PRE-REVISION
I’ll be honest, when I was told that our last English assignment was to convert a synthesis essay that we had previously written into a blog post I thought, this is going to be easy. I mean, I had already done the hard work by writing the actual paper. Now all I had to do was paraphrase it in a voice that mimicked the way I usually spoke.
But this was easier said than done.
CHANGES
Going into this assignment, I knew I wanted my writing to have a balance between my personal voice and my academic one; I wanted to appeal to people, but also earn their respect as a capable writer. But when it got down to actually making the revisions, everything that I ended up rewriting sounded just as academic as the original paper. I realized that I had grown so accustomed to writing for school assignments, that I had in some ways forgotten how to write something more personal.
It took me a few tries, but I slowly managed to weave more and more of my voice into my writing. I used a first person point of view, employing words such as “me” and “our”, which definitely helped me connect what I was writing to myself as well as to my readers. I also included more of my own commentary/opinion into the writing. Blogs, after all, give authors the freedom to be very opinion-based, so I didn’t hold back in including my own thoughts.
Bolding and s p a c i n g were also notable features I added in. I used bolding to highlight key words that I thought emphasized important ideas or points that I was making, and used spacing to divide my essay into shorter paragraphs that would make it easier for readers to follow. These extra spaces also gave me more opportunities to use visual elements to enhance my writing, which brings me to my next point.
Visuals/media usage was probably the most enjoyable part of this assignment. They completely changed the mood of the piece by adding a more playful and interactive aspect to the writing. I used GIFs, pictures, and even a video at the end to give readers an opportunity to take a break from all the words on the screen. Most importantly, however, I used hyperlinks, which allowed me to create a conversation between my writing and other sources on the web. I was able to link readers to specific word definitions, to other online articles, and to institutions and people mentioned in my writing, all of which helped establish the credibility of my arguments.
One of the most difficult changes that I had to make, however, was cutting down the length of the article. My original essay was almost 3X as long as it needed to be, so I had to focus on key elements that I knew I wanted to include and get rid of the rest. What I essentially ended up doing was keeping what I felt were my strongest sources/quotes and arguments, and getting rid of the other more “secondary” backup paragraphs. I found that this allowed me to make my argument more concise and focused, which is probably the writing style most blog-readers are accustomed to reading.
Though I made all of these changes, it was important to me that my academic voice was still prevalent. This blog is, after all, a kind of writing portfolio for my CTW essays, so I wanted to make sure I still included its more “scholarly” elements. For example, I chose to keep a lot of my metacommentary, simply because I found that it always added clarification to the points I was making. I also employed the use of a lot of typical essay transitions because I liked the sound and flow it gave to my writing.
“It’s about balance”
REFLECTION AND FUTURE GOALS
In sum then, the assignment was both a challenging and enjoyable experience. While I’ll continue to work on improving in my academic essay-writing abilities, I’d also like to practice writing in a more personal style. Hopefully publishing my work on this blog will help me reach that point.
Side note: for those of you who are interested, here’s a helpful article that talks about how to jumpstart your own blog on WordPress.
Thanks for reading!
Media Credits
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