Blogging

Blogs are, as Dictionary.com says, "a Web site containing the writer's or group of writers' own experiences, observations, opinions, etc., and often having images and links to other Web sites." I have discovered that doing this can be a lot harder than expected.


I only started blogging earlier this year, and looking back I struggled to make powerful claims. In retrospect, my first couple posts all seem very similar. They are, for the most part, rants about topics that I felt passionately about at the time. I am not embarrassed by my early posts, but I do wish I could have made them better.


A major piece I was missing from those posts, such as Hockey More Show Than Sport, was concrete evidence. My arguments, such as the one about the role of "More enforcers" in hockey, could have been stronger if I found specific facts to discuss. Instead of doing this, I generalized almost everything. I wrote things like "he racked up countless penalty minutes"(from Hockey More Show Than Sport), in place of evidence. By summarizing and generalizing facts like that I weakened my argument. If I had used quotes like one from the Chicago Tribune where Chris Kuc, a reporter, said Carcillo "had 127 penalty minutes with the Flyers last season and is suspended for the first two games of 2011-12 because of an incident with an official during the postseason." This would have brought more authority to my argument because I would have reputable sources discussing hard evidence that relates to my topic. The lack of evidence was only one of many thing wrong with my blogs, but it is probably the one that I have tried the hardest  to remedy.


My more recent blog posts are far from perfect, but I believe there has been an improvement. My most recent blog post, Story Telling Through Music, uses direct evidence to further explain my points of discussion. In that post I took lines from the song "Ten Million Slaves" by Otis Taylor and connected them to our class discussions about slavery. I believe that my analysis for the lines in the song is pretty good, but there is still room for improvement. In that post I said, "The song parallels many of the horrible conditions slaves had to live through in the book A Narrative Life of Fredrick Douglass," and I followed that with an explanation of a line from the song. Looking back I do not understand why I did not also include a quote from A Narrative Life of Fredrick Douglass. The book has plenty of evidence in it that I could connect to a song about slavery, but for some reason I did not do it. The song has a set of lines, "Food goes bad, food looks Rancid / But they ate it anyway"that I quoted in my post. To connect to this, A Narrative Life of Fredrick Douglass has many lines that would work. One such line is on page 16 where it is said that "He that ate the fastest got the most; he that was the strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied." It would have helped my claim to connect those two quotes from different sources and discuss the necessity for food and how it was a challenge to eat enough to survive. But unfortunately I did not get to an analysis that detailed.


I am not disappointed with my blogging so far, but there is definitely room for improvement. My goal is to continue progressing and write a few blog posts that I am truly proud of, and that I feel effectively make the reader feel as passionately as I do about the topic being discussed.