Meta-Post II

     Almost halfway through junior year, the year people go crazy with schoolwork and lose time to focus on anything else.  But blogging for American Studies has done the opposite.  Sure, blogging is work, but its goal is to connect the writers with the outside world, at least that’s how I think of it.

     I think that my writing has improved because now as I blog, I feel more comfortable putting my opinion out there.  It’s now that I was ever unsure of how I felt, but more that I didn’t really know how to say it.  For example, in my post It’s MY Life? I freely spoke about my thoughts on people judging other people.   In doing this I connected The Crucible to a subject Doc Oc brought up in class that I’m beginning to go through, the college process.  I like how I connected the two, though I wish I had come up with the connection, but I do think I made it clear that I was taking what Doc Oc had said and then taking it a step further.  I think I furthered the class conversation by digging deeper into a conversation that was had in class, and I wasn’t the only one who wanted to do that because two people commented on that post.

     I think, like I said in my last Meta Post, I’m still having a little bit of trouble leaving posts open ended.  I do think it has improved a little bit, according to my “stats page” because while there are around the same number of total comments, they are more spread over several posts this quarter whereas they were highly concentrated on certain posts last year.  To think that I am putting out a variety of topics that seem to appeal to different people makes me think that I must be doing something better this quarter with my writing. 

     I think one thing that I can really work on is trying to come up with more creative titles.  It may seem like a small thing at first, but the title is what draws the reader to the post.  When I’m picking classmates blogs to comment on, all I can see is the title and maybe the first sentence or a picture.  One of my goals is to get more people to comment, and for that to happen, I first have to have more people read my posts.

The post that I feel best represents how I want to be as a blogger for this quarter is Man vs. Woman. Or is it Woman vs. Man? I feel pretty strongly about what I was blogging about, that women are really coming to the top.  I connected the post to an article from class, as well as to a class discussion.  The article and discussion had been conflicting because the article said women were rising, while our discussion of famous New Trier graduates was about only men except for one lady, the CEO of Playboy. I think it would have been a good post for people to comment on, but I can understand that maybe people were a bit overwhelmed because of the information I presented.

     I think blogging is a great way to further improve my writing, as well as to keep in mind the larger picture of the United States, and even larger, the world.  Not everything in my life should have to be about school, even though the blog ironically is.