Honors English 1a Blog Reflection

Throughout the course of the trimester, my biggest struggle was just with coming up with topics to blog about.  I wasn’t always sure how to answer questions on the prompt page, and I was afraid that if I came up with a topic of my own then I wouldn’t have a good blog post, or it wouldn’t be long enough.  As time went on, I tried to become more comfortable with the idea of the blog, and move more away from topics already set in stone.  Instead, I morphed together different prompts based on what I felt went with the novel I had read or was currently reading.  By the end of the trimester, sometimes I didn’t even look at the paper, preferring to blog about whatever was most prominent in what I was reading.

My greatest strength with blogging was describing whatever I was reading well, I think, so I didn’t confuse people who hadn’t read the book.  Most of the time, I tried to put myself in the shoes of someone who hadn’t read the book and read the post from their perspective before publishing it.  If anything was confusing, I included a better description of what was going on and read it over again.

The quality of my writing has grown over the trimester in many ways, one of which being my ability to sound more like myself while writing.  As seen in my blog post "Doomed", my tone was very robotic and had little authentic voice.  This is best shown from this quote in the beginning of the post, which says, “The book I just finished reading is Doomed, by Tracy Deebs.  The main character of the novel is named Pandora.  Her father has been gone for ten years, and her mother consistently warns her to have nothing to do with him- to not open any mail, any message, any gift, or ever talk to or see him.  But on Pandora's 17th birthday… Pandora opens an email sent to her by her father, since her nature at the beginning of the novel is very curious and prone to temptation.”  Yes, I described Pandora’s qualities, but I didn’t try to relate to anything about me or that I know, or to even get into detail besides basic description.

As I got further into the trimester, my writing had more of a voice and I began to sound like a real, unique person.  Although my writing style in the blog posts developed a very laidback tone, it still gave the readers more of a chance to learn about me instead of just having an objective summary.  This can be seen in a quote from my blog post “Ender’s Game", where I wrote, “Science Fiction has always been my favorite genre to read and write, and I thought the concept of the story's plot was so exciting.  It intrigued me that in the beginning of the story Ender is only six years old- just a little kid, and the idea of six year olds training for battle is such an anomaly in our time that it hooked me in and held me there.”  Here you can see more about my personality, my likes and dislikes, and how I relate the book to what I know.  I still describe what the novel is like, but instead of through and objective point of view it can be heard through mine as if I were speaking.