Final essay

I can't believe I actually forgot to post it....

4. Feedback you gave: In what ways do writing response posts to classmates' blogs help you become a better writer, reader, or thinker? Are there other ways in which your classmates' blogs help you learn?

I usually do feedback on my friends’ blog posts, mainly because I read their blogs first, and felt an immediate connection to their topics or thoughts that I can already write a 250 words response post to them, it is also fun to respond them by quoting what they wrote and expressing my own opinion, which if we do that in real life it will be seen as ‘mocking’ and would not be very polite. Although I would snoop around other classmates’ blogs, I still find it awkward to respond to a person I do not know.  Not that I haven’t tried, but my response posts were just so horribly written I didn’t dare to comment on that person’s post so they might read mine. Even if we never talked in real life, I don’t want to make a bad impression. Therefore I wasn’t surprised that after I reread my previous response posts, I found that my feedback to my friends are usually agreeing to what they were blogging but to complete unfamiliar classmates or people I don’t know well, it is usually disagreeing to their point of view, as I hardly respond to other people than my friends unless I feel a strong disagreement to what they said.

I felt that the improvement of my writing skills isn’t significant because of the response posts since I believe that there are other reasons involved to why my writing got better. Other than continuous blogging and writing in English class, snooping around people’s blogs also helped me a lot. Reading other people’s blogs had not only helped me see a different side of them but I can also see how they express themselves through use of words, structure of paragraphs and sentences.  

11. Statistics: If you check out your blog's "Stats" page to follow your readership, what information do you learn about your audience? What posts have gotten the most/least views—and what does that suggest to you?

I found the “Stats” page rather interesting, not only has it showed the number of my audience and their counties, where they found my blog, and even what types of browser and Operating Systems they use. Although those information were unrelated to this question, I find it interesting to know. Expecting to have only less than ten views, seeing the number fifty-two views were a pleasant surprise indeed.

Astonishingly,
the post that has gotten most views was ‘Pieces’. ‘Pieces’ was written in my
junior year and I found it while I was clearing my computer files, having
writers block on free post, I decided to edit and expand the essay before I
posted it. It was about how my family torn apart and written with a failed
attempt of sarcasm.

“Apparently my uncle has forgotten how
he rushed to pay the bills before my father but anyways, their strong
relationship has crumbled down, yay.”

My biggest regret would be not cutting out the “but anyways’ and
“yay’, which made me sound more immature than I already was. My guess for this
post getting the most views would be because since family dramas play a big
role in our lives and effects how we think of many things, knowing what
happened to a person’s family is a big step towards to knowing them more.

        Posts with least views would be my uc prompts and current events, I think it might be due to my uc prompts were really just pieces combined. I jumped around a lot while writing my uc prompts as I was having writer’s block, and I could only write small fractions of sentences combined. As for current events, I tried making them sound more formal but failed miserably, as I don’t know how to express my views very much, therefore it made sense that nobody would want to read them.

Inspiration: Where do you get your ideas for blog post topics? What inspires you to write?

Writer's block: What have you learned from your struggles with writer's block? Why do you tend to get stuck? How do you tend to get unstuck? Notice any patterns?

        I tend to get my ideas for blog topics from daily life, usually conversations with my friends or something that effected me greatly that week. I had wanted to make my blog interesting. Even though I know I won’t get many audience, besides the teacher and very few of my friends, there is still a slight probability that someone would accidently clicked into my blog and read what I wrote. Knowing this possibility, when I wrote I felt a sense to impress my audience. That became a small burden for me as I wanted to keep them interested and at least finish one post, and not close the window after the fitsr sentence. I had also wished that I could write more about of my inner thoughts, but my mind often wanders too quickly for me to really concentrate on one topic. I wasn’t good at expressing myself while talking, and writing became more difficult for me as what I wrote wasn’t usually what I had in mind.

I am also the kind of writer that refuses to continue writing whenever I got stuck, such as when I could not find the suitable vocabulary to describe the situation or whenever I cannot make the sentence or paragraph sound the way I wanted. Usually I would wander off or do something else until I am satisfied with what I wrote. Although I know that this method is time consuming and I might lost focus of what I was suppose to be blogging, it helped my mind to relax and think of new ways to express myself, and even look at what I previously wrote from another perspective.