“A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world.” ~Anonymous
I have mixed feelings when it comes to having a blog. Sometimes, I enjoy writing on my blog, other times; it just seems like a waste of my time. Most of the time, I find that I detest having a blog, and blogging every week is just a pain in the ass. As I stated in the previous semester final:
[At the beginning of the year, Mr. Sutherland was lecturing everyone about how he had a new idea, which was to blog. He said that we would write a blog every Friday and that would be like a weekly assignment. When I heard this, I was like oh my god! Thank you!! I had so many ideas on what to blog about. Subjects that included games, movies, technology, and worldwide issues were all of interest to me. As the school year progressed on though, I started having doubts about it.]My first experience handling a blog has definitely changed how I feel about writing and how I write. Before blogging, all I knew how to write was essays, essays, and more essays. With blogging, I discovered free writing, and when I say free, I mean free writing. One thing I have gained this year is that writing is not just restricted to a set of writing styles like persuasive, descriptive, expository, and narrative. Blogging is a nice change of pace. Since blogging only requires Internet, and a computer and of course an imagination. With blogging, there’s hundred of thousands of topics to blog about, however you choose to do it. Grammar and spelling don’t have to make much sense either. That is truly free writing. Another positive/negative effect of blogging is that I’m such a procrastinator, and like always I wait until the last minute to do it. When I blog, most of the time I wait until the day it’s due, then I have to think of a topic to write about and then write about it. So in a way blogging is sort of like practicing quick writing. I don’t know if quick writing is the same as writers block per se. I know that blogging has helped me somewhat in the area of writers block such that if I really concentrate, many times I can come up with something within a minute or two. Comparing my thoughts now, and my thoughts last semester, they’re pretty much the same when I said:
[I have to think about this one. I mean I can’t really say that I like having a blog. Ever since we made them, I keep forgetting to write one every week and it affected my grade so much. So we are not off to a very good start. Well, aside from dropping my grade down to a D, blogs are pretty OK. They can get annoying since ninety nine percent of the time I don’t have anything to write about. I end up sitting there watching the screen for an hour.]
Everyone wants life to be easy, but for ninety-nine point ninety nine percent of the world’s population, that is simply impossible. The same goes for blogging. Blogging is easy, but my writing has been badly damaged by the carefree ways of the blogger. Like I said before, I spent my whole life writing persuasive, expository, narrative, five paragraph essays. In eighth grade, my teacher was a pretty hard grader when is came to writing, my average grade in his class was probably a low B to high C, BUT I learned how to improve my writing, and blogging has sort of diminished the “professional” way of writing. Like this excerpt from New Statement of Purpose:
[ I know that like all of my blogs suck since I don't put any kind of time or effort into since I write them at the last minute. These topics don't even actually interest me that much. I just write about them since i procrastinate and then write it at like eleven. That's.... all..]
As you can tell, my writing dropped considerably in the beginning of the year, now nearing the end of the school year; there has been a slight improvement. For instance, in a recent regular post Hidden Water:
[It's clear, pristine and refreshing. Soothing and necessary, and it makes up almost three quarters of the Earth. It is water, and all life depends on it. Without it is without life, with it there is survival. But only a miniscule portion of that can actually sustain life. We humans alone use up so much of the Earth's resources that other life organisms can barely hang onto existence and in many cases have already died off yet everyone, including me, are still abusing what we have.]
I guess that towards the end of summer, teachers didn’t pile on as much homework, which allowed me to seriously think about what I wanted to write about, without worrying about other classes. I don’t want to give a bad name to blogging or anything like that, but it is seriously a bane on improving my writing. When I think about it, this is what is going in my head. Since its been drilled into my head for the past fifteen years, essay equals professional and neat, while blogging equals laid-back type of writing which is why I think blogging has not improved my writing at all.
As I’m writing this, a quote keeps running through my mind. Jim Buckmaster said that:
[I read blogs every day, for all sorts of reasons, but I turn to blogs especially when I want to hear alternative viewpoints — for example, information on a particular medical treatment from the viewpoint of patients receiving it, rather than doctors administering it; reports from the battlefield seen through the eyes of soldiers rather than politicians; thoughts on a particular technology from the standpoint of engineers rather than executives.]
which is why I implore you to check back later through the year because I might return to blog about whether my writing improved from blogging to essays.
