My Blog Post Journey: A Creative Outlet in This Academically Charged Environment

Throughout this course I was able to write about issues and topics that are important to me. I had the chance to write about perceptions of race in the media, poetry, events occurring in my life, and I was able to end the semester creating a book that I am extremely proud of.

This English course was the second English course I’ve taken at Davidson, my first one being the Introduction to Food Literature course I took during my sophomore spring. That course was very traditional in the sense that we had essays, a midterm, a final, and group projects that we had to complete throughout the semester. This course was extremely different in its course material, the assignments we completed, and how each class was structured.

I started all of my blog posts in google doc format before I transferred the posts onto our class website. Writing the posts in google doc beforehand let me edit my posts and work at my own pace without worrying about my posts not being saved in the correct format. Using google docs also allowed me to work on these posts in various environments. Sometimes I wrote better when I was on the couch in my apartment, while other times I needed to be in the union or the library working on my posts. Uploading the posts to the class website was tricky at first trying to navigate formatting issues. I slowly learned how to troubleshoot these issues and now I know how to insert quotes, format my pictures in a way that they can easily be seen, and embed videos and other links into the post.

My first official post was the tracing project and its structure was very similar to an academic paper I would have written in another class. In this post, my first sentence contains my main thesis for the project and the subsequent paragraphs are supporting my thesis. I used the pictures as further analysis and support of my thesis and the tone of my writing mirrors the writing I completed in my other English course. The tracing aspect of this project excited me because it was so different from anything I have ever had to do in my four years at Davidson, but because this was the first post I fell into the academic jargon hole.

The two posts that allowed me to express my creativity the most during this course were my impersonation and roundtable blog posts. With both of these posts, I used articles and other texts I read in order to inform how I could write in other voices, whether it was the voice of Amandla Stenberg (Rue) or the women participating in the feminist roundtable. These posts required deeper and more complex thinking. I believe that I spent the most time working on these posts because I wanted to make sure that I was representing my thoughts in the clearest way possible. With both of these posts I also integrated images that related to my writing. I appreciated being able to include images into my posts because I feel like the images enhanced my arguments and helped my posts flow better.

My strongest post in my opinion was my multi mediation post I created about Kylie Jenner’s Pepsi commercial and the twitter reactions. I wrote about a topic I was passionate about and I was able to utilize twitter memes and images in order to support and amplify my argument about the relationship between advertisements and backlash on social media websites. My favorite part of this post was my conclusion: “Pepsi utilized the growing sentiments of protesting and expressing discontent with society’s injustices as a means to amplify and build their brand. The power and strength of Twitter as a social media platform was stronger in this case in presenting facts and showing Pepsi where they went wrong in trying to show a message of unity and peace while also trying to make money” (Simmons 2017). I brought together my ideas around the advertisement and the twitter responses. I also feel that someone not in this course could read my blog post and be able to understand my argument and the significance of my topic choice.

I would have loved to focus more on how “black twitter” responds to things such as current political actions, awards shows, television shows and movies, and other advertisements like the SheaMoisture commercial. The role and impact of “black twitter” has influenced my thoughts about certain events and exploring their impact and influence in greater depth is one of my academic goals that I wished I could have engaged with more.

Simmons, Malaika. 2017. “The Controversy of Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi Advertisement: Black Lives Matter and Twitter Memes”. Media + Community. http://courses.suzannechurchill.com/community-s17/2017/04/10/black-lives-matter-kendall-jenner-and-pepsis-response/