Meta Post

At first thought, I did not think that my blog posts had much progression over the course of our first semester.  At second thought, however, I did see a bit of improvement in my use of evidence and subsequent analysis.  My first inclination in starting to write this post was to look over some of my older posts, and when I looked at my first one, I remembered Mr. Bolos' comment listed below the text.  He wrote regarding my first post (which I at the time thought was my best), "The only thing I would ask for is a specific instance from Assange's actions that your readers could more directly respond to."  The issue Mr. Bolos had with the post was that the evidence was too broad-based and, although the initial thought/argument was strong, what I provided wasn't showing enough empathy for the readers.  I gave an excerpt from the interview with Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, the whole video of the interview, and pulled quotes out quotes occasionally.  I did not, however, properly represent with succinct, precise evidence the essential part of my argument.  I needed an example from Assange himself, not just what he said in the video.  This is something that I'm currently grappling with while rewriting a portion of my civil liberties during wartime paper, so it is not an issue that naturally works itself out through practice.  Blogging does, however, catalyze the process of me realizing what I need to work on because it has forced me to frequently construct pieces and as a result I begin to understand my writing better.  


I've always had a lot of trouble with revising my own work because for some reason, my eyes can only correct so much of my own writing before I can't tell the difference between good and bad.  The continued practice that blogging gives has helped me realize my faults in previous pieces and then work on them in later pieces.  For example, in my post about gift returning during the holidays, I struggled with continuing my argument because there wasn't much to write about without a piece of solid evidence in which I could base what I was trying to say.  I searched for some scrap of evidence so that I wouldn't be forced to abandon all that I had written, and by the end of writing the post, I found a somewhat solid example that worked well with what I was trying to say.  I probably needed to use that evidence (or something like it) from the beginning so that I wouldn't flounder so much in the first place.  


My first piece of evidence was, "'I bought some games for my nephew.  I decided I had bought too many.  So I needed to return something,' said a shopper in the news story."  It was not a piece of evidence that could support an argument due to how it was merely stating an obvious, uninteresting quote from some random guy.  My piece of evidence later in the post was from another article and it said, "In Japan, it's customary to give gifts periodically to certain people, such as co-workers, bosses, parents, relatives, teachers, and so on.  These gifts are given to express gratitude."  What I liked about this quote at the time was the fact that the gifts were "given to express gratitude", because it was a  point that I could bring back to American societal customs (as many Americans simply give gifts because otherwise it would be rude.)  All in all from this recent post of mine, I learned that it is important to have a text before beginning to write, so as to avoid floundering while getting the thoughts out into words.


In my most recent post, which directly follows the one from the last paragraph, I tried harder to base my argument on something more concrete.  Although I didn't have evidence set aside before I began writing, I had some great primary source information taken directly from my Aunt Marie, and I knew that I could find some solid evidence about the topic I was discussing once I got to the point in the post.  Nevertheless, the process I underwent in writing the most recent post was a somewhat long one, and it well exemplifies one of my bigger difficulties in writing blog posts: they take me a long time to finish.  In learning from these past posts, perhaps it would be better for me to base my posts in hard evidence I find first instead of finding proof of my argument as I write.  For whatever reason, this has been my natural inclination, and from this point on, I'm going to try and reorder my blog post writing process so I don't take up too much time writing them and can thus finish them on a more regular weekly basis.  


Part of why I originally chose this process to write posts was because I wanted to start writing about something I liked, not just basing an argument off of some piece of boring evidence I find that would work for a post.  Part of this meta post is to analyze not only your writing habits, but your post idea habits as well.  As I looked through my blog posts, I noticed that most, if not all of them, were based off of experiences I had that day or something that I saw on the news.  When I looked further into the posts, however, I noticed that there were a couple of themes that permeated throughout a few seemingly unrelated pieces.  I wrote pieces about people wanting the next best thing, the changing tides of the baseball industry, a changing new, technologically-based generation, and American football becoming more popular in the U.K.  News is based on the idea of progression or change in some way.  If there was nothing changing in the world, we would have no stories to report.  This, of course, is not and will never be the case.  Since I enjoy the idea of hashing out what is in the weekly news through a blog medium, I often write about what the T.V. networks and newspapers are discussing.  That is why some of my posts somewhat reflect the theme of progression, because they are based on the news at the time.  The theme of change or progression was quite prevalent in my earlier writings (all of the aforementioned posts were written in a two month time span.)  Why this is, I don't know exactly, but I do like having a common thread connect a lot of posts and may try to creatively do this in the future.