The Meta-Post

I've been blogging for just about 4 months now and I just now took the time to critically read through all my blogs to see the progressions that I've been making.

To be able to truly reflect and analyze my work, I decided to look up the word "blog" in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.  It is defined as "an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer."

So when critiquing my posts, I decided to make the main criteria personal opinionated reflection, how well it comments on (and not just reports) events, and the presence of strong links that connect it to a real issue.  Based on this criteria, I'm going to attempt to construct a narrative arc, since we've talked about this a lot in class, of my blog throughout this semester.

What I noticed when reading through my blogs was that--although the arc wasn't a "perfect" and infinitely increasing line where every post is better than the one before--I can certainly see a general improvement in the three aforementioned categories through the first three months.  However, after reading my last few posts, I was displeased because I was unable to find the same type of improvement.  I still feel as though they are better than the early posts, but I think I actually regressed in terms of adding in personal reflecting and comments that would make it my own.

The reason for the improvement I made in the first few months is simple: I stopped viewing my blog as an assignment and started viewing it as simply a way I could express my opinion about topics I felt strongly about.

The reason for the regression in the last few posts was a bit harder to wrap my mind around.  I thought at first it could be just kind of a fluke because it was only a few posts, and not every post was going to be better than the one before.  Then, however, I realized that it can be almost certainly attributed to the fact that after I got ahead in blogs with posts I was very happy about, I got lazy, and it certainly showed.

Let's start at the beginning.  I remember, during the first few weeks of my blog, feeling pressured to find something to blog about and then forcing myself to make a post even if I couldn't find the right topic.    This is evident in two of my earlier posts (We Will Never Forget Your Money and It's All About the Money).  I was linking my posts to an issue well, but before even reading a single word of the posts, I could tell that I couldn't possibly doing much reflection and was most definitely just ranting about stupid facts because of the immense paragraph size.  This makes it nearly impossible to not only advance the argument but also to make it interesting enough so that the reader actually wants to finish reading it all (even I didn't want to read through my writing again again).  The giant paragraph size is surely a direct cause of me feeling like I needed to blog even if I didn't know what to say, so I wanted to feel and make it look like I did my assignment without actually saying anything meaningful.

Then, however, I started to view my blog a bit differently.  It was no longer something I had to do; it was something I wanted to do.  I started to write about topics I felt passionately about, and all the sudden my arguments were a lot more clear and I felt as if I was actually "blogging".  One great example of this is my favorite post, Penn State Cheats Joe Paterno.  This was a topic that was very much talked about, and I was in the minority for this debate, so I was able to find an article to link it to that I completely disagreed with.  Since I didn't agree with what most other people were saying, it was very easy for me to insert my opinion, which is what made this post an actual "blog" rather than just an article.  This wasn't the only post I felt great about, from the end of October and all the way through November, I was publishing posts rapidly and felt very good about them all.

At this time, I started to become a little lazy.  I was ahead in my blogging, and I never really felt the need to publish much.  In the just over five week period between October 23rd and December 1st, I published eight posts, and in the six weeks since then, I've put out a grand total of two.  Not only has the frequency been down, but they have been lacking real personal reflection that would be required to make it a "blog".  Instead, my last three posts, especially Occupy Movement Causes Disruptions, have simply been reports of events and unarguable facts.

I'm glad I took this time to critique my blogs because it made me realize what I was doing right and what I need to do to get that narrative arc of my posts to go upward again in terms of the level of reflection, comments, and links.