Challenges of blogging

In this post, I would like to tell about the challenges I experienced in writing for the blog in comparison with academic writing and I will compare my experience with the results of the survey about blogging experience conducted among my groupmates. Overall, my earlier attitude towards blogging can be described as rather negative – mostly unfriendly and cautious. Although some of my friends are successful bloggers, well read and supported in their writing exercises by readers as well as their families and friends, it was hard for me to understand how any blogger can freely reveal his or her thoughts in public. According to the survey, conducted in our class, about one third of my groupmates would support me in that sharing your thoughts via blogging is not as easy as it seems. Therefore, when blogging was announced as our major writing activity to do this semester, I was happy, because I knew, this would be a challenge for me.

Blogging really turned out to be challenging. The first challenge for me was choosing a topic. In my opinion, for a standard academic writing it is easier, because your instructor or supervisor is your main targeted audience and in this case, the most important point is to choose a topic you know well to be able to demonstrate the full knowledge in the field. However, choosing a topic for a blog post, the most important point is writing about an interesting or highly relevant issue, because main peculiarity of blogging is freedom of readers to choose what they read. In addition, the main purpose of writing for the blog is to attract as many readers as possible. According to the survey, over 50% of my groupmates find it difficult to choose topics for blog posts. It is not a surprising number for me, because there are especial requirements to the topic for the blog post: blogger writes for audience which chooses whether to read the post or not, so the topic must be worth reading.

Another challenge for me was a writing style. By trying to blog, I learnt that good writing  can be very different in style. What is appropriate for academic writing may seem clumsy in a blog post and vice versa. In addition, our exercise was to do blogging on education-related topics, so we could not be too informal. In my opinion, blogging is a good writing practice, because you develop sense of words and phrases, suitable for various range of topics.

And the last challenge for any blogger is comments. After I published my post about women in education, I got comment from one of the coursemates I know, which showed that she did not fully understand some phrase in the blog, and after her comment, I edited this phrase to be clearer. However, the main thing I learnt was that when you engage in blogging, you must be ready for negative comments, because there must be people whose life positions are different from yours. However, I am eager to receive feedback, and so are just below 50% of my groupmates. The secret motivation of the blogger here is the willingness to get his or her work appreciated. Of course, the blogger must be ready for criticism, and that is why the other half of my group did not find getting feedback from peers as attractive.

Despite these challenges, blogging was a good exercise and a good development tool. With the help of this exercise, I learnt that it is possible write interesting things without necessarily revealing your intimate feelings. In this activity, we wrote about education, and that was really interesting and useful. Now, since I have overcome these challenges writing for a blog as a classroom activity, I will definitely practice some blogging outside classroom.

References:

Montgomery, D. P. (2015a). [Blogging and Academic Writing]. Unpublished raw data. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/PX8wv7