Although blogging is fun, it is not as easy as it seems.
I am actually writing this blog for my college English class, and for our first assignment, the class was instructed to rewrite one of our academic essays for a more general audience.
My previous post, “Down with the Patriarchy,” was originally a lengthy essay about the discussions that revolve around the definitions of “success” and if college is necessary for one to be deemed “successful.” I presented different perspectives from various credible sources while also including my own thoughts on the matter. Success can mean going to college or not going to college and learning valuable life skills. However, my opinion on the matter is that success means having life skills, but one should still attend college to learn those important life skills in a short amount of time.
Although I liked the content of my essay, I admit that it’s a boring read, unless you actually enjoy reading analysis of various education and gender inequality essays. So for this assignment specifically, I had to cut down my lengthy nine page essay into a short blog post that only contained 600-1200 words — approximately three pages long.
Yes, challenge accepted.
For me, getting started was a simple task. In my original essay, I focused on many different definitions of success. However, I felt that my paragraph about what success meant for a woman was the most expressive and passionate, and I wanted to dive deeper into the topic by emphasizing the idea of feminism. I was off to a good start, but after this first step, things became a little more challenging.
What should I cut down? What should I keep? How can I make this essay have a more casual tone while maintaining an academic tone? How can I make this essay speak to a larger audience? Am I making my point clear? Will people care about what I have to say? These questions constantly popped into my head as I wrote my first blog post.
The first thing I did was rewrite my entire thesis to focus solely on the ideas of success for women in order to introduce the topic of feminism. My initial argument and current argument are completely different, and you never would have guessed that my blog post originated from that essay. Additionally, to make myself seem more personable and the content of my post more relatable, I also asked a lot of rhetorical questions to engage with my audience and to catch their attention.
I didn’t want my blog post to bore the reader, you, so I attempted to make my post visually appealing. For instance, I added pictures and videos, broke up long paragraphs into short ones, blocked quotes, italicized and bolded important points, and used hyperlinks to make my post more interesting and appealing to the eye. I loved how these visual aspects enhanced my main point of the post while also making my blog post look aesthetically pleasing. This is definitely my favorite part of blogging because it gives my post a more personable and artistic element that my academic essay could not offer to the reader.
Nonetheless, I do like the idea that a blog is my own personal space where I am free to express my own thoughts and opinions. But I also had to keep in mind that this blog is public and that someone could misinterpret my thoughts and criticize me for it. As I was writing my first post, I had to be aware of my own writing and constantly check if I was making any assumptions that my reader may not have known about. To fix this problem, I asked my peers and professor for feedback as well as asking myself, “Is this topic clearly defined?” And if not, I would either insert a hyperlink or define the concepts myself. This part of the blogging process was the most difficult for me because, similarly to writing an academic paper, I had to step back and critically reflect on my own work by questioning the assumptions I’ve made.
In conclusion, my first experience with blogging was fun yet difficult. Coming up with a topic was fun, but thinking about what to keep and what to cut from a lengthy research paper in order to turn it into a succinct blog post proved to be a bit challenging. I am hoping that my first attempt at blogging was not too bad and that I was able to help you understand feminism from a new perspective.
