Meta-Post 3.0

Please check out my most recent post "Wealth Does Not Equal Happiness"

This semester, I was proud of a lot of things in my blogging, and I also thought I could have done some things better.

One thing I was proud of was my Junior Theme blogs, and connecting my blog with my JT. Sometimes it's hard to come up with blog topics that relation directly to things that are happening in class, so Junior Theme was a great opportunity to connect things in the outside world to a topic that I was an expert on. In my blog "Junior Theme & Spring Break" I connected my topic of assisted suicide to a situation that arose over spring break, which just goes to show you that potential blog topics and connections can pop up when you least expect it. I also connected my junior theme to current events in my blog "When Parenting Goes Wrong"  on April 12th. I thought my connection between the story of a mom refusing to give her son his chemotherapy drugs was possibly a stretch, but I was proud of myself that I was attempting to connect everything to my junior theme because I had so much knowledge of it. I also thought my blogs during the JT time period were both helpful to write, because I could sort out my ideas in writing and think about what I needed to do over the next week, and also numerous.

A lot of the ideas for my blogs from this semester came from experiences I had during the day or things that were on my mind. While it is great that I am able to bring the discussions and topics we are covering in class outside the classroom and make connections in real life, I think some of my blogs needed a little more grounding in research or other types of media besides just my personal experience. For example, in my post "SnOMG" I wrote about my experiences being technology-free during the snow day. During this time we were talking about the children growing up in different periods of history. I think my experiences during the snow day were valuable ideas to put in my post, but I probably could have added more research or quotes to provoke more of a discussion or an argument instead of simply telling my readers a story.

While some aspects of my blog have improved greatly, I am embarrassed to say that the mechanics of my blogging have stayed the same. First semester, I emboldened every single question or important phrase in my blogs, which was not very empathetic to my readers. This semester, I don't think I put enough text in bold, which is just as hard if not harder for the reader to understand. Also, my titles need improvement. Many people in our class have funny, creative titles to their blogs. No matter how long I sit and think, I can't seem to come up with something witty enough to put as a title to my blog. On the other hand, an improvement that I have made in the last few blogs is figuring out how to center and italicize quotes. I put quotes in both my blogs "The Bucket List" and "Wealth Does Not Equal Happiness", and I think it helps the readers to have a source to base their comments off of.

Blogging was a great experience for me this year. While my blogs weren't perfect, I had to challenge myself to think critically at everything while writing them. Writing blogs was not always the most fun of tasks, but as I write this I am pretty sad that this is my last official blog for AS class.