FINAL:

Katie Mulville

WRA 140 Section 011

Final Blog Assignment

April 17, 2011

I Blog, Therefore I Am

As a kid learning to write, you are constantly pounded with the concept of writing formally. As I was taught to write throughout my K-12 years, the idea of writing in a blog as a homework assignment was inconceivable. You can’t write a blog for a school assignment, just too informal. Yet, here I am, writing a blog for a college English class as part of my final grade. I’ve only made a dozen or more blog posts but I feel that I have expressed myself more in those twelve posts than I could have in twenty formal essays. What is this new form of writing known as blogging?

It’s a four-letter word: B…L…O…G… BLOG. The word “blog” was added to the English dictionary only five short years ago. It’s a relatively new term defined as, “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections and comments (Merriam-Webster),” but it means much more than that. It’s more like an online diary where people can post to the world how they view, feel, and believe about a particular topic. It’s much stronger than that old diary you stick under your bed or hidden in your underwear drawer because its put out there for the entire world to share, read, and comment on. “Blogging”, otherwise known as “making frequent blog posts”, has become one of the most recent trends in American life, soon to be replaced by another, cool, trendy, online fad. But for now, blogging is it. You blog, therefore you are.

Contradicting to the style of writing bloggers use— which is normally very informal text, as if you were speaking to another person not the paper— there is the writing one does in school. When writing papers in a school setting, the student’s paper usually has audience of… well… the teacher and that’s about it. If the student if writing a paper, knowing its for the teacher and only the teacher to read, their tone is often formal and lacks opinion and voice due to the paper’s slim audience. Teachers may even try to switch things up by making students do in-class journaling where the students take the first few minutes of class to write down their feelings about the day. But once again, only the teachers eyes will be seeing and, more importantly, grading the journal. Students will once again, not fully express their views and opinions because they are trying to please the teacher, writing like, they believe, the teacher would like. Giving students the opportunity to blog means they will finally have the chance to write things they and their fellow peers care about and even give them the break to read their classmates blogs to see what their views and feelings are. Allowing kids to read other student’s blogs will even help the student grow and develop themselves as a writer. Most kids hate to write and what better way to get them to than putting together the two things they love: technology and the social media.

The discovery channel recently published an article about blogging being good for a student’s health. “Blogging can help students feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face (Ryan).” It’s a win-win situation: teachers get the results and the students get to do something the actually enjoy.

            With any other online or computer technology, there is always the issue of availability of the technology. Do all students have access to a computer? If not, are there computers available in the school for all students to use. School districts, such as Detroit Public Schools, which could potentially benefit from blog writing, just doesn’t have the resources available for students to take advantage of. Schools like this will have to resort to old fashioned in class journaling.

            Its not fair to say that all classroom writing should be done via blogging but by replacing some of the traditional classroom composition work students may start to enjoy the writing they do in English class and teacher will begin to enjoy teaching it again. It’s a simply four-letter word, changing classroom all across the country: blog. Blogging used in classroom helps kids express themselves in a more free and open environment. Blogging may only be a trend of the present, but its changing the way students write. I blog, therefore I am. (Ryan) (Blog)

Works Cited: 

Blog. 17 April 2011 <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/blog>.

Ryan, Claudine. Blogging's Good For Your Health . 3 March 2008. 17 April 2011 <http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/03/blogging-social-health.html>.