Blogging is not my thing. At. All. When I saw this was the last assignment of my Critical Thinking and Writing 1 course I thought, piece of cake. Oh how horribly wrong I was. After compressing my seven page, two thousand and two hundred word synthesis essay into a blog post, I about had a mental breakdown. Not really. But seriously, it’s a lot harder than it sounds. First of all, transitioning from formal writing to casual writing is incredibly difficult. I had to imagine myself speaking to one of my peers about my topic of interest during a casual conversation, which for me, entails a lot of sass and sarcasm. Every sentence I typed I questioned myself, as it is completely unusual for me to write a complete assignment in such a laid back tone. Yikes. It was definitely an uncomfortable task, but one I appreciated as I have never done something like this before. Blogging, ha.
Next I was forced to pick and choose which parts of my essay I wanted to include. I had to be sure to prove my point, but also not leave out any major details, which was a seemingly impossible task. The process of stripping my essay down to its skeleton outline and deciding which arguments are the strongest was tedious, and brought with it a great amount of frustration. After choosing the direction in which I wanted to take this blog, I had to tackle the next obstacle of how to further simplify and compress my ideas. DOES IT EVER END? I guess in reality, yes, it does end but, pray for me, this was a nightmare.
Because I am passionate about the topic of my blog, the challenge of simplifying my ideas bothered me in many ways because I feel like I couldn’t include everything I wanted to without it becoming more of an article than a blog. But that’s the beauty of a blog: it can be simple. Simple does not mean any less powerful, it just means make it short, sweet, and get to the point. Because of this, I had more freedom to use my voice in this blog post compared to a formal essay. I could add my own thoughts as they came to me, pull from outside sources other than the ones I had to synthesize in class, and my tone could be adjusted to provide a more light and not-so-serious environment for me to share my views.
Best part of this blogging experience? The fact that I was able to freely express myself and share with the readers a little bit of my personality. I feel like I got to share a side of myself that is masked in the process of formal writing, and readers could connect to a bit of comic relief in the seriousness of the subject I chose to discuss. It also gave me some of my voice back. In formal writing, it is very unusual to incorporate personal views or experiences using first person. Throughout my schooling career, it seems as though using pronouns was greatly discouraged in writing of any sort, other than fictional writing exercises or personal narratives which became more rare as the years went on. So, to have an assignment in which personalization is encouraged threw me off. I wasn’t sure when to use pronouns, and constantly found myself beginning to write in third person and having to go back and edit, edit, edit. But, I really enjoyed being able to challenge myself in finding the balance between using formal and casual tones, along with making my blog unique to my own personal views while incorporating the views of others. Oh, and did I mention the gifs? Fun shtuff.
-FH