First Semester Blogging

Blogging is a new thing to me this year. I pretty much had learned the definition of a blog about ten minutes before being told that I would have to make a blog for a grade in my sophomore English class. But, over the past several months, I have made eighteen blog posts and have grown quite fond of this style of writing. It can range from being casual (almost even conversational) all the way to highly formal and sophisticated works (i.e scientific theories). Looking back on all of these posts, it makes me wonder how my writing has gotten better by comparing my earlier blog posts to my more recent ones. Also, I write my blog posts on a lot of different topics and I am starting to think about where I get my various topics in the first place.

I think that my writing has actually gotten a bit better over this past semester. I think that by being given a required amount of word to meet has motivated me to be a more descriptive writer. The more in depth that I describe certain events or objects, the easier I find it to meet the required amount of words. Sometimes I have to cut out words to make the blog post stay under the four-hundred word maximum. When I was writing my post titled "Reading," I possibly overdid one sentence, but it was filled with a large amount of organized information. It goes, "The way that the author, Rick Riordan, incorporates Greek mythology (with all of its violent and action-filled stories) with our current society turns out to be really appealing to a young teenage boy." This sentence seems to just "paint a picture" in the reader's mind. The order of the words work well too. It makes the audience follow them sequentially. Starting with the author of the series. Then to Greek mythology. The "violent and action-filled stories" allows a reader, who is familiar with Greek mythology, to imagine the tales of Hercules and the various monsters that he battled with. After that sentence comes the phrase "turns out to be really appealing to a young teenage boy." Most people would most likely agree with me that teenage boys enjoy hearing violent stories of war and bloodshed on the the battlefield. The only way that I could have tried to make the sentence better was by adding the words, "such as myself," at the end. Just to prove the point of my blog that I had really loved reading those books.

The blog post minimal of three-hundred words to a maximum of four-hundred words is actually quite easy to meet. Because of my descriptive sentences, I will likely finish in less than one hour. When I feel that I have just finished a blog post a bit too easily, I will usually decide to edit it before putting it onto my blog page. Looking back at every time that I had done this, I would say that this small word requirement to meet has made me more critical about my writing. Whenever I look over one of my blogs, I always find at least two things to change before posting it. I either find a better way to make sentences and paragraphs sound better and "flow" more easily, or if I find myself abusing a word (in two or more consecutive sentences the word will appear more than once), I will change a few of them into a word that better suites the sentence. I posted the blog called "Technological Evolution" to my blog right after I saw a TED video in English class about the exponential accelerating rate of technological advancements. The video just completely "blew me away." My mind was racing so fast that I needed to calm down a bit in order to comprehend what the man from the video said. Once I had an understanding, then I started to make a few predictions of what this might mean for the future. "I watch a few science fiction movies from time to time thinking that some are completely unrealistic. But, when I saw the robot dog thing, I slowly started to think of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Terminator. Could the "age of machine" really be real? And if so, how close are we to reaching it?" These were the exact words that came to my mind at that moment I made my frightening "prophecy" for the future. I put them into my blog like this because I thought if this was the best way I can organize my thoughts so they can start to make sense to me when my mind was speeding through too many ideas at once, then it should possibly make even more sense to a person that is fully concentrated on reading my blog. On the other hand, repetitive words are easier to spot out and fix. In "Alameda Weather," I wrote "I have not been enjoying this very awkward behaving weather. It can be so unpredictable that news weather reporters are completely off with their morning forecast." Originally, I made the simple mistake of by saying "...the news weather reporters are completely off with their morning weather forecast." That would bring the total use of the word "weather" to three in only two sentences. I decided to remove the word from between "morning" and "forecast" because I guess that it is implied that a weather reporter would give a forecast about the weather.

By looking back on all of my blog posts, I have noticed one clear fact. My blog has a lot of varying topics. I guess that I would have to thank my overactive imagination for allowing me to think up of different things to write about. But then I started to wonder how the topics even came to my mind in the first place. It turns out that everything that I blogged about was either an event that recently occurred, or a thought that was lingering within my head for the past twenty-four hours. This discovery led me right to another. I seem to write my blog posts better when the topic sits in my mind for a while , but still remains a little "fresh." Two perfect examples of this would be "Christmas?" and "PARTAY!!! (Yes, I know that I misspelled it)." I wrote "Christmas?" because it was just days before the beginning of winter vacation, and my parents brought up that my brother and I had not asked for anything that we wanted as a gift. And it made me want to find out why I was not in the "holiday spirit" when Christmas was right around the corner. Instead, I just wrote about it, and I think it made me reach a conclusion on why I was not so cheerful. On the other hand, "PARTAY!!! (Yes, I know that I misspelled it)," is about the highly entertaining day at the park my friends and I had for one of their birthdays. The whole thing was written in the past tense because the birthday party was an event that already happened over the past weekend. I was still very excited form that day, so in order to release some of that bliss feeling so I can concentrate on school, I made it into a blog post.

I am still yet a beginner when it comes to blogging. I would say that I do enjoy doing it because it allows people to write in many different styles. By seeing how far I have come in the blogging world. In the post "Reading," I found a sentence that allowed me to see that my writing was becoming a whole lot more descriptive (compared to my previous school years). I also learned that every time I go over something that I wrote, I will always find something to fix. Even though the usual suspects are repetitive words and awkward sentence ordering, I find ways to improve them. Another thing that I acknowledged was that I get my wide variety of blog post topics is because different things happen everyday. And those events have an influence on what I think and choose to write about. As the school and I slowly start to transition into the new semester, I hope that my blogging will continue to expand its wide range of topics and still maintain a good quality of grammar and fluency.