Blogging Reflection

The semester has quickly come a close; obviously it’s a happy time for teachers, students, and the like. As we embark on our breaks and eventually our next semester classes I know I will for sure take what I’ve learned from this class and apply it from here on out. This class completely changed my whole view of writing. In high school we were brainwashed into thinking the only type of writing we’d do in college was formal, 3.5 essays complete with MLA format. But in one of the first classes we were told to throw all of that out the window. With blogging it’s important to keep your readers interested. My first piece was so formal I’m sure I bored everyone to tears. But then I started looking at the blogs I had chosen for my reading list. They had personality, they had style, granted they were fashion blogs but still I paid attention to how they wrote and what it is they did to keep me interested.  So through this class my writing evolved and I developed some personality, learned to include facts and statistics without it being a snore, and how to be flexible enough to write about anything and make it interesting.

            Like I said above personality and style is something I really lacked when we first started blogging. I tried to do that by adding in a little sarcasm sprinkled with a few rhetorical questions and voila just those two things added an immense amount of style. I feel I did this best in my post “What is College Good for?” In this piece adding style was crucial.  I also thought a way to include style easier was to try to find new angles on this topic that other people hadn’t used. When your writing is unique that makes your writing a ton less boring because it’s not repetitive like everyone else’s posts with the same points. And adding that style makes it stand out even more. This piece did it in certain areas. When I included the quote about how college educates the whole person and makes us more literate cultured beings I opened a whole new angle. I think it bumped up my style points a bit.

            The next thing I improved on was taking a sort of boring topic that requires facts and statistics and making it interesting. The piece I thought I did that best in was “Is College Good Enough?”. I used several long statistics but with interesting ways of explaining them I think it made it much less boring. This one was a challenge for me because since I had just moved away from the extremely formal writing. So when I knew I had to present facts my first inclination was to be overly formal. But I went away from that and inserted style like I mentioned above and it made this piece a very interesting read.

            The last thing I improved on was being able to write about not only things I was interested but also things I thought were hard to right about. When we had to do the piece “Why College” I wanted mine to be super different from everyone else’s. So I decided to take it to a whole other angle and talk about my road to finding the right school and how it was affected by volleyball recruiting. I think it was certainly different then what anyone has wrote. It was a challenge to initially come up with how exactly I was going to answer that question. To me it was vague but it helped me develop the ability to be able to write about anything.

            In conclusion this class taught me an awful lot. It made me a very diverse writer because I can do the formal MLA style or I can do the very stylistic, authentic voice, or I can do a fine job mixing the two. I’m glad I found a way to mix the two but to also really develop my voice. It will certainly help in the future.  And make any writing assignment I’m given from here on out a breeze.

Photo Credit: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30311/10-Amazing-Blogs-About-Blogging-to-Start-Reading-NOW.aspx