Blog Reflection

As anyone who has read my previous entries knows, this blog was for an English class at the university. Overall, I'd say I enjoyed it a little, but due to my tendency to leave things for the last moment, I didn't really keep it updated throughout the semester. I wrote some entries and ideas on my phone with the intent to post them here later, but I never really got to that last part (which, as you may imagine, is the most important one). Anyways, I think it would have been a more satisfying and maybe less stressful experience in the ends if each entry had a due date, rather than the blog itself. I know it's a pretty stupid idea; I could have imposed these due dates on myself. However, me and many others do this thing where we take as long a break as we can before doing our assignments, and well, if I were forced to do the assignment bit by bit rather than all of it for a specific date, I think I'd have enjoyed it more and the entries publishing dates would certainly be more spread out. Anyways...


The main idea for the blog was to speak our minds about some specific topics, and we were even given the freedom to choose some of these for ourselves. I ended up writing 13 blog entries, this one being the 14th, and though they were supposed to be between 300 and 500 words each, I'm pretty sure most of mine were longer than that (and I think this last one will be no exception). I guess for these kinds of things it's better to say more rather than say less though, right?

Anyways, throughout the blog experience, I feel I opened up to myself as to how I like to write. Obviously, I won't be as casual when writing an essay or a thesis or something as I am when writing here, but I enjoy writing in the way I think and speak throughout my normal life. As you may notice, I loosened up more and more after each entry, and I think I can speak my thoughts pretty clearly in a casual way better than I did before. I think one of my favorite entries, in terms of content, is the one about The Use of Force, due to its controversial nature. There can be a lot of opinions in regards to that story, and no one person can say that one of them is wrong or right. The one about my identity was pretty significant too, but I think the one about the journal is that meant the most. The journal itself was a great experience, and as I said in the entry, it even helped me out quite a bit in my personal life.

I think what changed most between my writing in the journal and my writing in here was the content. In terms of style, I wrote pretty similarly, though since the journal was only for myself, I didn't worry about making things understandable for others or explaining inside jokes or anything. I also didn't worry about censoring myself. I think I'll have to burn it down once its graded. Both were good experiences, but as I've expressed before, the journal was my favorite.

As for the commenting experience, I honestly have to say I felt it was a little too much. Commenting on all of our group member's blog posts (approximately 15 each, and my group had 6 members) felt tedious to say the least. I believe this task is still in progress for all of us, and I'm not really sure if any of us will manage to finish commenting on all the blog posts, due to the fact that they're A LOT and not all of us have even finished our blog posts themselves yet. The Peter Elbows method was very interesting though, and I think it would've been really helpful if we were to comment on 5 or fewer of our group members' entries so that it felt like we were choosing something we actually cared about or had an opinion on to comment.

So... As I said, the blog has helped me discover how I like to write most. It also helped me see how horrible I am at sticking to word limits. This post is probably way over 500 already. I'm finished though. So yeah. Good bye!