Hundevad Productions

In this post, I will summarize my revisions, articles, and edits, and describe my major takeaways from these.

I started this website as a project for a school assignment and I am glad it has grown to a passion and hopefully a place on my CV for a career or future prospects. Blogging in general has never been a strong suit or something I have done in the past. Journaling or anything like that wasn’t a strong trait of mine. But I love to write, and while this was new to me in terms of content, it was familiar in terms of doing, and that helped me lean into the assignments’ objectives. Major takeaways from this website building is that you need not only consistency, but come from a place of truth. Content doesn’t really matter when the writing is from the truth and heart, it makes the content worth reading. Major takeaways from the editing and revision process is that consistency is key, and having a good editing mindset is highly valuable. 

Throughout this process I have really honed my editing skills and my ‘revision vision.’ To free write and to openly write in a blog style is great and freeing and allows me to process my thoughts. Writing to me is reading my thoughts and beginning to understand them, and to edit and revise them only makes that thought more sound, more strong, and more susceptible to persuading. A blog written for the first time might have some good lines to ponder and insightful opinions, but a well revised and edited blog will have much more structured narrative that will captivate and engage your readers. This is something I aim to achieve moving forward with my blogging. In my experience, going back to edit some of my blogs, I’ve noticed the ones I know I spent more time on seemed to have a more coherent voice and narrative credibility. The others I did not spend so much time on are the ones I went back and edited the most. My podcast script, Why Theatre is Good, and the Ten Points article, I revised the most and that’s the reason why, I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted to on them. 

The podcast script especially, I wanted to change even more, but so far, I have revised the script and content to reflect a more upbeat persona. I felt the narrative and content dragged on a while and provided some dull points that didn’t need to be there. I hope to continue editing it to make it more coherent, so far it seems more like rambling but that is what I explained too. But even as a session zero to my podcast, it could use more direction in the way I talked and talked about certain topics. The layout of the content I revised, and changed a lot of information to reflect more on the curiosity of theatre I wanted to portray rather than confusion. Moving forward I will aim to specifically focus on one topic inside of theatre, this way it can flow better and provide an easier script to write, rather than a free write on such a broad topic. 

The knowledge I have gained from creating a podcast was tremendous and incredible. Takeaways for me include programming, coding, voice editing, and recording knowledge. I played around with a few different mics and set ups to obtain the best sound I could. I researched the best ways to start a podcast and speak into one, and I learned how to publish and post my site and podcast, which I think is the most important. One thing I read that stuck with me while researching and doing the podcast was, ‘your first episode is never going to be your first episode.’ This to me, is the biggest takeaway for all of internet blogging and content creating. It is not a theatre audition where we get one shot, two minutes, and a piece of paper. Here we get endless time to revise, edit, and perfect the thing we want to publish, but that’s the other side of the razor too. We, (I), can get stuck in the editing and revision phase and never go on to publish. We have to remember that it is possible to delete the post, edit it later, or change your mind and write a new one retorting the old one. This helped me move on with editing and posting, because I got so caught up in perfecting it and making it better each time, but it ate away my time and therefore I never got any content out. And like I said, consistency is key. Post consistently and continuously and the experience will take shape and you will learn and become better with time. 

Editing my website was quite a challenge. I was so new to coding and building digital archives, it was a brand new language to me. I got frustrated at times and once, deleted my entire website and started from scratch. I have chosen multiple themes, and have struggled with the layout of my website. I think I have succumbed to the classic blog, and face the fact I need to learn more before I can get the website design I truly want. Seeing other websites and bloggers from my class, their sites were clean and fresh, colorful and themed. Mine is white, and bland. I hope to change that. 

I have learned about editing through Youtube, word-press articles and talking to their support tech. In the future, I aim to have a sleek design with a cool dark background toned color, and vibrant colors to portray the theatre, podcasts, and blogs. Then the blog page can be more relaxed and easy to navigate. I think now it is too boring really. I have a couple pages in draft mode that I am experimenting with and learning in hopes to actually make multiple pages on my site, each with their own category and purpose. My major takeaways from these lessons is patience, and re-read. Something digital like a website is like learning how to use power tools, its a new skill that requires knowledge of different aspects of their respective digital tools and tricks to build a site. Other people get it better than I do, and I need to have patience that it will come with time. So far I have a functioning site that posts my articles and shares my podcasts on Spotify and that is most important. It will get better with time, if I stay consistent. 

The value of revision and having a revision ‘vision’ is insurmountable. You have to have a vision for you revisions, what you want to create and what you see yourself reading should be your visual while you revise. Revision is when you change the layout, the content, and the meaning of your paragraphs to shape your blog or essay into saying what you want it to say. Editing is when you meticulously look at the syntax, grammar, and mechanical errors of the  paper  A vision is not really needed here. Revising is building your thoughts, essay, blog, website, speech, whatever into something an argument can be structural sound in. This is the value of revision, really shaping your thoughts into a credible and worthy statements. This was a major takeaway from building this website and learning to blog: that my first write through, the first podcast, the first opinion is usually always not the one to get posted, or highlighted, or picked out, it is with careful and close revision that one achieves an opinion worthy of quoting. As always, write, (and revise), and good things will happen.