English 9.4: Digital Newsletter Writing

Session 3 | Research (Google Docs)

Cartoon representation of e-mail, smartphone, and business communication.
Image by talha khalil from Pixabay 

Session 3 | Research

Using Online Sources to Research and Understand Your Topic

Learning Goals

Assignment

Overview

Session 1: What is a Newsletter? (Audience and Genre)

Learning Goals

In this session, you'll be learning to apply the concept of Genre to newsletter.  By the end of the session, you know three things:

Teaching Notes: Genre

Genre can be a confusing concept.  Most students are familiar with genre in movies (such as horror, comedy, action, etc.), but genre has far more variations that just these.

Genre: What's a Newsletter?

There are certain expectations for a newsletter.  If you're writing a newsletter, you're basically sending updates about your topic or organization to others who want to learn more.

As we talk about newsletters, it helps to know some academic terms.  You're actually already familiar with these concepts, but the vocabulary might be new to you.

A newsletter is simply one type of communication — hence, a genre.  For newsletters, it's expected that you'll provide interesting updates about a topic that your audience cares about — and the conventions center around the sound and look of your newsletter.  Your audience is the group of individuals who care about your topic and want to hear more — and when you write your newsletter, you want to prepare something that this audience will enjoy.  So if you're doing a newsletter about the American presidents, you'll want some pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — if your topic is Heavy Metal, you're gonna need some photos of bands and concerts, and you'll likely want a black background to convey the themes of the music.

Genre Skill: Newsletters

5 Essential Elements for a Great Newsletter by Jodi Harris.  In this article, Harris explains the key components for using a newsletter to communicate.

9 Customer Segmentation Models by Kaitlyn Arford.  Are you ready for some marketing talk?  In Arford's article, she explains how organizations understand specific groups of people.  Depending on what you want to say and who you want to say it to, that can dramatically change how you communicate.

25 Easy Newsletter Ideas (+Examples) on WordStream.  Our course is centered on research, but what exactly should you research?  Did you know that birthdays and holidays can be part of your research?  This article gives ideas on the kinds of news updates that your audiences might look for.

How Plagiarism Wastes Time

Did you know that Google actually penalizes websites that plagiarize?  If one website simply copies material from another website, Google will downgrade or possibly even remove that site from search results.

Now, that's just a small example of why plagiarism is a waste.  When you write a newsletter, your audiences will be looking for new information — your readers want information that's fresh, information that only you can provide.

Understanding Plagiarism

10 Reasons to Avoid Plagiarism: Effects of Plagiarism on Your SEO Performance by Richard Conn.  Here, Conn describes how plagiarism hurts your online reputation.  He describes the types of plagiarism and how they affect the visitor experience for a website — and the newsletters you'll be writing are similar to websites in this regard.

Assignment: Describe Your Newsletter Topic

Now that you know a bit about what a newsletter is and why it needs to be original, talk with your group about what your newsletter will be about.  Figure out your topic, the direction you want to go, and what original content you'll provide.

First, you and your group members can brainstorm using paper, if you like, or a whiteboard.  I recommend taking a picture to upload to Google Drive.  This stage is conversational.

Next, build your folders in Google Drive.  This project require creating a Google Drive folder for your whole group, and then creating individual folders for each group member.  One of the hardest part about group projects is keeping everything organized — and for this project, you need to keep things sorted so that each of you can show your specific work.  Once you have your individual folders, you should not be editing materials in the folders of others — instead, you'll draft your materials in your individual folder, and then copy your materials to the main project when they're ready.

Add your notes to Google.  Add all your individual notes to your individual folder — when I do my grading, I'd like to see what you specifically have been writing down.  Then as a group, add the most relevant notes to a single group document.

Here are some examples of great notes to add:

Finally, add Headings and a Table of Contents.  In Google Docs, it's ridiculously easy to add a table of contents — but only if you have your headings in place.  At this stage, you don't need anything fancy — you just need to know what a heading is so you can continue using this skill in furture sessions.

A couple tips:

Docs Skill: Contents

Adding a Table of Contents to Google Docs by HowTech.  This quick video shows you how to add a table of contents and update it with the section headings from your document.

