Writing for an Online Audience with Aoife Barry

Course Summary

Want to share your writing with an online audience? Whether it’s via a newsletter, blog, opinion piece, or on your personal/business website, this course will help you to find your niche and learn the fundamentals of writing compelling pieces that readers will want to read and engage with online.

Course Outline

This course will cover two major elements of writing for an online audience: finding your niche, and learning the basic fundamentals of writing a compelling piece.

The first part of the course will look at your intention as a writer, what your aims are as a writer, honing in on your niche and the ideal platforms for you to publish online.

We will then look at the basic writing and layout skills needed when writing online, so you can write within your niche and connect with your ideal audience.

The six-week course will include reflection exercises, writing, sharing your writing, reading and discussing examples of work, and paying attention to the writing that stands out to you on the vast world of the internet. Through thinking, reading and writing, you will learn more about how to make your own writing stand out online.

The final week will include a Q&A session with Aoife.

Course Outcomes

After completing this course, you will have clarity about your niche as a writer for an online audience. You will be confident in writing a piece to be self-published or published online that grabs the reader’s attention. Crucially, you’ll understand the basic rules of writing and laying out a well-constructed piece that tells your story or narrative in a compelling way – and how to break those rules when you want to!

Aoife Barry is a freelance journalist and author of Social Capital: Life Online in the Shadow of Ireland’s Tech Boom (HarperCollins Ireland, 2023), which was nominated for an Irish Book Award. She spent 12 years working for the news website TheJournal.ie as a reporter and assistant news editor, and has written for online audiences via blogs and websites since the early 2000s. She is arts columnist with the Sunday Times’ Culture Magazine and has bylines in the Sunday Times, Irish Times, Irish Independent, Business Post, Examiner, RTÉ.ie, Tatler and others, and appears regularly on RTÉ Radio, including a monthly slot on Today with Claire Byrne. She writes the culture newsletter Sweet Oblivion on Substack. She has received an Arts Council Agility Award and was selected for the Irish Writers Centre’s Evolution programme in 2023.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.