Blogging is not such a bad thing after all!

I too would like to close out the blog for the semester by sharing my thoughts on blogging and how my thoughts have changed from the first class period until now. When I learned that this class was going to center around a blog that we were required to contribute to as members of smaller cohorts, my first thought was to drop the class. I did not feel comfortable sharing my thoughts with potentially anyone who had access to the Internet, which is a much larger audience than I was hoping to have. I was especially nervous that I didn’t know exactly what we would be asked to write about and post to our blogs. I was nervous that we would be asked to write about politics or other topics that fall under the arena of things that I like to keep to myself. I didn’t want people that I did not know reading and judging the work that I posted. I had also never followed any blogs or much less read any posts to blogs. I assumed blogs were just a fad that would pass, just like networking sites seem to do in their time. I was not interested in either reading others’ blogs or creating a blog of my own. However, the class time fit so nicely into my school and work schedule and I needed the communication credits, so ultimately I decided to stick with what I had signed up for. I decided that stepping out of my comfort zone would likely be a valuable exercise that I would learn from. I also realized that if I was to truly become a professional I would need to learn to be comfortable with others reading my writing. And I also realized that I should be comfortable with others reading my work as long as I posted quality work to the blog. And in the end, for those reasons, I decided that this would be a worthwhile exercise and I would give it a chance.

Now, at the end of the semester, I can look back and say that I was glad that I made the decision to stick with the class. I learned to be more comfortable sharing my writing with others. One place where I saw this positive change was during a writing workshop that we had just a week or two ago. In the past I also dreaded having writing workshops, in the same way that I dreaded posting to a blog at the beginning of this class. I always preferred that the professor was the only person to read my papers. Writing workshops meant that my peers also had to read my papers. Although I oftentimes receive valuable feedback through writing workshops, I was just uncomfortable participating in them. However, in my most recent writing workshop I was more than happy to read my paper aloud to my group and ask for any feedback that I could get, and I truly appreciated the feedback. This class, in a big part through blogging, has helped me to realize that engaging in public argument doesn’t have to be a scary thing, and the experience that I had with the blog was extremely positive.

-Jaclyn E