A New Ending

Inflamed eyeballs were the un-established compromise to writing blog posts for English. But don’t get me wrong, it was well worth ALL of it. Now that the school year is ending, I’m disheartened to see this community of student bloggers come to its final stop. I think that’s what I’ll miss the most about English. I was able to see the inner workings of my fellow students and friends and their weird, brilliant, scary, and funny thoughts about everything. I had the opportunity to step into others’ perspectives and it felt genuine. I didn’t come across many bloggers that wrote just for the sake of finishing it. We had the freedom to talk about any topic and I feel like giving someone a certain trust that they can write about any topic, unconsciously makes people want to do well. That’s how I felt about it, but that’s also because I don’t like having restrictions on things that don’t require it.

There were some barriers along this whole blogging experience like not knowing what to write about, finishing on time, and creating something that would be satisfactory to myself. There’d be days where I had a week to write a blog post, I’d end up with ten drafts before I decided on what to write about and when I figured it out, it was too late. I would ignore all my drafts and start a fresh post that I wish I’d spend more time on. However those are only the elementary aspects of actual hindrance. I would worry about what I had already written, so as to not repeat myself because I am a person with old thoughts. It was also overcoming the fear of not caring what other people thought about what I wrote, that helped me grow as a writer. But not only does that help with my writing, I can speak my mind more freely than I have before this year started. There was also a line between being playful with words or just writing as though I was speaking to my friends. The main thing I would change about my writing, is to write poems, or mess with how things are supposed to be structured. I should have just risked the play on words, because then I would learn something if I was doing it incorrectly,luckily I realize my mistake now.

As I’ve mentioned in my last post “The End Has No End”, I struggled through organizing my thoughts so that the writing process would flow fluidly. Sequencing things is my scotoma, and I never realized it until I started blogging. I’m still not great at putting things in order, but it’s gotten better. Along with learning how terribly I organized pieces of writing, I learned how to incorporate quotes into a passage in ways where I could either bring it up randomly or have it slowly creep up as the main idea of my writing. Visually, I had to think about what details tied into what I was writing about, and using tags correctly to bring the right attention.

Some of my favorite posts have to be “Sorry for not Uploading” , “The Good the Bad and the Weird parts of Rain” , and “The End Has No End”. I was able to express bottled up thoughts that I’ve been wanting to share. There are some things you can go on forever talking about, and these topics were exactly that. Sometimes we forget them, but once it springs back to our minds again, you have to write it down immediately before the thought escapes. When we were forced to plan out the connections we made to rain, it helped me draw even more connections from personal experiences with rain. It was effective to focus on one topic to draw connections from your past, future, your five senses, or anything. And with those connections you would create more connections. I was able to dig deeper into the connections I’ve had with rain, even the insignificant details led to something bigger.

The best advice I could give to anybody who’s writing a blog or will be, is to be unafraid of what you post. If you’re passionate about something, go for it. Your writing can reflect who you are, so be bold even if it’s a little embarrassing. Also, don’t write about certain topics just because it will get views, write for yourself.

If there was something to fix about this blogging system, I would change the picture policy about having a picture as big as the blog post. I would often times find fantastic photos, only to be disappointed that it didn’t match up to the columns beside it. I understand how smaller pictures make things look “unprofessional”, but some photos are worth posting even if it isn’t big enough.

For my part, I loved blogging. I liked seeing other people’s opinions on things that people don’t share when they talk or hang out in real life. The things that go unmentioned were noticed because of our blogs. It is our own, and we can spread ideas like a wildfire which was what interested me the most. It’s refreshing to see new minds talking about unfamiliar things, rather than everyone focusing on one topic that they couldn’t find connections to. I think the best part about starting a blog post is finding the connection we made during class, it broadened our spectrum of what we can talk about as long as it connected to something we learned. It’s a good mixture of work and freedom and I hope other English teachers catch on(Future AP Eng teachers, I’m looking at you). Reading other people’s blogs were just as fun as writing posts, I’m glad I was able to experience this and I think I’m going to continue blogging. I’m going to miss seeing everyone post up a new blog post every week.