Blog Discourse

When I first heard of the blog assignments, I was skeptical. Not only had I never heard of blogger.com, I’ve never experienced writing any form of my thoughts in a “blog.” Needless to say, writing my first blog entries was an interesting experience. As I got more comfortable with blog posting, I realized that it wasn’t that terrible—it was actually a very helpful tool in my analysis of literature.

As I look back at my earlier posts, I can definitely see different qualities to my more recent ones. My earlier posts seemed more structured than my later ones. I also focused more on literary aspects of the works than of my opinions of the meanings. I think this was mainly due to the fact that earlier in the quarter, I did not feel quite as comfortable expressing my opinions about literature. Since I knew the entire class was going to read and comment on my analysis, I think my blogs had a much more professional feel. It was intimidating knowing that people I hardly knew were going to read and comment on my personal thoughts of a literary work.

As I got more and more comfortable with the blogs, I put more and more of my own opinions in the blogs than before. I could definitely tell that the tone of my later blog postings was more casual than my other posts. Because of this, I think my best blog post was “The Flea” by John Donne. It sounds a lot more professional than my later posts. I took more time writing that posts than any others because I enjoy poetry a lot more, and I wanted impress the people reading it. Later in the quarter, on the other hand, I didn’t spend as much time on my writing style and spent more time on my opinions about the works. For this reason, I thought my worst blog post was my comments on “Catastrophe.” I really had no opinions about it and didn’t really enjoy the work. Overall, though, I’m satisfied with my blog postings because they helped me sort out my thoughts about the piece of work, which I believe is the point of these assignments.

Writing and reading other’s blog posts really helped me through the process of
understanding the stories and poems. It allowed me to sort out my thoughts about the readings, as well as forced me to take another look to find the deeper meanings. The blog posts also forced me to incorporate literary concepts we learned in class which I otherwise probably wouldn’t have thought about as much. Reading other people’s blog posts helped me a lot as well. I gained multiple perspectives on the reading, which made me look beyond the literal meaning of the work to see their point of views.

Another way I gained new insight on the readings was through the comments people left me. Especially if they asked me a question, it urged me to think a little more about what I was trying to say or what I believed. I tried to do this on other people’s blogs—to make them think a little harder as well. But even though I tried to cause a little more thinking for others, I think more of my comments were based on agreeing with other’s thoughts because the majority of the time, I really did agree. I didn’t know what else to say to further help them understand so I could work on that a little more.

Writing in the blogs helped me understand the readings we read a lot better. They pushed me to think a little deeper about the works and helped me sort out my thoughts. Sharing my ideas with the class and hearing ideas from the class allowed me to gain new ideas on how to analysis different texts.