Reflecting on our blog

This course on blogging has stretched me as a person in so many ways and given me a fantastic opportunity to write as much as possible! I remember how excited I was when I first realized that we were doing something as fun as blogging as part of our syllabus.

I was frustrated in the beginning though because I was constantly rehearsing for our drama practical exams and did not have enough time to write extra blog posts when I really wanted to. It is for this reason that my productivity in terms of the blog started off relatively slowly. Luckily I am in a group where everyone takes their work quite seriously and works diligently. This meant that our group meetings generally went quite well even though there were differences in opinion on occasion. It also meant that the work load in initially setting up our blog was shared. I am not the greatest fan of group work, but being part of such an enthusiastic group was refreshing and I learnt to be more tolerant of other people’s ideas instead of wanting to have only my ideas used.

I was amazed by the fact that once my head was in the blogging mode, it became so easy to think of story ideas. Most of my story ideas were things that I would think of at any random point during the day. I did not always blog on these ideas, but the things I did blog about were mostly personal experiences and therefore not really researched as such. My interview for the profile article went really well. Luckily for me, the girl I interviewed, Lara, is very easy to get along with and talkative. I was faced with the dilemma though of not having a story with a big Todorovian disruption of any sorts and no Proppian villains, as Lara had quite a happy first year. I tried very hard to keep the profile piece as interesting as possible with the little bit I had to work with, but was disappointed in the mark I got. This however encouraged me to work even harder on my other posts, be it the academic or extra ones.

After blogging for a while I found that I had fallen naturally into a kind of blogging genre writing style. My blog posts seem to have become quite casual and chatty rather than formal or academic. Because the extra posts only have to be 200 words long, I tended to write each post as one paragraph and when it came to actually writing an essay it felt like I had forgotten how to make paragraphs which gave me a good laugh! I definitely think that the genre restrictions of blogging did limit my writing in some ways. There were often times when I wanted to write about issues that I had thought about but it either didn’t relate to first year and therefore to our blog, or I was not necessarily comfortable sharing it on a blog with group members who know me personally. We had also originally decided to keep our blog quite light hearted, but I found that sometimes a post warranted a more serious tone, in which case I decided to go ahead and write in that tone so long as it was relevant to our blog’s theme. Another thing that I found strange was having to include these “academic” comments on other people’s blogs where we had to incorporate the different narrative theorists into our comments. In light of a blogging genre, it felt unnatural to me to post comments of a more academic nature.

Although my blogging experience as a whole was very positive I had and still have a huge issue with the ethics or lack of ethics involved in some of the other blogs. I enjoyed writing an opinion piece and I found it quite challenging as it is definitely something that is hard to write well. I was absolutely horrified though while reading through some of the opinion pieces on other blogs. There were a few xenophobic and homophobic posts that made my blood curdle because as far as I’m concerned they were bad enough to be classified as hate speech. This is unacceptable in the world of journalism and I do not believe that this is the aim of an opinion piece. I think it is fantastic that people have strong opinions about issues and that they are brave enough to voice them, but to be so blatantly homophobic on a public blog is not on. Click here to see an example of a homophobic blog post.

My group did not seem to have any problems in terms of writing ethically, but after emailing some of my blog posts to my mom yesterday just for her interest, I got quite a surprising reply. My mom who understandably is not familiar with blogging and does not understand the genre was quite offended by one of my posts as she felt that it was stereotyping, unfair and could even be regarded as gender hate speech. I was obviously quite shocked by my mom’s reply as my post was not intended to be stereotypical or hate speech, it was merely commenting on an incident which involved the inappropriate advances by an elderly man, and then relating that issue to a more general audience and appealing to that audience not to fall into the same trap. Although I don’t think my mom realizes the diary nature of blogs and she misunderstood the intention of my post, which was meant to have quite a strong impact, her reaction made me realize that one has to be very careful when writing and always make sure that your intention is clear and that you aren’t employing hate speech or stereotyping devices.

Overall this blogging course has allowed me to write extensively on a very wide range of topics and I would say that my personal growth was about eight. Thank you to Sim and Alette for a challenging but fun course, Hailey for all your help and to my great blog group!