Our blog team worked together to develop original weekly posts about design thinking and innovation. In this blog, the blog editors reflect on the value of storytelling and plain language writing, while highlighting the importance of leadership in deepening their learning.
Written by the Blog Editors & Digital Content Writers
This year, as Blog Editors & Digital Content Writers, we’ve taken the lead on developing blog content that is centered around Innovation Hub topics, such as design thinking, innovation, equity, and qualitative research. For every blog, we followed an iterative process that involved brainstorming ideas, creating outlines, writing drafts, designing visuals, and formatting for the web. As a team, we support each other by taking each other’s writing through multiple rounds of feedback and revisions before they eventually reach the community. Our blogs aim to be inspiring and personal, centered around our own stories, experiences, and learnings as students.
Writing for Storytelling
Storytelling is key to creating a lasting impact on the reader. We use storytelling to inspire readers into taking action to make change. Manavi spoke about the importance of storytelling, reflecting upon her understanding of its elements and how it can be applied beyond literature, to blog-style writing.
Manavi: I believe there is a strong potential in applying elements of storytelling to literature beyond works of fiction or biographies, such as in blog posts. Storytelling adds personality and individuality to facts, enabling readers to relate to the information and feel emotionally moved. As storytelling often involves conversational language, it was important to capitalize on the impact of plain language in our writing. It was integral that we applied elements of storytelling to our blog posts, even if this was something that wasn’t easy for us to do right away.
As students who are well versed in academic writing, switching to plain-language writing for storytelling can be challenging. Manuela spoke about her process of finding a balance between formal writing that is emotional yet professional.
Manuela: I definitely agree that there is a lot of merit in storytelling, but it can be difficult to actually put that on paper when we are so used to academic writing. As I am more accustomed to argumentative or objective writing, the iHub’s emphasis on personalizing blogs and taking a diary-entry style approach to writing was unfamiliar. We had to strike a balance between finding blogs that were candid but not too personal, as these blogs would be published online and would be representative of the Innovation Hub’s employee community.
During the process of establishing this middle ground, we created this concept of ‘professional emotionality’ where we would write about our personal experiences in a professional tone. Practicing this in our writing helped us generate empathy in readers and inspire change.
Making Storytelling Accessible Through Plain Language
Ensuring our blogs included plain language and did not require deeper analysis was vital to keeping our blogs accessible to diverse audiences. Even though writing this way can be challenging as students, we learned that accessible language is key to reaching as many people as possible and making the broadest impact. This often involved challenges with our current writing style. Manuela spoke about how she learned to adapt her writing styles to be more accessible, and the challenges experienced along the way:
Manuela: Learning how to write in plain language was a challenge. Despite knowing the importance of being inclusive in our blogs from the start, the idea of sometimes repeating words in the same sentence or paragraph was difficult for me to settle into, even if it made the sentence more accessible. I realized that ensuring our blogs are accessible to everyone is ultimately most important, in favour of prioritizing inclusion.
Although, as students, it can be difficult to adapt to plain language writing and write in a tone that is professional yet candid, using plain language can make writing accessible to all readers, and have a broader impact.
Learning to Lead as Writers
During the past academic year, we learned that leadership could come in many different forms. While our main responsibilities included writing and editing blogs, we practiced our leadership skills by introducing the writing process to some of our colleagues who were interested in writing their own blog posts. We learned to be leaders of the blog and encouraged other team members at the iHub to try writing blogs of their own. The blog process became a community effort that invited others to share their experiences and practice storytelling. Below, Manuela reflects on how her experience collaborating with other iHub colleagues allowed her to step into a mentorship role:
Manuela: Talking to our colleagues about our design process and the core values we need to keep in mind while writing blogs acted as a refresher course for us, pushing us to re-evaluate if we have been enacting these principles in our writing. I also felt that my collaboration with Breanna, an iHub team member on the Qualitative Data Archivist team, was extremely rewarding. It was an opportunity to help the growth of a writer because of my genuine motivation to support her progress.
By supporting others in their writing, we were also able to understand the power of storytelling on a deeper level. We were able to think of existing information in new ways or carefully analyze new information. Below, Manavi reflects on how leading interviews with other iHub team members to collect their reflections for this blog series of team reflections challenged her to think deeply:
Manavi: The process of conducting interviews with several teams to put the blog reflections together was a memorable experience for me. It was more complex than I had envisioned; we needed to be attentive to core themes we came across throughout the interview and ensure we had a strong grasp of the team’s roles, to embody their experiences during the writing process. Although it wasn’t easy, we eagerly took on the challenge, enjoying the novelty of the tasks.
Taking the lead in different ways can bring about new challenges that can foster personal and professional growth. We realized that the best way to practice and refine leadership skills is when we collaborate with others.
Writing for Change
During the blog writing process, we learned to challenge ourselves and grow our skills as storytellers. We realized what it means to be a writer who can inspire change through this platform. We learned that storytelling can be a powerful tool for impact and getting readers inspired to make a difference. As a team, with support from the entire Innovation Hub community, we’re so proud of our work this year, and the stories we got to share with our audience. Check out more posts on the Innovation Hub’s blog below!
Contributors
Manavi Goyal, Blog Editor & Content Writer, Honours Bachelor of Science, Psychology Specialist, Economics Major, and Sociology Minor
Manuela Mora Castillo, Blog Editor & Content Writer, Honours Bachelor of Arts, Political Science and History Double Major, Latin American Studies Minor
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