Teaching Notes: Cooperation vs. Collaboration

Did you know that many students hate group projects??  (Gasp!!)

For my group projects, I add an extra step where each student puts together individual contributions separately, and then adds those contributions to the group document.

Session 2: Creating a Newsletter Template (Collaboration)

Learning Goals

Now we start the "real" work.  (Hint: it's all real work!)

In this session, you'll make decisions about the look and format for your newsletter.  Now, there are a lot of newsletter apps out there to help automate this process, but for this class you'll be starting this work manually using Google Docs.  This might feel a bit frustrating, and you might  be wondering "Why Google Docs???"

The answer is simple: the process of building a newsletter on Google Docs will teach you a lot about how to make Google Docs work for you.

Assignment Objectives

For this session, your assignment is to build a newsletter template using Google Docs.  As a group, you'll pick a topic for your first newsletter, and then divide up the work so that each person will focus on a single article.  Then each of you will individually choose and create a template for your article.  Here's what I want to see by the end:

Teaching Notes: "Real" Writing

My fourth year of teaching, I put in some real hours developing an incredibly intricate writing assignment.  It combined images, websites, and analysis — and I thought my students did great work.  But they said it wasn't "real" writing because the end result didn't look like a research paper.

Your Newsletter Plan: Using Tables in Google Docs

Tables offer one of the most powerful aesthetic tools available in Google Docs.  Before you add your pretty images or fancy fonts, you need to have solid layout for where everything goes.  This is particularly important for your group document, since it will link to all your individual articles, and you want it to look good.

For this portion, first watch the Working with Tables video by GCFLearnFree featured below.  Note how easily you can add a table and adjust the appearance.  When you put together a newsletter, you'll want to use color to highlight some areas over others.

In your group document, go ahead and put together your own table.  I recommend listing out topics, article titles, and authors (i.e. group members).   Remember that these are all placeholders — nothing thus far is carved in stone.  You're simply laying the groundwork for something more sophisticated.

Extra Video: Tables

Google Docs - How To Add And Customize Tables by Dusty Porter explains the basics of creating tables and adjusting the colors.  By controlling the rows, columns, and colors, you can get a lot out of your tables.

The "Look" of a Newsletter: Shaping Those Tables

Next, on to your individual articles!  In your individual folders, you're going to lay out a plan for the article you'll be writing on your own.  For this stage, I want each of you to experiment with different layouts to see what works best.  You'll certainly want to talk about common themes and colors, but the individual articles are meant to stand alone — you can gussy them up however you like.

In the Merging Table Cells video by OS-College, you get a quick look at how to change the overall layout of a document by merging some cells and not others.

After watching this video, give it a try yourself.  Start out with a 3x3 or a 4x4 table, and then adjust it until it gives you a layout that feels pleasing.  Decide where you want your article to go, and then where you'll put your images.  In the next step, you'll be adding the images.

Go Deeper: Sorting Data

Google Docs Tables by ShakeUpLearning shows how to create your tables, sort information, and shift your columns.  If your newsletter article includes facts and figures, this can be really helpful.

Teaching Note: Layouts

Yes, working with tables in docs might feel strangely archaic — after all, you can just drag and drop things anywhere you want in Slides or PowerPoint.  But in the online world, tables define where words and images fit in relation to each other — learning to use tables in Docs helps provide that grounding for when we learn Google Sites in Part 3 of this course.

Choosing a Highlight Image

Yes, it's true: we've spent most of this time considering aesthetics.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the look of your newsletter is at least half your message.

While the next session focuses on the research and writing, we're going to spend a little more time here on visuals.  Now that you have a layout, it's time to figure out how you'll fill that layout.  Ironically, text is one of the easiest parts of your layout — whatever your write, the words will bend and flow to the shape of the box you put them in.  They're like water this way.  Images, on the other hand, are solid.  Either the words move around your images, or they go through the images — the images cannot twist and curve to accomodate what you have to say.

Finding a good image today is surprisingly easy.  The internet provides all kinds of beautiful and useful images — and some are free to use!  But here are key considerations:

Research Dilemma: Copyright Expiration

It takes decades for works to enter the public domain — or practically a century, as this article by the Smithsonian explains.  This can actually distort what we know of the past — books and movies from before 1923 are free for public use, but many publications from afterward still can't be distributed without permission.

