The Blogging Life

When I attended my first college English class, I was told we were going to be blogging and commenting on other people’s blogs. My first thought was this kind of sounds like Facebook or twitter but it can’t be like that because this is English class. As I designed my blog site, I found it interesting that we were going to be writing about topics that were happening in our everyday lives. When I wrote my first blog, I found myself getting into what I was writing. Our word amount was 250-300 words and I was so interested in writing my blog that when I was finished I wrote almost 800 words. I have really enjoyed this writing process and I feel like it helps me to express what I am thinking and feeling at that time. I also feel like blogging has helped me to become a better writer by reading other peoples writings and comparing them to mine.However, I have to be aware of my audience when I am blogging because it is an academic point of view and you actually have to have a point and not just ramble on about something. I used to hate when teachers would tell us to write 5 paragraph essays about something that I had no clue about. I believe blogging gives me the freedom to write what I want and to choose the topics that I write about as well as read some other very interesting writing from my peers about stuff that I can relate to. I enjoy putting my own opinion out there and seeing what other people think about it. This is the best thing about blogging to me because I can get the situation off of my chest without any judgments from my peers. I have kind of struggled with coming up with topics that I was going to write about to begin with but I would just sit my computer down until something popped into my head.

Peer Review

Over the past few weeks in class, we have been discussing and reading about peer reviewing our peer's writing. In the readings, I learned not to be so harsh when leaving comments but to act like it is your own paper that you are editing. Give good feedback and help them to make their paper a lot easier to understand as a reader. When our teacher first told us we were going to have to peer edit papers, my first thought was how I am going to edit someone else's paper when I can't even edit my own. The first thing I think of when editing papers is correcting grammar and spelling mistakes so that should be easy. Well I thought wrong, there was much more to reviewing a paper than just spelling and grammar. According to the readings we have done and the process through which we have already incorporated with our literacy narratives, I have learned that after we read our peer’s papers we are supposed to comment on what we thought they did well, what we would change, and what confused us. This process has been absolutely wonderful in helping me to realize what my strengths were and what my weaknesses were.  However, I really don’t like reading so it made the process of reviewing my other classmate’s papers a lot harder than I had expected. It helped me to read the paper out loud so that I could hear myself speaking and actually comprehend their mistakes. I found it odd that reading these papers was actually pretty interesting and made me want to help my classmates with their paper because they did such a good job of commenting on mine and helping me through the process. 

Are you one of these people?

When I was walking back from class today, I happened to hear out of the corner of my ear, these two girls in front of me were carrying on a conversation about another girl that was walking the opposite direction. As I heard them say "ew that girl is hideous, why is she with that hot guy"? It made me start to think about how judgmental people are in the world today. We all like to think that we judge people fairly but obviously this is not true because judging people based on their external factors is not fair, when they usually can't help there appearance. Our first impressions of people usually have a strong impact on the way we judge a person and it is sometimes hard to change our minds when we already have made misconceptions. Whether we like to admit it or not, we judge people every day based on their looks or what they are wearing. You never know what a person is like if you just judge them by the way they look because honestly everybody has been through hard times in their life and if you don't take the time to get to know them then you’re just hurting yourself. The external factors that we most often judge people by are skin color, clothes they wear, weight, age, and gender. Clearly it is hard to change our personal biases that impact our judgment, but this is becoming a big issue in our country. Our minds seem to quickly jump to conclusions about people with very little evidence of who they are. However, these conclusions can keep us from building healthy relationships with loving and intelligent people. I believe that as a human being we can overcome these tendencies by consciously doing so, whereas animals do not have that choice. It is up to us as young adults to change our preconceptions of people and learn to open ourselves up to a broader range of people. It is very interesting for me to walk from class to class every day and hear people’s judgmental point of view because we don't know who they are.