1. Explain one or two ways my writing has improved (or not). Include a few examples from my posts over time, with analysis and links to the original posts, to illustrate how the improvement(s) happened.
I feel like my writing has improved and changed since the beginning of the year when I first started my blog posts. Many philosophers have stated basically that if you have to do work, then you should choose to work on something you will enjoy and it won’t feel like work. I have done so with my blog posts. At the beginning of the year, I had little confidence, especially when it came to writing, and I never got good grades on past writing assignments and essays unless they were pass or fail essays. When I made my first blog posts, I didn't go into much description and could have written much better posts now that I look back. I only did the minimum of the blog posts, and now I feel like an underachiever and that I barely did anything. Now I feel my more recent posts have been better. Even if I still did the minimum length of the blog posts, I still chose subjects that I found interesting.
At the beginning of the year, I remember wanting to be great at writing these posts, but I expected it to happen without me trying. At the end of the day, when I had to make my posts for the week, I remember just wanting to get it done a pick something randomly so I could watch TV and be lazy, which included one of my first blog posts, the one about Linguini’s. I even said that I was just picking a random topic because I wanted to get it over with. At the time, I thought that making blog posts were a bit of a drag, and it was just another homework assignment I had to get done. So I was a little surprised that I could choose whatever I wanted to talk about, and I couldn’t find anything to write.
“Well. I don’t really know what to write about or what to take about, so I’ll just make it up as I go along... So maybe I’ll do that. I think one of the best pizza places I’ve ever been to is Amici’s so if you see it, immediately plan a time to go there, cause their pizza is awesome!”
Since then, I started choosing topics that wanted to talk about, or that I wanted to speak up about. I don’t exactly know or remember when I wanted to started to choose things I really wanted to write about, but I remember specifically that there was one topic that I really wanted to talk about, which was my post on the movie Food Inc.
“I was looking at some recent posts made, and I saw something that I knew I could write a lot about in 14 minutes on Cristian's blog.
‘Sometimes it just hits me that we, humans, the animals that have an open conscious and can feel love are the same animals that can a drop a nuke and comit genocide on a people because religious sterotypes. We are the animals that can make industries like Pixar and the Red Cross, but yet, we can also judge someone based on thier skin color or have rich and poor. Well, I think we messed up, big time.’
I was just watching a movie called Food Inc. and when I saw this post, I had to respond.”
I had always liked talking about documentaries like these, (i.e. An Inconvenient Truth) for whatever reason, so when I wrote this post, I felt like I had really accomplished something. It was one of those moments where you just realize something, and I realized that the blog posts served a purpose. It was to help you out in some way. For me, it helped me to improve my writing, because that’s what I wanted to do, be a good writer. So what I had to do in order to figure this out was write about the right topic. I’m not sure which topic it was where I really found the right one and started to love writing my blog posts, whether it was about food, The Kite Runner, or something else that I felt I talked a lot about. Whatever post it was though, I certainly found the right post and discovered that I the things I really wanted to talk about and found out how awesome blog posts were. So I would like to say that blog posts have helped improve me and my writing by knowing what I wanted to talk about and make a lot of ideas and comments on that topic.Another way my writing improved was in ways that I could make connections in books. In my blog posts, I usually made connections in books like Of Mice and Men, Unwind and The Kite Runner. I usually put in things like “maybe so-and-so happened”, or “what if the character’s intentions were to...”, so I felt by the end of the book Kite Runner, I had improved a lot. It was one of the blog posts that “changed” me, and gave me a different opinion of what I thought about blogs and the purpose they served. I felt like I did a very good job on the connections in the book Unwind as well.
“It is possible that something like this happened to Hosseni. Not all of this word for word, but maybe he did something small that he would never forgive himself for. Then he could have exaggerated greatly the amount of regret he felt and made it into a much bigger problem. Also, he may have based Amir on himself, maybe on the decisions he would have made as a kid: trying anything to please his father, being scared of bullies like Assef, and even making some decisions that may have seemed good at first, but later he realized that was the wrong choice. Then these may have affected his life. He may have even gone a long time in his life haunted by something he did, and every day wishing he could take it back.”
In this blog post, I felt like I kind of stated the obvious since it was a class discussion, and that was basically the only thing I talked about. I had, however, learned how to make starting steps to making these kinds of connections and ideas in books, starting with The Kite Runner (it was in my second or third post on The Kite Runner). In this next post though, for my Unwind book, I made many connections like this and they were my ideas, so by then I felt like I gained some confidence through writing these blog posts.
“A few chapters before this happened, a kid named Cyrus Finch (CyFi) was introduced in the story. He was kind and was always in good humor, but later on, he stole gold necklaces, Christmas ornaments, and other valuable items. Later on, we find out that CyFi had been given a part of someone else's brain when they got in an accident. That someone stole valuable items, so at certain points, CyFi would be controlled by that piece of mind and start to steal things and talk differently. This could have been what happened to Conner. Maybe he had been given part of someone else's brain, and that person got in a lot of fights or had mental problems where they couldn't be around crowds. This could have been why Conner would have sudden impulses to punch someone because they were being too loud.”So all in all I found a purpose for blogging this year. It helped me improve my confidence in writing as well. For example, I used to be unsure of what I should write, and when I was writing my first blog posts, I was constantly deleting what I wrote and changing it. Now though, I have confidence, in writing my blogs and I realize what a big help blog posts are to me and how much they may have affected my life. I think I will be writing blog posts for a long time.