Reflection

I think one of the major effects of knowing that my blog was going to be read by a lot of people definitely changed what I wrote. First of all, I always feel like I might say something stupid and embarrass myself. It isn’t that I feel like I can’t contribute something, but I do worry that I will sound stupid compared to other things people might say. I have always been bad at classroom discussion and when I read other people’s blog entries, it made me feel stupider. I also feel like I couldn’t share any personal connections because I was worried that someone I know might have read it and been offended. Usually when I write papers, I put in personal connections that often enhance what I am writing about. However, when it came to the blog posts, I had trouble doing that without feeling guilty. I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of my friends or family members that might have come across it someday. It made me hold back on making my posts more interesting. I also had a little bit of trouble writing more than the minimum because I felt like it wasn’t really being graded. I also fear this might have made me look a bit dull in the eyes of my classmates. Most people had some great posts that were really insightful, but I felt like mine were boring and repetitive. This only enhanced the trouble I had with writing the posts because I always ended up comparing myself to everyone else. I felt soft of guilty making people read my post when I hadn’t said much of anything in it.

However, it wasn’t as if using the blog was a terrible experience. Most people say to start with the bad and end with the good, which is something I try to do whenever possible. One of the nice things about having a blog having to not deal with paper or printers – especially since I ran out of ink in the last week of class. There was also the ease of organization. I sometimes have trouble staying organized and will lose papers. The nice thing was that I didn’t have that type of trouble with the blog because all my posts were right there on the blog. It saved me because in the middle of the quarter my laptop crashed and I lost everything. With the blog, I didn’t lose anything important for this class. I also liked how easy it was to use. I didn’t have to worry about losing all my work if my laptop froze because it auto-saved drafts if you paused for more than a few seconds. Since my laptop crashed, it has frozen every few moments. I may have lost a few paragraphs on my papers, but not with my blog. It was a nice little convenient touch considering that during the week I was often really stressed about writing papers since I would often lose my progress. I also liked the fact that I could read the comments of my classmates and it made me think a lot about the stories and what I had written. It also helped me remember a few details for the test we would take after reading the blogs.

All in all, I really liked the use of the blogs. I might have had trouble writing posts, but it did make me feel like people were interested in what I had to say about the stories. I think it is a good idea for an English class and I completely encourage people to use blogs for classes so that they don’t lose their progress and so they can get an idea of what their classmates have to say.