Blog 21: Self Reflective

I never really thought of myself as a writer. Last semester up in Greeley my major was “Journalism and Mass Communication”. When people asked what I was majoring in, I would always tell them and then add “but not for the writing part”. This is because I was in it more for the communication aspect. Anyway, in the past couple of years I have found that writing is something that I am not horrible at. This was my first college semester of English and found that it was for the most part enjoyable. When I would re-read my blogs I found that what I wrote was interesting. This has been improved throughout the past few months. My first blog “Focus on the Focal points and Such” was about the search page Ask.com. Yes, I answered all the required questions with the site and finished the assignment but it wasn’t the most interesting topic. Whereas later in the semester, "Don't Judge a Book by its Cover" were interesting, more diverse, and gave me more material to work with.

This may be minute, but I loved coming up with titles of the blogs. I would always try to be creative and fun relating to the topic I wrote about. Some examples are: “My Free Write, Our Free Right”, “Golden Death”, “Look No Feet!”, “Easy as ABC”, “The $Bucks from Starbucks”, and “Bridezilla is Out!”. Creativity is always a great thing to implement in writing. I tried to do this a lot. We had many chances with the requirements of multimedia and hyperlinks. I tried to use pictures that related to my blog, whether it was in a general way or a unique way. For example in my first and second post I used simply pictures to represent the search engines I was discussing. In the next blog about the crazy bride I found a great picture of a true Bridezilla. Later on in a freewrite about profit on oil, I took advantage of pictures to truly give the audience an idea of what I was talking about. This is also true with my reflective essay, I used above and beyond the required amount of images to create more imagery.

The workshops or peer reviews were very helpful. I enjoyed getting feedback on my papers. It was also helpful reading others and critiquing their work as well. The questions on the peer review forms were detailed and insightful to assist in reviewing the essay. Also, having the teacher read our essays beforehand was helpful as well. The workshops helped especially with advice where to put hyperlinks and multimedia. It helped also because I found out if my paper and writing style was interesting to others. If it wasn’t I would want to change it to intrigue my audience more. Obviously because they are the ultimate grader and decision maker it is nice to get their input. I wish more of my classes did peer reviews it was enjoyable and useful.

I have strengths and weaknesses of being a writer. A strength I have is perhaps choosing a good topic matter and being able to incorporate a lot with that topic. Also a strength I have is creativity and using humor as well. In my post “Look No Feet!” I took advantage of making that post my own. I used first person as if I was the girl and made it humorous by making a random picture funny with the text. It is obviously a roller coaster which I made sound like a not so dangerous toy the young girl received. One line, “It is hard to carry my bike up the 85 steps up to this starting point, but it is so worth it!” is an example of some humor. He whole post itself is an example of creativity. Another blog involving humor is the recent You Tube video I posted of Will Smith. We couldn’t put any text, but I knew that alone would get some laughs. Finally, in my last post I used a humorous commercial as my rhetorical analysis piece. This aspect of humor and creativity was used as a writer throughout my posts. A weakness I have as a writer is usage of vocabulary. I know a good amount of vocabulary words but not a lot of unique, articulate words that people don’t always use. Sometime there are words that many know that I don’t always know the exact definition. As a writer the more words you know the more description and diversity you can add to your work, so I definitely would like to improve that. We all have things to work on.
Overall I think my writing improved and as a writer I think I have found myself to enjoy it better. The way we wrote in this class I really like with all the computer based technology added to a simply essay. It helped bring my creative side out.