Metablog

Intro

This blogging journey was unique to me. The closest thing to something like this that I have done before was a guided writing process in my senior English class in high school when we were given a random prompt and told to write about it for several minutes without stopping. The prompts we were given during that course were not ones that I would have naturally chosen to write about, so the freedom that we were given to write about in this college course was definitely a reprieve and I reaped a lot of enjoyment out of it.

Frequency:

I definitely did not blog frequently enough, and part of the reason why is that I had trouble deciding what movies or shows to blog about. Once I exhausted a couple of my most favorite TV shows or movies that I was very familiar with and had watched several times, I was left with only media that I had recently seen. Of course, if I was going to blog about something, I obviously had to be refreshed on the plot and what the movie/show felt like to be able to write enough substance about it. If I could do it again I probably would write a shorter-length blog that wasn’t necessarily a review of something, but maybe my thoughts on certain topics, for example: why I think movies/shows have declined in quality.

However, I do feel that I made up for the lack of frequency in providing substantive amounts of high-quality detail about the movies I reviewed, and I tried my best to explain why I felt the movies were so great. My writing style was fragmented, and mainly relied on my stream of thought, so some of the blog posts jumped around a lot. Some of the information in the posts definitely did not have anything to do with the title, but were simply aspects I felt I had to bring up as I felt they were vital for understanding the brilliance of the movie, or else I would be doing the reader a disservice.

Feedback

I was surprised that out of relatively few students in both of the courses that there were several people who had seen many of the content that I reviewed, and even held some of the similar beliefs. I wish I had a little more feedback, but the amount I received was to be expected in a relatively small course. I appreciated the feedback greatly and enjoyed reading the comments, and I especially enjoyed reading other people’s writing and finding common ground with them and commenting on theirs, as well.

Process

The process definitely helped me understand myself more as a writer, particularly more about my specific writing style. I learned that although I write the most words when I simply pour my thoughts out on to the paper, it is important for me to reread what I wrote and revise things where clarity is needed, or to remove things that are unconnected.

Changes

I think the way that this blogging part of the course was setup was pretty well-done. I am extremely grateful that you (prof) let us pick our own material to blog about. This was the best decision you made because when students are forced to write about things they don’t particularly care about, or simply didn’t choose, the students will produce lower quality work. They will write with less passion and inevitably less knowledge, leading to more half-assed work and the assignments being seen as a chore, rather than a learning exercise to look forward to.

Maybe this is just my feeling, but I felt there were too many blogs to be expected. It took a lot of time away from class for me to think what to blog about, and I put many hours into writing them. Some of the assignments often overlapped during the time blogs were due, and it felt constricting at times. I feel like if there are many blogs to be expected to write, students are forced to shorten their thoughts and make less qualitative and quantitative posts. They will feel like they can’t dedicate all their energy into a well-rounded post, because they still need to write many more. Maybe I’m wrong and other students found this to be enough, or maybe the nature of my specific blog posts led me to feel this way (being very detailed movie reviews).