alliek414

Weblogs, blogs, journals, filters, notebooks, and diaries are all different ways of personal writing. It can be very beneficial to maintain one of these types of “story keeping” journals in your life. We have been asked to keep a Weblog as part of this class. Keeping a Weblog has been very interesting for me because I was never interested in keeping one before, but I do keep a diary and it has been interesting comparing some of the aspects of them. There are several benefits to keeping a Weblog which include obvious reasons such as people are going to read this, but there are also two others that I would like to address: How it has helped me become more organized in my writing and how it has helped me maintain writing skills.

Writing for a Weblog is very different than writing a paper and turning it in to your English teacher or writing about what has happened to you in your diary. When you write on the Internet anyone can see it, and anyone can make a comment about it. At first I was intimidated by the idea that everyone could read what I was writing and be able to critique it if they wanted to. However, after actually putting some writing out there I realized that it is really nothing to be scared of. I have learned that it is not a big deal if no one comments on my posts and that I can just write about what I want to whether others find it interesting or not. Because of this I like to think I am more carefree about people reading what I write because of the realization that everyone has some of their writing out there as well. I think that even though it is early in the Weblog process, I have become a more confident writer, and have learned which topics interest people and which topics I write because I want to. Since we have been writing in our blogs every week and writing something in out class blogs as well, I have also learned how to organize my writing even though it has just been in a few minor ways.

Another benefit to blogging is learning how to organize your thought process and deal with writer’s block. Through blogging I have learned that even though you may think you have nothing to write about, you should just start writing and it will evolve into something. Almost all of my blogs that I have written were unfinished topics. For example, in my “driving” blog I started out writing about my favorite song and then realized I love to listen to it when I drive, and that I wanted to write about how great driving is. The effectiveness of this in blogging is very useful and may seem like it may not apply to other forms of writing, but trust me it has helped me through some pretty difficult papers that I thought I was not going to be able to finish.

Even though writing on a Weblog uses a more relaxed type of writing it is still beneficial to maintaining writing skills. You still use your skills every few days and are forced to come up with something different to say. This is very beneficial in comparison to not writing anything for weeks until a huge term paper is assigned. “Everyone needs to be writing at least once every three days, whether it is in your diary or just a story you are telling, write!” My third grade teacher told my class those words. She said to write at least every three days. It was not something I ever got excited about or ever really listened to. After keeping a Weblog and having to write every three days, I have realized that maybe I should have paid more attention to what my little third grade ears were hearing because just these few weeks have been beneficial to me as a writer.

I think the overall process of weblogging has been beneficial to me. I have the expectation that even after this class is over I am going to maintain some type of writing in my life because I have already seen some benefits from it.