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Blog Self-Audit

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The following post is for my English 1101 class at Georgia Tech.

[insert different "24"-esque intro]
The following took place between August 26th at 2:09 PM and October 31th at 9:45 AM.

Looking back through my blog posts I find that I have not really changed too much. Well, maybe a bit more than I say. From the beginning I have always written about technological topics with the occasional aviation related topic or topic that just straight out interests me in some way or form. Since then I have stayed with that theme. In my mind, if it is interesting and I have some reason to share or comment about it, I will blog it.

Over the weeks that I have gotten back into blogging, I would have to say that my blogging style has changed a little bit. When I was out of it and just started blogging again, my posts were still kind of bland and written like an essay. In other words, they were not too personal and did not particularly sound like me. I’m not exactly sure what to account for the changes, but I guess one could say my writing changed just due to me getting back into blogging. I had done blogging before, but I could never sustain the blog for too long, so I suppose the more I blog now the more I shall get back into the idea of blogging and writing more often.

I am not particularly surprised as I go back and reread my work, though I can attribute that to blogging back in the day where I learned what is the best way to write and such. Now if we look at blog posts from my old, old blog many moons ago, I am surprised at how much I’ve changed since then. Well, not completely surprised, but it is interesting to see the changes I have made in writing style.

There exist a few ideas/topics/threads in my posts that I would like to revisit one day. One would have to be the topic of modernization of transportation as my Student Alumni Association mentor, Steve Dickerson, had something to do with the transportation tracking system here at Georgia Tech. I would really like to continue the idea of being a digital native (i.e. being born digital) even after my ENGL 1101 is over as my generation is starting to be completely different from my parents’ generation and helping document it and examine it is probably one of the most interesting things now in the world.

I value a lot out of blogging throughout the week. I like to get my thoughts out and have the possibility of people listen. If anything it is more of a way just to write about what I like. It matters not to me whether I have people reading, but whether I get something out of blogging that I enjoy. I believe that if I continue to write about technology, aviation, and other things I love then I shall be happy with blogging. I’m not sure how it shows up in my posts – perhaps the depth, length, and quantity of such posts? I do not know.

After writing this blog self-audit, I kind of like the idea that is promotes – reviewing my blog and looking at what was good and bad. Perhaps I shall do it bi-monthly in the future even after my ENGL 1101 class is over. It’s good to look back on what we have done and review what we could do better.

The Process of Writing

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On Tuesday while working on preparing for an interview for an ENGL 1101 project, I tweeted the following tweet.

The idea of archiving thoughts through audio than writing seems so much a better idea right now…

After tweeting this my ENGL 1101 professor tweeted back asking why this was so and I replied as so.

@ktcrow For me, when writing thoughts I am censored by the medium of writing. The process of writing is the middleman to record my thoughts.

In end, the idea was interesting to me and I thought I might write a blog on it. So here I am. Have I said “tweet” enough?

When I write a blog post, assuming I know what I’m going to write about, I take several steps as I write the post. Do I want to use “we”, “I”, or “you”? How do I want to organize it? Do I want to tell a little story or do I just want to tell everything flat-out? Should I ask rhetorical questions throughout the post? Do I like the wording of that sentence? Is there a better way to describe this? Should I be funny?

What I am trying to say is that a lot of thoughts that I go through when I write a blog post. Now if you pay attention, there is one thing that shows up only once among all the other things – what I am writing about. The real, physical content of the post has perhaps the lowest brain process priority; I will spend more time thinking about how I want to format things and not just saying what I want to say.

So what am I saying? That when writing, formatting and wording can get in the way. I am not saying that they are unnecessary, but there are times when they can get in the way. If you are writing a letter to the President, you write a nice little letter with a few paragraphs not just “Don’t build the bomb”.

When speaking verbally, we rarely not think about how we format what we say unless we are doing something impromptu in front of people we have great value for – our bosses or professors. When speaking, there is no medium. We speak every day to our friends, family, and respected others. We are used to speaking. Speaking is our primary means of communication.

Remember back to when you did not know how to write. When you learned to write, what was it for? It was for formal things – essays, papers, “The dog ran.” kind of things. To us, to my generation, writing is something formal – like cursive. We will use cursive when we have to on our signatures, “I hereby accept” statements, and the “I will not share answers” paragraph on the SAT – all important things. What do we use in the rest of our life – some version of print handwriting that we call our own. If writing is cursive, than verbal communication is print handwriting.

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that unless you are esteemed at writing or have a great deal of time to spend editing, it is very hard to write what exactly you are thinking. I am not saying it is not possible, but it is hard. For me, I have to write with my personality in a sense. I’ll think what I would say and that I write it. Most of the times what I say makes sense and does not make me look like an idiot.

Eureka ideas come from talking. Working through a hard problem comes from talking. Putting our thoughts down via writing is very hard, which may be apart of why have college students write blogs for ENGL 1101 is hard to do. Maybe they’re just lazy.

Some days you write professional things and some days you just be yourself. That is what the world is.

Footnote: This post is somewhat related to this post on the formats of an interview.

Inflammatory Posts

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Today I posted on a tweet on Twitter.

I slightly cry every time I see an inflammatory post on a forum and it remains there not removed by administrators.

What I should have added as well is that the post remains there while users respond to it, explaining to the original poster what the flaw is in their logic, while not considering at all the provocative nature of the post.

Now I’m looking at this for two reasons.

Reason #1: I don’t like having forums of which I know that are awesome get pulled down by a bad administrators.

Reason #2: I did some moderation for Patrick O’Keefe years ago on his plethora of communities and have learned to love his way of administration.

I am in no way being paid or influenced by Patrick to write about him or his ways, I just think the way he does things is awesome. I’ve written about him once or twice before on an old blog (which sadly no longer exists – I should stop doing that).

Now, I could write a lot on how the forum does a lot of things wrong in my opinion, but doing that would get this post off topic.

I guess the main point of this post is that if you’re going to run a forum, at least do it well. Organize your administrators. Have a visible set of guidelines. Keep things simple.