Blogging about blogging. META POST!

I find it hard to analyze my own writing because I always focus on all the little things I could improve upon, rather than what my piece is lacking as whole. In reviewing my works, there were many things I noticed about my writing, and more importantly, the evolution of my writing.

One of the first things I noticed after re-reading my posts was my lack of specific evidence, and how that detracted from the overall quality of my post. For example, in my very first blog post, "The Success Meter", I contemplate the different measures of success and compare an unknown rap artist/slam poet, George Watsky, to big time rap artists like Lil' Wayne or Big Sean. As I compare them, I mention that George Watsky's "songs are carefully crafted, and are real pieces of poetry", but offered no evidence to prove they were "carefully crafted" whatsoever. I easily could have included an excerpt from one of his poems, and analyzed it to prove the depth of his writing, but instead left it up to the reader to take my word for it. 


As my posts progressed, I started to include evidence, but I still lacked the necessary analysis of the evidence. It's just not enough to include it, but to explain it to the reader, and I clearly forgot that in my blog post titled: "Where did Lazy Sundays Go?" In this post, I talk about the  song "Mayberry" by Rascal Flatts, and discuss how American society has become so fast paced, and jam packed. In the post I pull out a line from the song that says: "Sunday was a day of rest, but now it's just one more day for progress". Although this is an improvement from my early blog posts, I still didn't analyze the actual words. I left the reader to assume the lines meaning, and although the line is fairly straight forward, everyone knows to show- not tell. I think this is a prime example of where a student thought she was analyzing a phrase by isolating it, but didn't actually discuss the meaning. 


Thankfully, this post is not all bad news. One aspect of my writing I've noticed is that I supported my argument, and wrote with better clarity when the post concerned a topic I wanted to write about. For example, one my strongest posts, "Above the Belt", was written right after I got home from a slam poetry reading, and I was so inspired by the poet, that I came home and blogged about it. In this post, I discuss a poem by Andrea Gibson entitled "Swing Set", and discuss gender labels in todays society. I took out one of Gibson's lines, and proceeded to analyze the word "self" as mentioned in the poem by saying: "Andrea suggests she is the truest definition of "self" when she claims to be the best example" and that "she doesn't feel she is either [a boy or a girl], and that's why she feels so rawly herSELF" I felt this post was not only strong because I liked writing it, but also because I took words out of her poem, analyzed them, and expanding on my point through my analysis.


After this analyzation of my writing, I feel the best way to improve it in the future is to just write about things that interest me. Although I try to avoid being a "hoop-jumper" type of student (i.e one that does all the work, but just for the sake of the grade), I don't plan on writing any more blog posts just to fill the weekly requirement. Clearly, I put more effort into supporting my claim when I care about the topic so why not pick something that actually sparks my interest? Although I know I will not have the luxury of writing about interesting topics all the time, I have the luxury here. So I shall blog away.