I feel that writing consistantly over the year has greatly improved my writing over the year, not only with quntity, but also with quality. With writing so much though, it might tend to burn some people out, and give people more troubles with writer's block. However, with our quickwrites, they really helped me find a way to get past writer's block. If you just keep writing, you will eventually think of something to write. This doesn't work with everybody though, it is all about finding what works for you.
In the beggining of the year, I felt like there wasn't enough for me to write about over the year to keep writing as much as we were. I thought "there is no way I am going to make it through this year writing this much", but it only took a little bit of inspiration for me to get through this year. My one true inspiration for writing this year was sports. Everything related to sports helped me get through this year. I think almost everybody can relate to sports in one way or another, so it also helped with people staying interested in my blog over time. I also saw on google analytics that sports was one of the more popular subjects for blogs throughout the year. So I read a few parts of other people's blogs and wanted to sort of stray away from the most popular things people talked about the most. Unless I was completely set on something I wanted to blog about, I would look for something that sounded interesting and a little exotic. I would also not blog about something if I started writing about something and would get stuck a lot. If I couldn't write about 200 words no problem, then I would look for a new topic to blog about. So I tended to avoid writers block all together by just blogging about specific things that I knew I wouldn't have a problem with. If it works, it works.
4. How do the things you read influence what you write about or how you write it?
Almost everything I write about was written by someone else. I got most of my topics from ESPN and would read interesting stories and blog about the first one that sounded interesting to me. I would then summarize the what I read in my own words, and give my opinion on the topic. For example, one of my main topics in the year was the Bay Area football team, the Forty-Niners. Over the year, I analyzed them and even made predictions for all things 49ers.
Without ESPN, there would be a lot of things I wouldn't even know about, because I am not one of those press people who are able to find out about everything (How do they do it?). So without my sources, I don't think I would have much to write about, and I probably would have had a lot more missing assignments in this class. I am horrible at coming up with stuff to write about on my own. Like some of my other posts non-sports related, I have noticed, tend to ramble a little bit. That or they are redundent because I was running out of stuff to talk about. But thanks to sports and people who cover sports for a living, I was able to make it through the year without much trouble, other than those darn pesky monthly reviews. It is hard for me to review other people's work, especially books. There are some books that people just rave about, so when I read the book, and I don't like it as much as they did, I feel bad writing something negative. This is why I think monthly reviews were the most hard part of the year, but that is just my opinion and will most definitely change as you move person to person as everybody's opinion is different. Some people may say that they disliked the weekly blog posts, but honestly those were the best blogs for me. They were free topic and made it much easier for me to avoid writers block and express my opinion without feeling too uncomfortable.
8. How do you like having a blog? How has blogging changed the way you write, the way you think, or the way you think about writing?
Being a blogger has been pretty weird. If I didn't have this class, I don't think I would ever have or want a blog. I never really liked writing about what I did that day or anything like that, so I never saw myself having a blog or an online diary or anything else like that. But having a blog has definitely changed the way I think. When I hear an interesting story online or from someone else, I think to myself "Oh, I could probably write a blog about that" or "That sounds like something I would want to blog about".
Writing has become easier over the year, and I hope I can carry that through to next year to when I am a junior and will probably be needing to be writing a lot more than I did this year. This year, I only had to write in about 2 classes, English and History. I can't predict the future, so I can't tell you I will be writing more next year, but I can only prepare myself.
Blogging has been pretty weird for me. People sometimes come up to me saying they saw what I blogged about, and start asking me all about it. I don't necesarily like having one, but I also don't necesarily dislike having a blog. While blogging has helped with my writing for high school, I am not one of those people who like showing their feelings toward everything publicly. I hate having to have to give my opinion on almost everything I write about, because honestly, sometimes I don't have any opinion towards something. But still, blogging has done more good for me over the year than it has done bad in my eyes. And in the end that is all that really matters to me. Is what I am doing going to give me some new found experience and knowledge? And I think that blogging has done exactly that, so it was definitely successful for me.
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