Cautionary Tales: How a Single Stock Photo Ruined a Woman's Life

Heidi Yeh once modeled for a plastic surgery advertisement, and the image was later used in a fake news story that ruined her reputation.  She went from being a model to being a meme.

Regardless of the source of your images, you cannot make up fake stories about the real people in photographs.

Royalty-Free Images

Looking for images for your newsletter?  Try these sources!  Just remember — regardless of where you find your image, I'm looking for a citation for where it came from.  Be sure you read and understand the license agreement before using an image.

A Warning About Royalty Free

Royalty Free does not mean Copyright Free.  It simply means that the artist has given permission for the image to be used under certain circumstances.  Typically, this means the following:

Digital Skill: Stock Photos

Where to Get FREE Images for Your Website by Create a Pro Website.  He also happens to use the top three I prefer (Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash).

Session 3: Finding Information (Research and Citation)

Learning Goals

Now that we've considered the look and feel of your newsletter, it's time to delve into the details.  The look draws in your readers, but you need good content to keep your audience interested.  In this session, we have three key concepts to learn:

Assignment Objectives

In this assignment, you'll complete the following three tasks.  We'll be using these as the foundation for building your newsletter.

Teaching Notes

Content

Docs Skill:

Content

"Easy" Writing

Just remember: people will judge their own writing based on appearance and the "feel" of the effort.  If it feels "easy," many students will think it was too easy.  On the other hand, if it's impossibly hard, students will find it a waste of time.  So you need to make sure you're finding the right level of work for each individual student.

Adding Two Sources

Step 1: Find Your Info!

It isn't news unless there's new information, and you need sources for that.  For this part, your goal is to find sourcs about your topic that are both interesting and reliable.  here are a few examples to get you thinking:

With the sources, remember that you want your sources to be as specific as possible not only for your article, for also for your group.  So in your group, make sure that you're talking with your classmates to decide how each of you will approach the topic.  And remember — you each need two unique sources that aren't being used by your other classmates.

Step 2: Add Your URLs

Whenever you use an outside source, you need to show where your information came from.  For newsletters, this is much easier than it is for a research paper — for the most part, you can simply link to the page where the information came from.

Now, you want your links to be good ones that are easy to follow.  To do this, you should highlight the words that describe your link, and then use one of the following ways to add the link:

For this, make sure you're highlighting the right text.  Here are some examples of good and bad types of links:

Research Skills: Citing URLs

Designing Better Links for the Web by Slava Shestopalov explains how to compose effective links to websites that are both easy to read and ADA accessible.

Research Examples: Military Life

Let's say your group was writing a newsletter about what it means to join the military.  For this project, you'd want sources that directly focus on what it means to be in the military.

These would be examples of good sources:

Step 2: Write About Your Sources

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Choosing the Key Points for Headings

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Session 4: Organizing Details for Your Articles (Drafting)

Learning Goals

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More testing

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Assignment Objectives

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Choosing an Order for Subtopics

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Writing About Your Sources

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Content 3

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Teaching Notes

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Session 5: Expressing the Main Ideas for Your Articles (Revision)

Learning Goals

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More testing

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Assignment Objectives

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Introductions and Conclusions

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Paragraph Structure

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Lesson Content 3

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Teaching Notes

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Session 6: Organizing the Newsletter (Collaboration)

Learning Goals

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More testing

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Assignment Objectives

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Unifying Multiple Perspectives

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The Big Introduction: Signposting Your "Grand Tour"

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Calls to Action

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Teaching Notes

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Session 7: Refining the Message (Workshop)

Learning Goals

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More testing

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Assignment Objectives

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Sentence Completeness

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Sentence Length

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Verbs and Nouns vs. Adverbs and Adjectives

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Teaching Notes

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Session 8: Identifying Your Audience (Genre)

Learning Goals

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More testing

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Assignment Objectives

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Style and Reader Expectation: Formal vs. Informal Writing

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Finding Examples of Related Newsletters

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Lesson Content 3

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Teaching Notes

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