Tuesday morning. 8:30 AM. Critical Thinking & Writing I. My first thoughts were…
(or please kill meow)
I’m sitting in my class on the first day of class trying to fully pay attention and listen to my professor eagerly go through her course syllabus. She’s talking about all the papers we will be writing throughout the course, when suddenly she gets to what will be our last assignment, a Blog “Revision.” I got pretty excited when my professor said this was going to be my final assignment because I thought I would be able to end the class with a piece of cake assignment that would definitely boost my grade.
Now that it has come to the time of me actually writing this blog, I know I was so wrong. It’s actually pretty funny how wrong I was about this assignment.
Laughing through the pain.
What was I thinking?? People probably think I’m just being over dramatic, as more times than not I am, and saying something like this:
But this time I swear on our friendship (as I often refer to as “soof”) that this time I am not being dramatic at all!
The main reasons I think I found this assignment to be difficult is because…
- All my schooling career, including this course, I have been taught how to write in a formal way. However, this assignment requires me to write in a much more casual manner.
- I would have to cut my roughly twenty-five hundred word Synthesis Paper to around just a thousand words.
Blog writing process…
Like any other assignment, the first thing I do is print out the instructions. You might thinking “what a waste of paper” because it is virtually available to me online, but I like to physically write my thoughts and ideas out on a piece of paper before I even begin typing. Since this assignment is to make my Synthesis Paper into a blog post, I first started by looking at my Synthesis Paper thesis. I decided the main gist of my claim is that technology positively aids students of today when communicating with teachers, friends and family members, or even themselves. So because I clearly have three targeted subjects, I began writing an outline in my notebook (because like I said I like to handwrite ideas beforehand) all the ideas that to me are most important when referring to my topic in my paper.
The first aspect of this assignment I wrote was my “About” page. I started by writing just a small like blurb about my life, but I thought it was too boring. So I turned to my handy dandy buddy… GOOGLE!! When in doubt, Google it out…
I ended up immediately finding Melyssa Griffen website (a blog nonetheless) to be extremely useful because she writes to teach online entrepreneurs and bloggers how to make their passions popular and profitable. The post that specifically came in use to me was her “How to Write a Killer About Me Page for Your Blog.” How perfect, huh? Don’t worry, it gets better! After reading her ways to write a successful About Me page, she includes a worksheet that lists what she discussed in her post in nine questions for readers like me who are visual learners. So, of course I printed and filled it out, is that even a question?!
After writing a much more successful “About” page, I returned back to my main blog post. From the notes I outlined from my original paper, I began typing a shortened version of it that I would use as my main blog post. However, it still sounded way too formal to me. I am a failure. How could I fix this tragedy? I remembered something that my dear old friend Bob the Builder always said:
So I began adding images and forms of media to my post. Finally, it started to sound and look much more like a real blog. Once I started to add these things, I began to change the style of the text to fit the media properly. By doing this, my sassy, corky personality was portrayed more prominently than in my previous attempts of writing my main blog post.
Yes, it took me many drafts, and I had some moments like this:
I know I complained a lot about how difficult this assignment was, but I also really had fun with the creativity aspect of the assignment. At first, I didn’t like how different this assignment is to anything else I have ever written for an English class. But now looking back at it, I enjoyed it not being as dry and boring as the rest of the papers I have written for class. So I guess we’ll just have to see if I did as good of a job as I think I did!
