First thing’s first, I’m not a fan of writing. I’ve never particularly liked it, and the abandonment of easy and straightforward five-paragraph essays in favor of more complicated and lame essays with critical thinking involved added to my displeasure.
This assignment wasn’t fun the first time around, but I thought that formatting it into a blog would be pretty easy. I imagined that I was describing the subject to a friend and tried that out. I quickly realized that I speak way too casually and summarize the points way too much for that to be my blog posting for an English class. I’m way too hip for my own good. It’s a gift and a curse.
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I then tried just gradually changing the vocab in each sense to make it more “youth friendly.”
That just didn’t feel right so I just decided to write it from scratch. Naturally, I decided to take an hour social media/ping pong break before embarking on the final leg of my blogging voyage.
I tried to find a happy medium between casual and formal language but too often found that I would be too formal in one sentence and too casual in another. I had to make an active effort to balance out my tone.
I also found out pretty quickly that I had to force myself to find visual aids for my writing to fit the accepted blog model since I had never written with visual aids before. Actually finding the visual aids was very enjoyable because it felt like I was just scrolling a social media feed looking for funny gifs and memes that went with what I was talking about.
Another discovery that I quickly made was that using internet sources was SO much easier than quoting from a book.
I just copied and pasted my quotes and then hyperlinked all my sources. It was INCREDIBLY easy to do so.
The formatting for blogs differs SO much from traditional essay writing. Aside from the changes in tone, use of visual media, and overall length, the format of the words themselves is also quite different. Instead of traditional paragraphs, I wrote in groups of a few sentences usually surrounded by a gif or other piece of visual media relating to the topic or tone of the sentence grouping.
One aspect I really dug about the blog was the sources I found online. For the essay, I was forced to use sources from the book. For my blog, however, I was free to surf the web and find my own sources. I’ve always enjoyed writing fact-based research pieces more than my own opinion. Quite simply, it’s easier and is more convincing to me personally as a reader. I was able to quote studies done by the U.S. Census Bureau, Forbes, and other respected sources.
I had to rethink my argument from my essay, too. At the time I was writing the blog, my grade and feedback for the essay the blog post was based off had been released. I had to revise the source material by improving the fluidity of the ending and putting a little more thought into the analysis.
Overall, this was actually pretty enjoyable as far as English homework goes. It was interesting to write for a teacher in my own voice, and not trying to sound more well-informed than I am and more formal than I ever actually speak to my peers. Searching for and adding the visuals was probably my favorite part of the whole process. I know I like visual aids when I read, so it was cool to pick those out for my readers. I look forward to writing blogs in the future instead of long, boring pieces of writing. RIP essays, and good riddance!