Blog Retrospective

Blogging for me hasn't been an entirely new experience. I currently have a personal blog, although it has been quite a while since I have made a post. I enjoy the process of writing my thoughts for an audience, even if it may be for just a few people.

As far as blogging for this class, I think the thing that benefited me the most was that it made me have to write regularly. Even though I am an English major, this last semester has not involved very much writing other than the blogs and assignments for this class, so having to blog kept me a bit more in "writing mode" than I would otherwise have been. I think the process of writing is always a bit daunting at first, but blogging made me have to continually push through my initial resistance, and often, once I began to write, ideas would begin to flow. William Stafford says that "a writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." How true that is! I think that is the beauty of blogging, or any form of writing--it enables one to discover and digest ideas even while trying to articulate what to say in the first place. I definitely enjoyed writing about some of the articles more than others, but even with the more difficult ones I was forced to have to at least find the main ideas and expound upon what I did understand. This also forced a closer reading and enabled me to grasp through a second reading ideas that at first seemed confusing. That's not to say that I don't think some of the authors used an unnecessary amount of academic-ese, but I suppose that comes with the territory of higher education. I also think it would have been interesting to discuss in class what we had written in our blogs. Overall, blogging helped me practice my writing skills and produce ideas that I would not have thought of had I not set out to express them. I am not sure whether I will continue to blog or not, but I know that I will (hopefully for the rest of my life) continue to write. Blogging has reminded me of the value of having a regular "appointment" with my keyboard or journal because unless it is a discipline, the urgent (and even petty) things of life will crowd out the important habit of writing. And this discipline is not just a tool for personal enrichment, but when used well, has the power to effect great change for good in the world.