The Meta Post: A Summary of My Growth in the Blogging Experience

            Our assignment: write one blog post a week during the semester. It seems like a fairly simple task to accomplish. Yet the amount of thought that went into these posts turned out to be much more than I had ever anticipated. Looking back, I think my style of blogging has definitely changed, but not necessarily all good changes. Two changes that stood out to me when reading back through all of my posts were my analysis of articles, and use of quotes from the article, and my use of questions to trigger responses.

In my very first post, A Jobless Nation, I decided to quote the author of an article I had read. I took an entire block of quote, saying that the author “ ‘understands that we all want paychecks—or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money can buy us. But do we all really want jobs?’” This year we talked a lot about analyzing quotes in class. One key rule that I will always remember is to never leave a quote standing alone. You have to analyze your quote. In this particular post, I did not do a sufficient job of analyzing quotes. I may have thought that I did, but I clearly did not. Another rule I remember was to only quote what you are prepared to analyze. No offense to myself, but I don’t believe I was prepared to analyze almost two whole lines of text. But then as the semester went on, I regretfully never showed any growth in this department. I never really took a chance in trying to analyze many direct quotes. All I did was pretend like I had by summarizing the points of an article pertaining to the topic I was discussing. In one of my later posts, Television: Exaggeration at its Finest… I simply stated that “according to one article, the show helps people be more accountable for themselves in terms of their workouts and their diets,” instead of actually taking a quote and using it to make my case stronger. I did this same thing in many of my posts. I would read an article pertaining to my topic and summarize. I have now learned my lesson that this is not an effective strategy, and I think I should work on that in the future when I am blogging.

Although I was unable to grow in terms of analyzing evidence in my blogs, I think I did grow in terms of the questions I asked at the end of my posts. In one of my first posts, The Price of Modern Society, which I happened to think was one of my strongest, I asked, “What has made Starbucks this huge phenomenon? Why is it that we allowed Starbucks to impact our culture so much?” These questions are way too general. There is a wide range of answers I could have gotten that had nothing to do with my post, simply because I did not as a specific enough question. However, in my later posts, I think I was able to come up with more specific questions that triggered better quality responses. For example, in my post, When Athletes Burn Out, I asked, “Why are the expectations now so high for young athletes to perform at a high level?” This question was a lot more specific. I didn’t ask a general question like “Why do athletes burn out?” Instead I took a much more specific approach and asked why expectations are set so high for young athletes.

I have learned through the types of posts I have put up the kinds of things that I value. For instance, I know based on my posts that I value social aspects of American life. I knew this before but I confirmed that I value education and competition. The experience of looking back over all my posts allows me to realize the things that I truly feel passionate about. It also shows me that in the future I should look more towards these topics to talk about in my posts. Overall, the experience of blogging has been a very interesting one, and I definitely look to use this experience to improve upon my writing skills in the future.