Blog Discourse Essay

A few years ago I kept a blog but got out of the habit once I started college. When we set up our blogs at the beginning of this course I was actually excited to start another one, albeit a bit wary to be writing more for academic purposes than therapeutic rambling. In retrospect, the blog turned out to be helpful and made typically mundane assignments more interesting.


Although I knew that anyone could stumble upon my blog and read what I had written, I tended to think of our class as my only audience. Since we were all answering the same prompts and reflecting on the same readings, I felt that what I wrote would predominately be read by my classmates and not random Internet wanderers. Furthermore, if someone not in our class happened to come across my blog I doubted they would find what I was writing interesting or understand the context in which it was written so I wrote specifically for the audience of our small class. Fortunately, catering to such an audience helped keep the tone and quality of my writing at an appropriate level. Knowing that my peers and professor would be reading this helped me keep perspective when I responded to blog prompts so that it (hopefully) never sounded too casual or too pretentious.


As the quarter progressed, I feel that my writing, as well as the degree of seriousness with which I responded to prompts, improved. In the beginning, especially with the early questions about Ceremony, I opted to rattle off answers for the sake of having a blog post rather than truly thinking about the question. My responses to the questions in the first Ceremony blog (about Tayo’s guilt over the drought and Auntie’s attitude) seem more like a regurgitation of the text than a thoughtful response. Compared with my later blogs about Ceremony, I tended to avoid applying my own insights or feelings about the text to my answers. Once I became more comfortable with the process of writing in the blog (as well as the book itself) my responses became more of a balance of answering and applying.

I feel that my strongest posts were the Coulombe summary and the response to The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. When I wrote these posts, I felt engaged in a way that I hadn’t when writing previous entries. These texts really interested me and I was excited to be able to offer my own take on the prompts as well as create a summary for Coulombe’s essay. My second blog response to readings in Ceremony were not as bland as my first; however, I did not feel it was my best post because I lacked the motivation that propelled me through the Coulombe/TLRATFIH prompts. While Ceremony interested me, I felt more of an emotional response to Alexie’s work which made my writings for those topics stronger and clearer.


The comments I received on my posts were an interesting aspect of the blog experience. While I felt it was a great avenue for the class to get fresh perspectives on their writing and provide constructive criticism, I feel that we all (including myself) sugar-coated our comments a little too much to provide any truly helpful feedback. If there was any constructive criticism in the comments, it was weak at best and sandwiched between “Great job!” and “Great work!” – which wasn’t particularly helpful seeing as how there is always room for improvement. However, I feel that the simple act of commenting contributed to the learning process in that feedback of any kind can prompt someone to continue writing. Be it good or bad, I think the curiosity we all had to read each others work and see what others thought of our own motivated us to keep up with the blog and put effort into it (or at least it did for me). There were a few times when I received a comment telling me I could have developed an idea further, or that my answer was not one they had thought of before. These observations did stay in my mind the next time I wrote in the blog which helped steer me in the right direction.


Overall, keeping this blog throughout the duration of the class was a fun take on what could have been dull or routine assignments. Because I had a blog prompt waiting to be written after each reading, I felt compelled to really understand what I was reading and (eventually) tie that understanding in with my own thoughts and opinions. As such, the blog did help my writing in that it yanked me out of a strictly academic environment and encouraged me to blend together personal opinion and critical thinking.