I definitely under-estimated the process of blogging. My essay was relatively long, so it took a lot of work to decide which pieces I wanted in my blog and which pieces I needed to remove. I stressed a lot over this aspect because I didn’t want my message to be lost. That’s the most important part! Eventually I was able to break my blog into pieces (in the same way that my essay is broken up into paragraphs), and write about the most important aspects.
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Going along with this transformation, I also decided that I didn’t want my blog to be simply filled with the same essay sources as my synthesis. Although my initial sources did their job well, I didn’t want my blog to be an exact (shortened) replica of my synthesis. I wanted to try out my ability to be a true blogger. While I did use one of my previous sources, the majority were found through more broad research of my topic. I looked for other sources, people, videos, and statistics that helped to further prove my points. I did this because I wanted my blog to not only have a more stimulating aura, but also because I didn’t want to lose reader’s interest.
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Because I’ve never written a blog, I didn’t want it to fall flat and be dull. Because I wrote on a fairly serious topic, sometimes the language can get a bit boring. I had to find a good medium between humor while not completely losing the seriousness of the issue. I added a video, gifs, pictures and links in order to keep readers attention. I think the gifs in particular helped the flow of my blog. They added humor but also served to present the “main point” of each paragraph in a more approachable and entertaining way than my words could have. That is one of the aspects of blogging that I think makes it so powerful. There are multiple avenues for understanding through many different forms of expression. It makes the consumption of information available to larger audiences, and a lot more fun!
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Throughout my education I was conditioned to write in a very analytical and professional way, and I liked it. I’ve written personal narratives before, but that was the closest I had ever gotten to writing something in my own voice. Because of this, I struggled a lot with figuring out how to write in a way that didn’t completely remove my style as an analytical writer, but also was true to me. To do this I tried to use little moments of dialogue with the reader throughout the blog. I also tried to make each sentence more casual and less formal.
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After the stress surpassed, I began to really enjoy the process of blogging. Weirdly, I liked not having to be so serious with my writing. It was therapeutic to be able to express my thoughts in a different way. The thing I liked most about this assignment was that it showed the versatility of writing. Duh, there’s a lot of different genres of writing, but I think that taking a piece of academic/professional writing and turning it into something quite the opposite (style wise) is pretty powerful. I never thought that I would be able to make such a controversial topic humorous and unrestrictive. Blogging allows for flexibility and provides useful elements that an academic essay simply doesn’t. So while I will continue to work on and enjoy my formal essays, I can definitely say that blogging is my new favorite type of writing. 🙂