Friday, October 29, 2010

Reflective Essay

The blogs that I posted in the first quarter mainly reflected my views on friends, school, soccer and most importantly my life. I noticed that many of my blogs involved things that were happening in my life at the time. My inspiration comes from events that happen on a daily basis. Doing blogs has affected my life beyond school in many ways, for example, outside of school I find myself always thinking about possible ideas for blogs. Blogging is very different than structured writing because it is mostly about your thoughts on things rather than writing about a specific concept.
Blogs have changed my life not only during school but outside of it as well and my ideas or inspirations have resulted from the ability to write open-ended instead of academically structured.
After the first quarter, I realized that many of my posts came from the daily events that take place in my everyday life. Since one of the two blogs that I do a week is a response post, my other blog is usually dedicated to a topic that has struck me throughout the week. My ideas come to me whenever I go to a new place, hang out with friends, or even do my homework. Most of the time my inspirations for blogs are very spontaneous. In one of my blogs I wrote about the black out that I had just witnessed. I was at my friend’s house when it happened. The first thing that came to my mind when going through this was that it would make a great idea for a post. In the blog I stated,
“Last weekend there was a power outage in most parts of Hayward and Castro Valley. At the time I happened to be at my friend's house in Hayward. We were planning to camp out in her backyard for the night, but due to the inconvenience we weren't sure if we could.”
After this introduction of the subject, I began to explain what was happening during the black out. By the end I relate my post to the importance of electricity by saying:
“After this experience, I realized how important electricity is to people these days…Electricity has become something very important in our lives and without it, it would be hard to function the same.”
My inspiration from the black out helped me turn a small idea about a bit of my weekend into something that others could relate to.
Being able to freely write my blogs made it easier for me to flow through each post. At the same time, the quality of my posts was still questionable. In almost all of the blogs that I wrote, many of them lacked effort and showed little composure to edit them. I enjoy being able to write my posts with more freedom, but with a less structured form my blogs ended up being very sloppy. Though being able to write this way has turned in some ways a failure, in other blogs I have been able to express my thoughts to create a well-written post. One of my inspirations to do so was soccer. Since I can write a lot about this subject I found it easy to create a blog post concerning the aspects of my soccer life. One of my blogs pertained to my experience at the Olympic Development Regional Soccer Camp. Throughout the post, I explained my emotions going through this camp and the struggles I had to face to be my best. Another blog that was easy to write was my response to Tony’s blog on movie night. Even though it was not the most well written blog that I have posted, it was still very fun to write and I managed to exceed the word limit by roughly a hundred words. Doing this blog was very intriguing because I was able to express my thoughts on this topic without the burden of worrying about the specific structure that it had to be formatted in. I really like the privilege of being able to write my blogs freely instead of having a detailed structure of how they are supposed to be ordered. In the next quarter, I plan on having a more well fitting structure for each of my blogs to boost up my level of writing.
Doing weekly blog posts have affected my life not only in school, but outside of school as well. Every day I find myself constantly thinking about possible topics for my next blog. To me, ideas for blogs come easy, for example if I was looking at a paper cup, I could easily relate it to the overuse of paper in our world. Or I could talk about manufacturing of the cup and even make a story of the person that drank out of it. This is the usual process I take to create a mass amount of topics that I could write about. After a couple of days, I have a long list of topics that I look forward on making a post about. I feel like blogging has become a big part of my life because it gives me the ability to express my feelings about certain ideas. It is also a way to share my thoughts towards other people’s blogs too. In the next quarter, I am looking forward on sharing more ideas in my blogs and hopefully relating them more to others.
After the first quarter I noticed many changes that I can make to improve my blog posts. First, I want to focus more on making each post count. When I say this I mean that if I am going to work on a post for about half an hour, I might as well take another ten minutes spending time editing and revising it before putting it on my blog. Another thing that I want to focus on is writing about more important things instead of telling my audience what I did over the weekend. This way my blogs will be more interesting and hopefully they change the way others look at them. I am ready to improve my work ethic in the second quarter and in doing so I will continue to turn my inspirations into great pieces of work.

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