Media and Community: A Reflection
After analyzing my blog posts, I noticed that there is definitely a certain style to my writing. Often, my posts would follow a certain structure. In each of my posts, I start with a sort of “prologue” to set up the rest of my post. Often, these “prologues” are a short paragraph that relates the main topic to me in some way. For example, in my Favorite Poem post, I gave a personal anecdote on my relationship with poetry:
“Ever since I was forced to do it in grade school, I always hated reading poetry. I could never quite relate to whatever the poet was trying to say and, typically, I dismissed the poet trying to come off as smart, philosophical, and introspective when they really aren’t.”
In the Favorite Poem post, I used the above sentences to explain the impact of my favorite poem on me, as a person who has often disliked poetry. This stylistic feature of my posts was commented fairly heavily on by my peers in my Favorite Poem post and most of the comments were positive, with my peers stating they liked the way it sets the framework for the rest of the post. In some of my posts, I would immediately bring up an outside expert and position myself in conversation with the expert. This was more common in my post where there was an expert that was talked about in class or in a reading, such as the Feminist Roundtable and the Tracing posts. Following this “prologue”, I would give my thesis.
Another feature of many of my post is the way I present my evidence to support my thesis. I would default to dedicating one paragraph to piece of evidence. The paragraph would follow the structure of, first, set up the evidence in question by giving a little background, second, present the evidence, then finally, analyzing the evidence and relating it back to my thesis. This structure is very apparent in my Impersonation and Favorite Poem posts. I think the reason I would default to this is because I feel much more comfortable writing my posts this way. I’ve considered changing this structure in my writing after it was brought up in conversation in class after our Impersonation posts and some people mentioned how it was a kind of robotic way of writing papers; however, I’ve been following this structure for a long time and I have grown accustomed to it and I know it works.
One thing that I have learned by doing these blog posts and reading the posts of my peers is how digital media can greatly enhance a blog post. By adding digital media, the reader can actually visualize or refer to something that the writer of the blog is talking about in their writing. For example, in my Impersonation posts, I referred to scenes in The Hunger Games movie to support my thesis. Based on some of the comments I received on my post, the movie clips of the scenes I referenced in my post helped support my argument because in my post I talked a lot about the cinematography of the film. The movie clips allowed my readers to experience firsthand the cinematography I referenced in my post. Without the movie clips, the reader of my posts would have little idea to what I was referencing in the post.
Looking back, I feel like this class allowed me to find my voice when it comes to writing. This class was unique in the sense it allowed me to write the way I talk and think. I was very surprised when I learned that I can get a passing grade by basically writing my thoughts on a topic as long as I was able to support the arguments I make with support from a source and get into a conversation with an expert. I, also, in a sense, found my voice when it comes to writing. I noticed certain structures and phrases I use in my writing when I’m not expected to write in a scholarly way.
