Yogyakarta, September 21st 2020—Center for Digital Society FISIPOL UGM held the 34th Digital Discussion on Sunday night (21/9). The event was titled “Optimizing Your Writing Skill in the Digital Area” and invited Amelia Pandu, a project officer of research in CfDS, as the main speaker. As usual, Made Agus Bayu, an event assistant of CfDS, was acting as the moderator. The event went on from 19.00-21.00 in Whatsapp Group.
In the digital era, there are a lot of things made easy when it comes to writing. This includes when we are in the process of writing or when we want to improve our skills on writing. The existence of the internet allows us to find a lot of material reference when writing. Additionally, we can check our rate of plagiarism and our grammar correctness easier, as well as publicize our writing on various platforms. For university students, writing is an inevitable activity. Be it in the form of essay, op-ed, material resume, book review, research findings, and more. The majority of universities also still makes it mandatory for university students to create a form of writing as a requirement for graduation.
Not only academically, in organizations writing is also inevitable. For example, university students are often asked to write proposals, social media content, and other academic/non-academic writings. That is why for the sake of a smooth university experience, it is important for students to enjoy writing. Therefore, there needs to be a right strategy to grow students’ fondness and skills in writing. For Amel, the first strategy is by getting eager to write. According to her experience, there are two ways to build that feeling of excitement:
- Keeping ourselves updated with knowledge and new events that are happening in this world.
- Talking to ourselves about what we like, what we don’t like, and what we feel to find out what we want to write.
However, there are still several hurdles when it comes to writing because of anxiety or reluctance to write the topic we are told to write. Amel suggests that we brainstorm our ideas first before thinking about the quality of the writing. “Just write down your ideas first, you can think about the quality when you are revising the writing. Just write first,” Amel said.
After increasing our enthusiasm for writing, the next thing we should do is create a writing habit. The more often someone writes, then the more brilliant is their skill in writing. “So that we can make writing a habit, try to dedicate 30 minutes of our day just to write. Use that time to focus and to write anything that you are feeling or thinking at that moment or at that day,” Arnel said. After doing that habit, it is good to start setting a word count that we want to meet every day and that continues to increase gradually.
The next strategy is to make an outline before you write. Making an outline is the fool-proof way to create a more structured, coherent, and efficient writing. In this case, Arnel also gives a simple outline that she makes before writing academic or non-academic articles.
Then, Arnel gave several steps to write more effectively. The first step starts from choosing the theme/topic, gathering credible, actual, and factual writing materials, creating our outline, writing, reflecting, and revising. Revising is one of the most important steps in creating a good writing, but this step is often skipped. “Revision should be done carefully so that the final product can be a clear, focused, and read-worthy product,” Amel said.