Meta-Post 2.0

Doc 'Oc and Mr. Bolos, please look at my most recent post, "There Are no Children Here"

Thankfully, in this last quarter blogging has become significantly easier. Last quarter, a lot of the time I was struggling to find a blog topic, and when I did it was sometimes not something that had come up in class or something relevant in my life, it was something hastily taken from a website. This quarter, I made a resolution to blog only when something came up that interested me, not to search for blogs at the last minute when I needed them. I was pleasantly surprised that it was not a lot of work to find blog topics in my own life, as long as I was making an effort to be aware of my surroundings and look critically at my everyday life. I do admit, there where a couple of times when I was tempted to search out a blog topic to quickly get my blog over with for the week, but I fended off the urge for a quick fix and it was usually easier to write about the topic that I had stumbled across later.

One element that I tried to work on this quarter was posing questions in my blogs. There were a few times when my questions seemed forced, especially in the example of my post "Land of the Free". The post was three paragraphs long, and I posed two questions in each of the last two paragraphs. The questions ranged from "Is teaching children one religion against American values?" to "Is it right for teacher to teach the benefits of democracy in schools?" The two questions have certain things in common, like a child's access to impartial information, but beyond that the topics of the post seemed to jump around and this post might have been better had it been divided into two posts so each of these interesting issues could be explored more fully. On the other hand, I succeeded in posing a question in the post "Honorable or Not" without even directly asking a question to my audience. It is a goal of mine for next semester to not have to use so many questions in my blogs. My writing should be controversial or thoughtful enough to provoke questions and debate without necessarily having question the audience.

Something I did more effectively this quarter was use textual evidence or some sort of background information to back up my posts. All of my posts, with the exception of my "Black Friday" post, mention some sort of article, book, or movie that my readers could access in order to understand the post and the issue more thoroughly. In my posts "There Are no Children Here"and "Desperate Housewives in Saudi Arabia", I learned how to embed quotes to make it easier for the reader to follow along.

One last thing I'd like to work on in the next few weeks is commenting on other people's blogs from our class. This quarter I've definitely been commenting a lot more, but I am still self-conscious about my comments, and find them to be less controversial and most of the time agreeing with the author of the post. Personally, I would love if someone commented on one of my posts to disagree with it and start a debate, but I know that if I want more people to comment on my posts I should be extending myself more to comment on their work.