Over the past eight weeks, I have grown as a blogger. Blog writing was a new concept for me this year, a task that I had never been expected to do before. When we first were assigned to “blog”, I have to admit I was very nervous and not too thrilled. I was worried I wouldn’t pick the “right" topic or say the “right” words. Never before had my writing been so widely exposed, so I felt self conscious at first putting my opinion out there, and I spent many hours just writing the first few posts. And it wasn’t that it was hard to write, but more that I was worried what people would think.
Looking back at my posts thus far, I have definitely seen changes in format. My first posts were written more in the format of a paper, rather than a blog. They were less provocative and left nothing for the reader to grab onto, and no easy way to respond. For example, in my I Don’t Go to Colgate…post, I concluded with the following:
“Artifacts do not tell the whole story. Therefore research, collaboration, and corroboration are key steps that must be taken before any conclusions can be drawn. I mean, how do we as individuals have a right to make assumptions based only on materialistic items?”
This was merely rhetorical question, and left the reader with nothing to really respond to. What I have started to do, and still need to work on, is to make my posts more conversational, more open-ended (as opposed to a rhetorical question). In my post A Call to Action: Understand Our Past to Correct Our Future, I gave my interpretation of George Orwell’s quote.
"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."
I took the key word “controls” to mean “understands” and gave my personal interpretation. This allowed others to comment on what “controls” meant to him or her. Another technique I have used to create a statement or argument that extends the conversation is to end it with a question. However, I have found this to be a risky technique because it sometimes seems like the author is trying to hard to get an argument out of the readers, instead of allowing it to come more naturally. Nevertheless, in my The Social Network post, I found asking a few questions at the end beneficial because the questions went along with the post and offered people a chance to comment on their thoughts on social networking (i.e. “facebooking”).
In hindsight, I have noticed that a common theme I have explored is interpretation. I mentioned that a person cannot just make interpretations and assumptions about someone solely based on what they see in my I Don’t Go to Colgate… post. I wrote that textbook authors choose how they interpret and narrate a historical event in Are We Seeing the Whole Story? Or Just the American Version? I wrote about how people can have many different interpretations on an event, based on diction in my “British Petroleum? Or “Anything-but-American” Petroleum? In the future, I hope to widen my topic choices in my blog in order to create a greater variety.
As first quarter is ending, I already feel like I have experienced growth as a writer. I now feel more comfortable voicing my opinion and allowing others to read what I have to say. However, I still have a lot to work on; such as creating more concise and to-the-point posts, extending the conversation, and varying my topic choice. Nevertheless, now I don’t dread blogging because it motivates me to dig deeper on current events and make connections with things we talked about in class.
*Please read The Social Network*
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