--> How has blogging as a writing medium changed the way you write, think, or think about writing?
At the beginning of the year, when Mr. Sutherland talked to us as a class about blogging, I had no idea what that had to do with English, but it has actually quite helpful. At first I was a bit questionable about this assignment and I wasn’t sure how blogging was going to help at all with the English language. Once I started blogging though, I realized that it can help with forming thoughts into words, writing skills, and being less conscious about what one can write. I personally have problems sharing my writing pieces because I don’t like to write and so my pieces aren’t very good, but blogging means that you don’t have a choice about who can see what you write and who doesn’t because it’s out in the cyber world for everyone to read and comment about. Now, the way I write, think, and thinking about writing has changed quite a bit.
WRITING. When you blog you share your thoughts to the world. I never thought that I would even share my writing with my parents, let alone the entire world…well whoever wants to read what I have to say. I didn’t think that it would be easy to blog because I am so self-conscious about what I write, that I had a very hard time my first time blogging and pressing the “post” button. Writing on paper and writing on a blog, are the same exact thing, well, sort of. Blogging is on the computer, and writing on a piece of paper is writing on a piece of paper; everyone knows that, BUT the context that you write about is all the same. When 9/11 happened, I wrote about the event, my feelings toward the event, etc., on both a piece of paper and on my blog. 9/11 Blog Post what I wrote about this very fragile topic on the piece of paper and on my blog, were the exact same thing, and the point I’m trying to make is that blogging as a writing assignment, is very useful.
THINKING. Everyone thinks, and when one writes, they are forming thoughts and opinions about the topic they are writing on. It can be hard to take the thoughts that are formed in one’s head, and transform them into words on a paper, but blogging changes that. Blogging is on a computer, so it’s easier to press the ‘back space’ button for as long as one chooses and change everything they wrote if they want until they get their thoughts just perfectly written on the blog. Writing blogs has helped me form thoughts better and really THINK about how I can form a sentence just write, where readers’ won’t get confused on what I’m trying to say, or the meaning of the sentence even if it’s on topic. Thinking is natural, obviously, but with blogging you have to be somewhat careful about what you type because it does go out into the cyber world and someone could get the wrong impression and be very insulted, and something could happen. I use the word ‘could’. Thinking about writing a blog post can be actually quite difficult for me because I can have an idea in my head, but then I never know how to really write it out. For example, free posts was probably the hardest part about blogging for me because it really got you thinking about the endless number of possibilities that could be written about. A Free Post, this is an example of how I really just didn’t know what to write and thinking about writing random stuff until I finally started writing something that actually made some sense which is where THINKING comes in handy.
Blogging was definitely something I had to get used to; there was the Current Events post, the Response post, and the Free post (which was the hardest to me). I always had to remember every week, “I need to do my three blogs this week,” it was hard to remember at first but after a while it became easier. Writing on a blog has helped me over come my issue of letting other people read my work because you can’t control who reads your blogs, and what they thought about your opinion; whether you agree or disagree.
I believe writing has helped me form my thoughts better, and along the topic I chose to write about, and blogging helped also with that skill. Sometimes, I know from personal experience that when I write I can get lost in my own thoughts and go off topic, but come back at the end. I think with blogging, I had to really focus on what I was writing and I didn’t have the luxury (not saying I had the luxury when I did go off topic) to go off topic as much because I didn’t know who was going to be reading my different posts and which one would get the most views or anything.
Writing has always been one of my weak points because I can never structure my sentences the way I want, and vocabulary was hard for me too, but with blogging this year, I learned new ways to word sentences that made sense and was structured properly, and I would learn new words that other people would use. I get to see words that would work better for a sentence that I could use than the word that I already have, and I get to see different writing styles that show how other people write; which is kind of cool.
This past semester, doing blogs, and quick writes have been useful in different ways. Quick writes are better for just jotting down thoughts in a certain amount of time and they don’t have make sense, as long as you remember what it was that you were trying to say. Blogs are good for the final result of a quick write, but then you change words, edit the ideas, and the final piece of writing is the blog.
Writing is important, and getting the write ideas and formatting is also important, which is how blogging this year has definitely helped me with my writing.
