Blog #8 Last Blog
It's been a while since we've talked about James Paul Gee. And although we read and talked about what Gee had meant by, "discourse is a sort of 'identity kit' which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write", only though writing these blogs over the past 6 weeks did we really get to see and experience how our own identity kits affected how we write and how it differs from our peer's identity kits.
I didn't do many of the blogs, I'll admit it, but for the ones I did do I remember having to create a specific, secondary identity kit that I had believed would be appropriate for my audience. This identity kit acted more as a filter than a whole new identity. For example, I had to use a more formal style of writing, to establish my credibility as a writer I would always use grammatically correct structure and proof-read multiple times to show that I was a meticulous and educated author to my audience.
I envisioned my audience to be the people in the class. From that I understood that if I wanted people to enjoy my writing I would have to use only the most interesting of anecdotes to prove my points, as well as use visual imagery and pictures to make my blog seem pleasing and exciting to read. My underlying assumptions include knowing that most of my audience are college students and that they are writing these blogs as well, these assumptions allow me to guess what my audience likes or dislikes and that helped me tailor my writing to them. What surprised me about this class was the wide variety of ages of the students taking it. Some people, like me, are 19-21 and have only ever experienced going to school all our lives, meanwhile a couple of students in the class are much older, have had full-time jobs, been overseas, married, etc and I feel like that disruption in the classroom makes it much harder to predict how the audience would respond to my writing.
From my other blogs I noticed I normally write in a very impersonal and know-it-all way. I don't include many personal anecdotes, mostly out of fear that my readers wouldn't find them interesting or find any value from reading them. I use a standard writing format, short-medium length paragraphs, normal fonts, and simple vocabulary. I didn't add too many pictures because I wanted the focus to be on the writing rather than google clip art. I think I sounded like someone who already had the trust and credibility from my audience, I could've used more evidence to support the things I said, and I should've used more rhetoric appeals in my writing to make it stronger and more cohesive. I didn't get any responses to my blogs, which is understandable since I only did #1,#7, and #8. It would've been nice to see how others responded to my blog, but I don't think its a big deal.
In my opinion blogging in general was just very difficult for me to do. This genre, unlike a school paper or other structured assignments the blogging project had very few guidelines, and we were told to just simply do what we wanted. I unfortunately did not like this at all as it forces the author to be exceptionally creative which I had found rather difficult. As for Time constraints, blogs were not worth any points if turned in after the due date, putting such strict due dates on creative projects really didn't work well for me, which is another huge reason why I didn't write as many blogs as I could have.
The adaptation of blogging was difficult to do. Amy Devitt agrees that, "developing genre awareness is no easier than developing any other kind of critical consciousness". It takes a great deal of understanding of blogs to be able to successfully write your own. Values reinforced by blogs include creative writing, a creation of an author identity, understanding your audiences interests, and using relevant personal anecdotes to make arguments or to entertain. Meanwhile values minimized by this genre include not having to cite sources or use scientific evidence, and not having a clear purpose or argument besides the process of writing itself and audience entertainment.
I didn't do many of the blogs, I'll admit it, but for the ones I did do I remember having to create a specific, secondary identity kit that I had believed would be appropriate for my audience. This identity kit acted more as a filter than a whole new identity. For example, I had to use a more formal style of writing, to establish my credibility as a writer I would always use grammatically correct structure and proof-read multiple times to show that I was a meticulous and educated author to my audience.
I envisioned my audience to be the people in the class. From that I understood that if I wanted people to enjoy my writing I would have to use only the most interesting of anecdotes to prove my points, as well as use visual imagery and pictures to make my blog seem pleasing and exciting to read. My underlying assumptions include knowing that most of my audience are college students and that they are writing these blogs as well, these assumptions allow me to guess what my audience likes or dislikes and that helped me tailor my writing to them. What surprised me about this class was the wide variety of ages of the students taking it. Some people, like me, are 19-21 and have only ever experienced going to school all our lives, meanwhile a couple of students in the class are much older, have had full-time jobs, been overseas, married, etc and I feel like that disruption in the classroom makes it much harder to predict how the audience would respond to my writing.
From my other blogs I noticed I normally write in a very impersonal and know-it-all way. I don't include many personal anecdotes, mostly out of fear that my readers wouldn't find them interesting or find any value from reading them. I use a standard writing format, short-medium length paragraphs, normal fonts, and simple vocabulary. I didn't add too many pictures because I wanted the focus to be on the writing rather than google clip art. I think I sounded like someone who already had the trust and credibility from my audience, I could've used more evidence to support the things I said, and I should've used more rhetoric appeals in my writing to make it stronger and more cohesive. I didn't get any responses to my blogs, which is understandable since I only did #1,#7, and #8. It would've been nice to see how others responded to my blog, but I don't think its a big deal.
In my opinion blogging in general was just very difficult for me to do. This genre, unlike a school paper or other structured assignments the blogging project had very few guidelines, and we were told to just simply do what we wanted. I unfortunately did not like this at all as it forces the author to be exceptionally creative which I had found rather difficult. As for Time constraints, blogs were not worth any points if turned in after the due date, putting such strict due dates on creative projects really didn't work well for me, which is another huge reason why I didn't write as many blogs as I could have.
The adaptation of blogging was difficult to do. Amy Devitt agrees that, "developing genre awareness is no easier than developing any other kind of critical consciousness". It takes a great deal of understanding of blogs to be able to successfully write your own. Values reinforced by blogs include creative writing, a creation of an author identity, understanding your audiences interests, and using relevant personal anecdotes to make arguments or to entertain. Meanwhile values minimized by this genre include not having to cite sources or use scientific evidence, and not having a clear purpose or argument besides the process of writing itself and audience entertainment.
Hey Alvin,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your blog post. It was well thought out and had a lot of good points and reflection of your person style. You knew your audience and what you wanted to get across to us. I agree with you that too much freedom of creativity can almost be a hinderance. I wrote a similar thing that I waited until the last minute to get started on most of the blogs because I didn't know how to start. Even though you only did a few of the blogs it's still good to get them down. You mentioned the school paper. Do you write for the SDSU school paper? Anyway, great reflection and I'm glad I got a chance to comment on one of your posts. Congratulations on another semester of classes finished.
Chris
Hey Alvin
ReplyDeleteI agree that adapting to blogging was difficult at first but after awhile I got use to them. I did a lot of mine last minute since I'm a procrastinator and too much freedom makes it hard for me to start something. You did a good job creating your identity kit really shows you're a good writer. Our class has a lot of people from different ages so assumptions were pretty hard to predict. Seemed like everyone was very welcoming to people's opinion. Even though you didn't get any responses on your previous blogs you got 2 now for this last one.
Melos
Hi Alvin,
ReplyDeleteYou said you would have liked for more people to comment on your blogs so I thought I'd comment on yours. I really liked how you mentioned the fact that the audience in this class was really hard to pin down, being that the ages of the people in this class varied so greatly. I also had trouble with this as when I first signed up to take the class I assumed most of the people would be typically college aged (18-22), but it turns out there are a lot of people who have had jobs and been in the military and such, making the audience vary in age groups. This made writing with an identity kit harder in order to appeal to a broad range of audience. Great post!
-Ben Prukop