Blog of a non-blogger: Blog reflection

I am not a blogger. This, however, is being said by a girl with a facebook, a private Xanga site, and now a Blogger site. I have never been one for putting myself out there for everyone to see. The Xanga is a private messaging board between my fiancé and me, and if anyone were to find the password, I am not sure whether the reader would throw up from our cutsie posts before or after I died of humiliation. The blogger site for me was always just for the class. I know that other people can find it, and may have, but I could not imagine someone out there really wanting to read my post on my cottage, or on endangered species. That is not to say I did not enjoy writing the posts – there were many I really enjoyed, I just could not see people outside of our colligate atmosphere caring much what I had to say on these topics. Because of this, I really geared my posts toward my classmates. I wrote them with the impact and discussion they would spur in mind. I always looked forward to receiving feedback in the form of comments.

The first post we wrote, I received nine very positive comments which to me evened out the ridiculous amount of time I spent writing that snippet that I did not even use in my reflective essay. However, the fact that many assignments were blog posts made them somehow less important in my mind. For example, though I always tried on the rhetorical strategy posts, had I known I were directly handing a copy into you, I do not doubt that my grammar and writing style would have changed drastically. I think those are my middle of the road posts – the daily assignments that I tried on, but did not really pour into.

My actual papers that were posted to the blog, however, were taken with just as much seriousness as any other paper. Those are my best posts – it is obvious that hours were poured into them. It is a strange balance, even to me. Being forced to look back through these posts is funny for me – it is so easy to see what took time and effort and what (like the examples of good and bad rhetoric) was left to the last minute. That post and my Cradle to Cradle post just were not great. The thing that I find slightly annoying is that even the posts I spent VERY little time on garnered many of the same positive comments that the ones I really spent time and effort on. This cold, I suppose, be taken as a great compliment to my writing style, but I would take it more to mean that people want to be reserved in their negative feedback when they then have to meet face to face. Maybe if this were a complete online course (which I think it easily could be) people would be more truthful in their blog comments.

Looking at my comments to others, I think I can be harsh. I know I can be harsh, actually. I appreciate constructive feedback and want people to say, “This is great, BUT…” so that is what I do for other people. I do not know if that is what other people like, though, so I have wondered throughout the class if others view me as judgmental or too harsh. However, I feel that a lot of what I had to say was very constructive, and, I can only hope, somewhat helpful to my classmates.

Overall I think I did a fairly good job on my blog. I think it is a fair representation of the amount of time I put into this class – it shows that sometimes I did not enjoy the readings as much (Cradle to Cradle) and sometimes I had a lot to say (Omnivore’s Dilemma). This setup did help me work on my rhetoric as well – I knew my classmates were going to read my posts and I knew if I did not express myself well that they would not agree with what I was saying. This forced me to push my rhetorical boundaries and expand my writing.