Since I started to study at Nazarbayev University,
instructors taught us to write academic type of essays. In this semester I had
a chance to practice blogging. It is not an academic type of writing which
includes personal voice on different topics. It is a new experience and I have
some thoughts about its positive and negative effects on my writing. In this
essay I am analyzing how blogging changed my style of writing.
The first blog was like a review of the article. There
was no personal opinion or reflection. The second one also was close to
academic writing. I did not realize the difference between blogging and
academic writing. So, two attempts failed. After reading blogging guideline, I
changed my structure of the blogs. However, there were problems with including
personal voice. I was used to be neutral and after this exercise I had a goal
to express myself. I cannot say that it was easy for me, because blog is
available for all GSE students. Based on my experience, I know the GSE’s
students passion to comment on everything. I did not want to be an object of
attention. The reason is not that I am shy person. It is because I am not good
blogger.I have problems with balancing official information and personal.
From my point of view, blogging is helpful for
students who cannot talk during class discussions, for whom it is better to
write than to say. Blogging is combination of personal opinion and data. It can
be used as evaluation of participation. I believe that it helped me to deliver
personal ideas, whereas academic writing did not.
At
first, as a novice blogger, I did not like it. Based on survey, one third of
the participant answered that they did not enjoy blogging, they may have other
reasons to think so than me (Montgomery, 2015a). I spent a lot of time thinking
and writing blogs. I have limited time to do my homework, because I am trying
to combine my duties of a care giver and knowledge receiver. And blogs is not
the only homework which I have to do.
If you ask me it is always good to have a practice
which is different from academic. However the yield of the blogs is better to
decrease. Five blogs already gives taste of blogging and if someone wants to
improve skills they can do it by themselves. Topic is another challenge, some
of them are really relevant and actual. I indulged reading them. The rest was
junk. Blogging is half of the story, commenting is another one. There is an
obligation to comment and have some kind of interaction. General topics like
problems in education, how to combine motherhood and education is easy to
comment. The message is clear. But even my first topic about post colonialism
and education needs more background information and students are not interested
to comment it.
To conclude I want to say that it is fruitful to write
and comment blogs. It shapes your style of writing, because you are reading
other authors manner of delivering ideas. Blogging may bring hints, structure,
words to your writing.
References
Montgomery, D. P. (2015a). [Blogging and Academic Writing]. Unpublished
raw data.
Thank you for the post!
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think that blogging has more benefits than disadvantages. Blogging develop communication between group members. I mentioned the majority of peers personalized their posts which was interesting for me. People searched interesting topics for their posts, used creative pictures and videos. However, some topics sounded for me little bit controversial and irrelevant. I think this is problem of searching themes for blog.
Blogging mostly depends on independent work of students which was the real challenge for me. However, as you said - blogging "shapes your style of writing", changing the writing style.