Reflective Essay

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.
8. How do I like having a blog? How has blogging changed the way I write, the way I think, or the way I think about writing
9. Has blogging had any other effects on my life beyond strictly my "school life"? Explain.

Over the year playing around with blogger, I have improved my writing with different styles. From debates, to responses, free posts, to  book reviews, and even vignettes. All of these writing styles helped me to practice different styles instead of regular writing or formal writing. I have enjoyed doing these because it helped me to experience more. I now feel like an experienced writer.

Having a blogger for a year has been great. It helped me to experiment with new “widgets” in google like Google Reader and Docs. The main reason I like having a blog is freedom. I have the freedom to post anything, ANYTHING. Of course there are some restrictions because it is a school blog, but I can still post anything. But the type of freedom I am talking about is being able to post many different things as homework. Earlier in the year, we mainly did free post and response posts that helped out to get to know each other and share our opinions. By the second half of the school year or earlier, we began to make book reviews and posts relating to a book or books. These were good because I had never reviewed a book before (well I hardly ever read books).

Another type of freedom that we got from this is to write in any style. We can write with a certain attitude, like using fragments to put out a way to read it. This brought me to have an original style, I guess. An example of this is mainly in some of the response posts. One example that I thought that had a certain arguing style was the very early Debate Rebuttal. In this, I was rebutting against the Pro team of legalizing prostitution. But in this certain post, I read it like with an attitude it seems. Since it was a rebuttal, I was bashing the other team and this attitude came from this. Here is the quote,

Next, prostitutes are committing a crime. Prostitution is a crime, if you haven't realized, prostitution is illegal in many places. Only where prostitution is legal it is not a crime, but in other places it is a crime. What does prostitution from 2400 BC have to do with today’s prostitution. For all I know, i think prostitution has changed a lot since 2400 BC. Another, is there any statistics, facts, evidence stating that crime has reduced anywhere where prostitution has been legalized, no.

In this paragraph from the rebuttal, I was talking to the Pro team with attitude. In this though, I felt as if I needed to talk with an attitude to disprove them. The way I used punctuation really tells how I would say it. Like in the last sentence, I can really see myself actually saying it in that matter, no. But this attitude can sometimes be misread, which is really bad because people will think in a different ways. From this, people will get offended by reading it in a certain way, so it is not always so good writing in this style.
I noticed that many of my posts included something about Oakland, and me defending it. I think one of my goals in blogger was to defend Oakland because many people think it is a bad place. Many of my response posts were about Oakland, which I think were good. Here are just a few of them. In these posts, I was either going against people who think that Oakland is a bad place. Or agreeing with people that think Oakland is a good, but a dangerous place. This helped me to connect with people and make Oakland look good. I thought that some of these posts were good because they were meant to show somewhat how Oakland really is, at least in my neighborhood.

Blogging, I would say, is school life but different. It is school work because of course it is homework, but it’s different. Blogging as homework is not the same as regular homework, in a good way. Since we were able to have much freedom about what to write about and questions, it led me to be able to write prompts in very different ways. Just how everyone analyzed and wrote about different things in the vignettes of The House on Mango Street. An example of this is in my blog and also Bianca’s blog. We had the same assignment, but were able to choose whichever quotes and analyze them however we wanted to. In Blogger we have much freedom to choose our prompts, well also Sutherland allowed us. Blogger, on the other hand, does not feel like part of school life. I say this because specifically from one type of assignment. This assignment were the debates. The debates seemed like an argument with a friend instead of a homework assignment, it was more fun than work. It was fun to experience something like this.

As I look back very early into the year before, I noticed differences in my writing. I used to take the easy way out of doing assignments from blogger, I used to be slick (still am). What I am talking about is the amount of writing in my past blogs compared to now. Before, I wrote very little into the blogs, about 300 words. Seems usual like any other blog post from now right? Wrong. Before, I used one long concrete details, or quotes, in response posts. These long CD’s were bout 100 words from the 300 minimum words to get full points. So if you do the math, I only did about 200 words of commentary. Still seems a lot, wait until you hear this. For blog posts now, the minimum is 350 words. By this time, I used smaller CD’s or quotes. In total I used about two small quotes that added up to 50 words. S this means I now do about 300 words of commentary. A 100 word difference from before to present. This is important because it means I know or learned to write more commentary and am able to do so.

Not only the word count has changed, also how I analyzed quotes and CD’s. Before I pretty much just restated the quote and just wrote a bull response. I did not go into detail or re supported the quote, I just restated it. But now, I know how to analyze bits of quotes, sort of like breaking them down. I also now know how to keep the commentary going instead of writing bull. That is how I have improved. Here is a quote from one of my blog posts,

“When you leave you must remember to come back for the others. A circle, understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are. (105)” In this quote there are many little clues that will say what Esperanza will do later on. The most significant one is one that Meriam pointed out in class. Meriam had said that Esperanza will come back to help others that were in the same cycle as Esperanza. This was made clear when I read, “A circle, understand.” I thought of the cycle because a cycle is a circle, so that is why I agree with Meriam. I am not very sure if it was meant this way but it would make sense. Another part of the quote is, “You will always be Mango Street.” This part of the quote shows that even after she leaves, she has the inspiration or identity of Mango Street. So when she leaves, she will take the Mango Street with her.

In this quote, I believe I analyzed a quote closely. I took parts of some of the quote in the book, and explained it part by part. I thought this was a good analyzing paragraph because I got to take out more information from the quote. This helps because it gets to see things we didn’t see before. I am proud of now being able to analyze like this because before I could hardly ever explain or commentate on quotes, and now I think I have improved and am good at it. This was a good analyzing post because as I said before, I got more information from the quote that helped with my point, and Mr. Sutherland also said it was good analyzing. From now on, I will begin to try and pull apart quotes to get more information.

Overall, I think I have grown into a better writer that I would not have thought I would have in about a year. Blogger has helped me a lot and taught me that sometimes homework is not as boring as it is (homework isn’t boring). The freedom that we had throughout the year was the best (I’m sorry if i am saying this too much). I will consider to keep on blogging, even if we don’t have to. Blogger has been a good experience that has taught me a lot, and it has been a unique experience that I may have not have received from something else. Thank you for allowing us to have to much freedom and writing on blogger, it was really fun, Mr. Sutherland.