Every week in my blog post, the material I am posting about is very specific to that week of study in class, and so every blog post comes out radically different than the week before it. After reading through each of my posts through the semester so far, I discovered that I really tend to use the blog as a medium for thinking out loud and asking questions of my classmates that came up while I was reading. In class, I don’t have these questions ready to ask, but writing the blog seems to provoke more questions for me, hence the reason they mostly end in questions to be answered in the comments on my posts.
Over the past 5 weeks, I have noticed my posts getting shorter and shorter, and I think this is due to the fact that as the semester has progressed, my life has become busier and busier. However, I don’t want to my work to suffer because of this, and am going to make a conscious effort to make sure my blogs are longer and more detailed.
I think that with every week I try to focus on some smaller aspect of the novel/ article I’m working with to make sense of just a small part of the text. If I were to try to dissect a larger problem/theme, I would get too overwhelmed with it, and end up having an extremely long post.
The week we had to work on Fernando Botero’s artwork on the Abu Ghraib pictures was my favorite post. I really liked looking at a picture and trying to find meaning in the smallest aspects of the picture. A picture can mean many things all at once, and different things to each person who views it. I liked writing about what I thought about these paintings, and I also enjoyed looking at which paintings other people looked at and reading what they thought.
What surprised me when I was re-reading my work, was the first post about 1 dead in attic. I now wish I had picked two different stories to focus on, since the issue I first had a problem with now seems irrelevant. I think this is partly due to the fact that it was the first week, and I hadn’t finished the book at the time.
Overall, I think that after this exercise, I will try to make sure that my blog posts are longer, and more analytical to the topic at hand.
Hi Kerrie,
ReplyDeleteI think it's great that you use the blog as a medium for you to talk through your thinking. It happens for me too that I think of different things while I'm writing that hadn't come up in class. That seems like a great reason to do the blogs. If we can get more out of the class discussion by taking the time to share our thoughts in writing and with our classmates then that makes it a very useful tool.
PS- I don't think you really need to worry about length so much. I think it's more about the information you give in what you do write!