess up the format of the writing, making it skewed or have awkward spacing. That can lead to making the reader lose their thought process while reading, or just mess up the feel of the writing and paragraphs. Finally, there are times that I simply do not know how to use different affordances and thus can not use them. That is the reason that I have only been using the hyperlinks, audio, and picture inserts rather than using others or more of the ones available. In order to use them, you must first learn how to apply them or else they will not work.
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