Blogs, in all their glory...

As discussed in class today, there are a lot of choices when making a blog. I have found that with these changes, not only do I want for the blog to appear “pretty,” as well as reader-friendly, but also I want the blog to be a reflection of me in some way. Therefore, I chose colors I like. I honestly feel that if I were born just a few decades earlier, I would have been a hippie. Yes, full-blown flower child, complete with bohemian garb, the long hair, and a peace-encouraging outlook on life. As it were, living in this technologically ever-advancing world, I attempted to make my blogspot page have the appearance of one such identity.

One thing I’ve noticed with this course and specifically in creating a blog, is how although the assigned work is just as labor intensive as a traditional literature course, I feel more at liberty and relaxed in project creation phases. Whereas with traditional essays I am constantly concerned with my authoritative voice, here, I have become conscious of my capacity for authoring liberating written text. As far as the audience goes, I am less concerned with impressing readers with being an authority on the subject at hand, and more concerned with being part of a greater whole and wanting that “Yeah, I feel that way, too” sense of community and belonging.

Also, in blogging, I’ve become more of a computer-based composer of text instead of using the traditional pen and pencil, because I find creating text in a word processing program much more efficient both in saving time, and in correcting grammatical and/or mechanical errors. I've started writing my blogs in Word and then transferring them into the blog-post space to 1)ensure the length of the blogs and 2) for spell-check purposes. Given the five cannons of creating text- invention, arrangement, memory, style, and delivery- and adapting them to a hyper-textual or multi-modalized setting has not “[stricken] a blow against human memory,” as feared by the ancients, rather I have become a writer more conscious of the tools and choices I have at my disposal (Marcus 21).