Bloggin'

I definitely enjoyed doing an online reading journal this semester. Granted, it was easier and more fun to do  during the first quarter, when I had more time to take an interesting idea and actually develop it. Nowadays, I haven't had much of a chance to blog; although I think about doing it a lot, I never actually get around to it. But, instead of my laziness, I'll talk about the things I actually liked and disliked about blogging during 20th Century Novels.

One of the things I loved was being able to write about whatever I wanted; If there was something that I thought was super fascinating during class, but no one else found remotely interesting, I could write about it on my blog and people could choose to read it or not. There were a lot of things that kept me thinking even when I was outside of class, and it was really neat to be able to continue the conversation (at least with myself).

The second thing that was nice about the blogs was that this format is very informal, and I felt comfortable writing about things that I actually thought were important. Or not, as it turned out. I one wrote a blog about Kafka being born on my birthday, which isn't the most life-threatening information, but I thought it was kinda cool. In this setting, I could write about something like that, and I could also used the word "kinda." Also, not only was it nice to have freedom to write informally, it was good practice to write informally. In our lives, we write texts and emails, etc., or we write academic essays. The thing is that there's nothing that's really in-between. There's really no forum for casual writing that still has to be coherent, and a blog is basically that forum.

One thing I didn't like about the blogs was that, towards the end of the semester, I would always forget to do them. Since it wasn't something that I necessarily had to "turn in" or anything like that, and there wasn't a specific "assignment" for this blog on this night, etc., sometimes I would realize that the blog was still an assignment, and that perhaps I should write one of those sometime soon. However, this was also a good thing for a few reasons. One is that one of the things I hate is writing when I have absolutely no inspiration. I find that it comes out very forced and gross-sounding. With the blogs, this still applied if I needed one or two more posts, and still had nothing to write about. But if I did have inspiration, no matter what time of the day, I could just jot the ideas down into a blog and publish it. That was a really great feeling because I felt like I had something so important to say that it would get published immediately. This isn't true, but it's how I felt. :D

All in all, Mr. Mitchell, I would recommend that you continue with the online journals next year. I enjoyed doing them, and there are so many good qualities that they have that encourage writing in a slightly unconventional way. As long as you realize, as you have, that there may be times throughout the school year where people may do more blogs than other times, and that sometimes, it slips peoples minds to complete an assignment within the invisible "cloud" that is the internet (I don't know how much of a thing this is for other people, but I always forget about it because I can't see it), then I think the blogs can continue to be a really great feature of class.