1. In your opinion, what was the purpose of this blogging activity?
I think the purpose of blogging was to begin creating a personal writing style, which a blog allows you to do. This especially occurred since we got to choose our own topics, so there was a lot of freedom in how to write. Because we were literally on a global scale, writing was automatically more interesting, too. In my own blog, I was able to write about almost anything with my topic of simple joys. Week to week, I would pick something that I liked and found happiness in, and then just wrote about it! I’m immensely proud of the views my page got from other countries; I don’t even know how other people found it. Writing seems like it would be more worthwhile since others are reading it, but when I would write my posts, I wouldn’t write for an audience, per se. If I had done that, I think my posts would have sounded a tad robotic. My topic involved a lot of non-critical opinion, and I probably couldn’t have changed it for something (or someone) else. The only thing the views really gave was a slight motivation and inspiration to write.
2. What have you accomplished during your blogging and give specifics to support you?
During our blogging, I accomplished becoming more comfortable with my writing. When we had written our first post, I had been a little paranoid about doing it right and comparing the depth or feeling of mine to others. I was also worried I would never get any views on my ClustrMap—I even vowed to delete it if that happened within two weeks of blogging. Over time, I grew more confident in how I was portraying my blog in my own way, and my ClustrMap seemed filled to capacity with red dots. Writing about simple joys also helped me think more about things that really did make me happy, and that tended to put me in a good mood while writing up my posts. One of my initial goals was to put my readers in a content place; hopefully I accomplished that too.
3. What key concepts have you learned while blogging?
The most important thing I learned while blogging was to connect with the post. If you drone on and on about butterflies and sunshine, your readers will see it as a pathetic and robotic piece of work. Blog posts need an element of connection and poetry to tie it together. Making it to a certain level of personality instantly improves the overall quality. My topic could have easily been made tasteless, but I tried to put it at a more “mature” level. Another thing I learned about is appearance of your blog. I kept mine simple because my topic was, indeed, simple joys. It wouldn’t have made sense to have an overly-extravagant explosion of colors and patterns and then write about calm summer days. I opted for a plain bluebird with a light background as my theme. As for text, I normally kept it to one color (usually just black) to keep my blog neat-looking and professional. The one time I used numerous colors was when I wrote sixteen haikus about rain and then put them all in a different shade of blue or purple. Whenever we had to color-code our sentences, I went for some restful hues along the same color scheme. Keeping my blog tidy was important to me, and I feel like I learned more about how a business might market its products and such.
4. How did the weekly requirements help you become a better writer?
The weekly requirements helped me become a better writer because they targeted certain concepts. The hardest one for me was being concise but still saying enough when we had a very specific word count. At times, I would construct my blog post to have it hit just over the word minimum, but when I felt I was done with the post, I would be 30 words off. I found it harder to delete parts of the post than add on to it, since I had written them in for a reason. The other thing I found challenging was color coding my sentences as simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex. When I started to have a little trouble, I googled a good sentence structure website to help me. I was able to fix a couple sentences before running into more complicated ones I had written. I didn’t know what to do with hyphens or ellipses, triple simple sentences combined with commas, and a couple other things. I tried my best to figure out which sentence was which, and realized later in class what mistakes I had made.
5. Based on the skills (writing, technology, perspective) you learned while blogging, how will this benefit you in the future?
The skills I used while blogging can benefit my future because I learned more about my personal writing style and preferences. I think I’ll feel more confident the next time I write a writing assignment in school with this knowledge of myself. Also, I believe I am better at managing my time now. I discovered early on into blogs that they take me up to three hours to write sometimes, and I would feel a little swamped. As time went on, I learned to plan ahead to ensure a less stressful blog-writing time. Time-management will probably help me greatly in and out of school, and for my whole life. I enjoyed having a computerized connection with the world from blogging, too. It was a neat experience for me. (:
