IN my CTW class, my assignment was to recreate my formal analysis essay into a blog, which you can read here. I basically translated my work from academic language to language I would actually use. I thought the end result was quite nice. It felt more personal to me because it sounded like me, it was my voice, rather than a fake academic language that I used to get a good grade(It worked too).
I have found that posting on blogs is significantly different than writing an essay. That may seem pretty obvious to most people, but I have never really done it so I never knew first hand how different it is. It is nice to be able to use language that you wouldn’t be able to in an academic essay. It is much less pressure to sound smart, which lets you really focus on your topic.
What I did to rewrite my essay as a blog post was just open it in a document and have a blank one by its side. I literally went sentence by sentence, cut out what was not necessary for my argument, and translated the rest into how I would actually say it as if I were talking to someone. This is what I like about blog posts. They seem more genuine because they are not made up with all this fancy language, they are more like a conversation than anything else. So I added a little bit more of my own opinions and observations on my topic. I transformed an education essay about education to a relaxed casual post by saying what I wanted to say and not dressing up the language. I feel as though I could get my point across much better in the blog post versus the essay.
When I first discovered the Internet, I would read a lot of blogs about random things. I thought they were interesting, but I kind of lost touch with that when I grew up a little more. But for this project, I started reading them again to get a feel for the styles and strategies used, and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. A blog has so much more power to reach out to people than an essay. It can connect with your readers. You can tell a story, a joke, or anything that you would say in real conversation.
In my previous blog post, I included a story about me almost taking a gap year that was not in my original essay. I did not include the story in my original essay because it would not of been appropriate. However, I was able to include it in my blog post because it went along with my argument and was appropriate. I feel as though this is what blogging is about; your story.
If blogs were only focused on academics, no one would read them. But they are not, they are personal, they have a human touch and a real audience. Stories are often included in blogs because they add a factor of excitement and they also connect the author and the audience on a deeper level. The first thing you see when you google blog is the blog.com and the tagline “What is your story?”
Well here is my blog, and I will be sharing my stories with you. The great thing about posting a blog like this is that, even if your stories are bad, you still get to express them and yourself. If you have no readers who cares. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get to share yourself with people, whether they are interested or not.
This is how I felt writing this.
