Blog Post Reflection

I think the blog post I wrote on teletherapy was the most fun to write (not yet published here) because I got to watch a podcast for it and the topic was different from anything we’d learned in class yet. The most challenging blog post was probably the one where we had to choose our own article and look for logical fallacies (here.) The hard part for me was going through the articles in the spreadsheet provided and finding ones with logical fallacies because they were all articles chosen by a professor and most were pretty good! I significantly revised most of my blog posts, but I think I revised the earlier ones more because I didn’t know what we were supposed to with the blogs at the beginning. I just answered the questions directly and didn’t really have good flow between ideas.

I definitely thought that the blog posts improved my informal writing. I’m very used to writing papers and not putting in any of my own thoughts so I found it quite difficult. Since I’m publishing them on my personal website, I didn’t want them to be too informal. I tried to balance making them polished while also including my own thoughts. Usually I tried to do that by bringing up information outside of what the article mentioned directly. Writing for an online audience definitely changed my approach. Since this is a website that is acting as a portfolio for my work, I want to put the best work out there. Also, I sometimes hesitated to share my opinions that I thought could be seen as more controversial. On one hand, I liked writing to an online audience because I think it pushed me to improve my posts, but I also think I would’ve liked writing an essay because I would feel more free to share my opinions. Unfortunately having them on the internet raises the stakes because anyone can see and judge them.

My writing habits changed throughout the semester. I came up with a general template of having a longer excerpt and then a “final thoughts” section with the reflection portion. I also started adding more sources, pictures, and videos as I wrote more blog posts. I really enjoyed the topics we covered in class and I don’t think there was anything missing, we covered things I expected to hear about and then some. I really like writing about misinformation because I’ve taken another class specifically about that topic. Writing the blogs not only helped me understand the course content better, but many of them also introduced additional topics we didn’t talk about in class.

I will be continuing my website because I’m using it to publish information about my individual major and senior project. Even after this course ends, I hope to post the remaining blog posts here on my website. I would like to explore this more informal type of writing more because I am so used to writing academically. I only have one other post I’ve written for this website that is more from my perspective and I haven’t published it here yet. If I were to set a goal for my writing this next semester, I would focus on my senior project and aim to write something both academic and something more personal to include in my project.