Fourth Blog Post Assignment

Let's move this due date back as well, to Saturday 2/25 by midnight.


For this post, let's focus on the "writing to learn" aspect of blogging.


You're probably used to using writing to communicate. You write e-mails to your family and friends back at home, you facebook chat, you text, you complete homework assignments, you write essays: you write all these things to communicate something. Maybe that e-mail to your mom is clarifying what time she'll pick you up from campus this Friday. Maybe that text to your friend was to communicate your excitement about your Spring Break trip. Perhaps that homework assignment was to communicate to your Sociology professor that you've read and understand last night's chapter. This blog assignment, however, has been less to communicate and more to learn. 


Return to the passage I quoted, from our textbooks, in my "First Blog Post Assignment" post:
Good writing comes from returning to your ideas on your own and with your classmates, reconsidering them, and revising them as your thinking develops. This is not something you can do with any specificity unless you have written down your ideas (12). 
The authors of our textbook are saying that you have to write, throughout the entire writing/research process, to keep track of your thoughts and to make sure your ideas are fully developed.


And consider this quote, one of my favorites:
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it. -William Faulkner


Also consider this quote:
Writing has got to be an act of discovery. . .I write to find out what I'm thinking about.   -Edward Albee

So my question to you is, what have you learned from doing this blog? About the research process? The writing process? About your inquiry question? About yourself? Aim for a few meaty paragraphs here - and think about the genre of blogging. Even though you might want to contain your blog within my classes, which is absolutely fine, the larger purpose of blogging is to share your ideas with the blogosphere, with other blog writers and readers - and interesting blogs get followed. So, make your last post as interesting as possible. Put some muscle into it! Be creative. Be insightful. Be thorough. Have some fun!