Thoughts on Blogging

I didn't know anything about blogs before starting this assignment. I was nervous about it at first because I always feel self-conscious when other people read my writing. So the idea that all my classmates would be able to read whatever I wrote was kind of nerve-wrecking. It was the same kind of feeling I had when I was a little girl and was afraid that someone would find my diary. I think that knowing that others would be reading my blog did affect how much of my personality and opinions I let come out in my writing.

At first I had a hard time thinking of what to write about in my blog postings. I guess I was confused about who my audience was. I did a little experimenting; Sometimes I wrote as if I was just writing to myself and at other times I was writing as though I wanted the reader to know what was going on in my life. I also did a couple of reviews and commented on TV shows and movies. Depending on my mood I was able to decide who my audience was. It could have been myself, my classmates, or even all the citizens of the United States if I had chosen to address them.

I think that what is appealing about the blog is that it is what ever the writer wants it be. It can be used as a medium to express one's opinions to a wide audience or to a narrow audience as is evident in some blogs. Personally, I found that deciding who I wanted my audience to be allowed me to focus on the other basics of rhetoric (the purpose and technique or approach.) For example, my audience for this post is you, Karl. Therefore, my purpose was to successfully respond to your assignment "Revenge of the Blog," and in order to do that I thought that the most effective technique was to use paragraph form.

Not only does blogging give the writer a choice of what he or she wants to write about, but blogs also give readers a choice of which blogs he or she wants to read. For example, I only skimmed through other classmates' blogs and usually only stopped to read the short ones or the ones that had interesting pictures and/or titles. The blogs I liked most were Niko's and Stephanie's even though most of their posts were pretty long. They are both so honest and opinionated, which I found very entertaining. In regards to other classmates' blogs, there was a lot of variation in which every one chose to approach the whole blogging assignment. At times, I was kind of surprised at how personal some of the blogs were. I don't know if I could ever reveal so much about myself to strangers.

Although I found this whole blogging assignment to be kind of a pain, I do think that it is an appropriate assignment for this class because the purpose of this course is to write in various settings. What I can suggest is that if you decide to make blogging a requirement in your future classes, it might be a good idea to provide optional weekly prompts for those students who don't want to write about themselves.