Was having a blog a good expereience?

So this journey has come to an end. The semester is coming to the end, and so are semester-long assignments.  It is time to say goodbye to this blog and continue with the learned experiences.  I have written 15 posts with this one, all having more than 300 words as this was one of the requirements for each post. At first, just having a blog was a somewhat sketchy idea for me.  I was quick to think I would be writing personal things for all to read and comment.  But writing my thoughts from the different works we had done in class didn’t come close to personal thoughts.

Eventually, I got to speak my mind about a few things.  In one post I wrote what had I learned from writing in a journal for about three months.  This assignment was directed to get us writing our first thoughts.  Two years ago, I began writing my first thoughts about many things, and writing them in a journal was no different.  This time, I got to write about my overall experiences with writing in a journal, and writing my first thoughts.  For me, the exercise of reading my first thoughts proved to be very revealing.  At one point I had gotten scared because of what I was writing when I first started. But then I saw how many things disturbed and bothered me, and I resulted to fixing them.  Writing on the journal helped me clear my head and organize my thoughts if I feel overwhelmed with work.

Writing on the blog and the journal were two different experiences. The journal was more of an internal, reflective exercise for each of us, while the blog was more of a social interaction expressing our ideas and really getting them out there so that anyone could comment. The journal allowed me to organize my thoughts while the blog was a medium to express my ideas. The blog was obviously a more formal, the writing, than the one in the journal.  Every time I made a post I would think I was making little essays; writing concrete ideas and sharing them with my class. I guess this replaced in-class discussions in a way. This made me think of how correctly developed my ideas had to be.  The journal could’ve been a train wreck compared to a blog, but that was not my case. The journal served as a cathartic exercise.  I could write freely and just release some stress while I was writing.

Having a blog meant receiving comments. And receiving comments meant that I had to give comments as well.  We had to follow Peter Elbows techniques for writing comments.  This was basically a way of writing comments by contemplating what had been written in a post. I received comments from all the classmates that were in my group.  I got a few comments that wanted me to better explain some ideas I had written about.  This type of comments, Peter Elbow’s, is more for giving a different view on things; it basically is a way to better expand ones understanding of a topic.  I have to say that I found myself with a few posts from my peers that I simply could not create a thought or write a comment on what they had written.

Being a college student, my blog worked as a way for me to speak my mind and ideas, and it gave every other classmate the same opportunity.  Keeping the blog got a bit tedious when I didn’t have any reaction to a work.  This happened twice; not being able to write a concrete idea turned out a bit frustrating because we had to have comment, reaction, or something to go against what we had read, or seen if we were talking about a movie.