Reflection on blogging

Blogging gradually gains a great momentum in academic writing as part of unconventional and user-friendly writing method. This semester blogging was applied in the course to put positive impact on students’ writing skills. It offers possibility to write from your own personal voice along with fostering to write in academic tone. However, personally for me, drawbacks of writing posts overweigh its positive sides. This reflection puts emphasis on negative influences of blog writing to my academic writing skills.

            It seems to me that writing is the most pertinacious aspect of English, which is difficult to advance. Writing “academically” means being able to write laconically and comprehensively in the academic vocabulary. From the beginning of the semester I thought we will continue paper based periodic assignments, where areas of topics or themes themselves were identified by the instructor. In this semester, I spent much time on choosing topics for posts. Moreover, in fall semester, I used to receive regular and helpful feedback on my grammar and lexical mistakes, as well as on APA formatting.  Whereas blogging did not provide me with such opportunity, and my progress could not be observed during this time. Another negative facet of blog writing is spending much time on signing in and reading which posts are interesting for you (sometimes I did not have an internet access, it reduces accessibility of blogs).

On the other hand, I agree that disadvantages of blog writing are ultimately individualistic. For some students it considers as a unique opportunity to get comments, ideas from other students and reflect on them. As Montgomery pointed out that “online writing environments, such as blogs, however, create the necessity for natural and authentic communication between students and teachers, as well as among the students themselves” (p.2).  In this context, Warschauer (2010) added that “blogs thus represent an effective tool to combine the publishing and discussion of student writing” (p.4). Therefore, interaction with peers, to some extent, made my writing process more interesting; however, it did not encourage me to write quality posts. 

In conclusion, I would not recommend blogging for those students who specifically are aiming to develop their academic writing skills. 

References:

 Montgomery, D.P. (2015, April). Did you read my new post?: Improving autonomy, English and engagement through class blogs. Paper presented at The International Conference for Building Cultural Bridges, Suleyman Demirel University

Warschauer, M. (2010). Invited commentary: New tools for teaching writing. Language Learning & Technology, 14(1), 3-8.