Reflection

I don’t consider myself a blog reader and I used to hold the opinion that blogs are just dumbed down articles for people who can’t comprehend the full information. Well technically I’m a blogger and as I researched more about

Originally, this blog post was a behemoth of an essay. When I asked my friend to read it over, she sighed dramatically and groaned, “it’s literally a million pages long!” It was 8 pages. But, I will admit, my friends quick judgement on my paper was somewhat accurate as it was very long and not exactly a thrilling page turner.

Our assignment, a synthesis essay, involved relating different arguments that might not have straightforward links. I was given multiple PEER REVIEWED sources and was supposed to combine the to make one nice and tidy argument.

My brain doesn’t let me write nice and tidy arguments. According to my mom, I throw up the words and ideas onto the page and hope everything connects. I can often make readers have the following sort of reaction:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With a lot of time and effort I think I did a darn good job, but maybe I’m a little biased. Despite my self-evaluation, it was very long and not the most interesting read, so I’m sparing you all the pain and just sharing the interesting parts.

I know, how noble of me.

 

Instead, I rewrote a specific part of the argument as this blog post. My original essay included everything from unemployment on account of new technology, to how chess can help our economy develop, to utilizing community college to educate our society. It covered a very broad range of topics and needed “a million pages” to establish my argument. Let’s just say it took the reader along for a wild ride and there’s no way that all of it could be “tamed” to fit into a short blog post.

 

So, I waived goodbye to 7/8th’s of my masterpiece, and narrowed in on the importance of accepting a technology based world.

By narrowing my argument, I was also able to focus on reworking the language to fit the tone of a blog post. Instead of using phrases like “post-secondary educational opportunities” like I used in my original essay, I simplified it to “college” to fit the style and tone of a blog post.

I know pretty exciting stuff.

Blogs aren’t really the place to write dense heavy paragraphs with thesaurus language. Instead, the tone of a blog is meant to be much more accessible and appeal to an audience with short attention spans. This meant that in addition to reworking the language used, I had to condense my argument into more easily read blog paragraphs. 

I thought I’d have a lot of trouble “translating” the language and argument from my original essay, but I found it to be surprisingly easy and almost fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Well, maybe not quite fun…but prior to trying it for myself, I had an unmerited condescending attitude towards blogs. I actually really enjoyed my first taste of blogging, maybe it’s not so bad after all.