Entry 11: The End

Blogging has been a unique experience I have never done before nor would I ever have if not for my English 101 class. The act of sharing my thoughts for the world to hear has been rather fun even if no one is really around to read them. I have been using this blog almost as a personal journal using the free-write entries to highlight and share some of my favorite things with the world. Blogging for me has been an experience of making the things I am interested in interesting for other people, which has been something I have rather enjoyed. I never really took the blogging project overly serious besides making sure it done for my grades. I always just took it easy and let whatever I wanted to write about be what the entry ended up being rather than trying to force something or plan out my entries, I tried to just let the writing come naturally. I will probably not continue blogging in the future but I am happy to have had the experience of blogging.

Actually blogging has changed my opinion on bloggers as well. They have to put more thought and effort into their works than I had originally given them credit for. While there are still bad bloggers out there that spread mis-information and use their blog to promote an agenda there are also plenty of interesting and fun blogs out there.

There is a lot to learn with blogging. Blogging makes the author think more about who their audience is than normal essay writing does. Furthermore the author has to consider the fact that the blog is accessible to everyone and must be more thoughtful of what is being posted. No one wants the blog they wrote in community college to end up being used against them in the future.  Beyond just academic learning I learned a lot about my class mates by reading their blogs. They shared a lot of personal and interesting things that I would never have found out without the blog project.

As an assignment for class the blog project was great for highlighting the importance of choosing your audience and writing in such a way as to appeal to them. Overall it was an interesting aspect to take rather than having us do another essay. I appreciated the fact that the work was spread out over time rather than having another large assignment to do in a short amount of time. I think the commenting on other’s blogs could should have been expanded, I enjoyed giving others comments on their blog and receiving some on my own.

The main place I did not like the blog project and felt restricted by it was when I had to write on very specific topics that I had no interest in. While this is a good writing exercise in and of itself it was hard to generate an entry that I found was worthy to post when I felt like I had nothing worthy of being said on the issue. I noticed that many of my class mate’s blog posts were rather short, being around a paragraph in length. Personally I found that these posts were terrible to make comments on and usually did not say much. Adding a guideline of what a minimum blog post should be might be helpful to give students a better perspective on what a good blog post involved.