So the reading for week one was Adrian Miles’ Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.
As I have mentioned previously, I have always enjoyed blogging and this is due to a number of reasons that were also touched on in the reading.
Whenever I see a course outline in the beginning of a semester involving a ‘major essay’, my automatic reaction is to push it out of my mind until future (more stressed out) me has to worry about it. Although handing in a 2000+ word essay is a feeling unlike any other, the process of finding 2000 ways to say something academic is never fun, or easy for that matter.
What I like about blogging is the ability to write with personality. I like writing as though I’m speaking to people I know or people who have similar interests to me. Adrian mentioned in his reading that through practice, blogging can become second nature and develop into a platform where you can develop a distinctive voice / online persona. This style of writing definitley appeals to me more than formal-harvard-referencing-style-essays do.
Back in 2011 I started a “fashion” blog with 2 friends of mine (I use the word fashion verrrry loosely). It causes me to cringe a little bit thinking back at our attempts at taking photos and appearing professional. For example the time we met our favourite blogger from tuulavintage.com, and very quickly embarrassed ourselves by forgetting her name and mispronouncing Tuula. We should have known then.
Anyway, although we began to realise we were pretty lazy and horrible not that great at taking photos, what we did have was a pretty distinct style of writing. We were always a little self-deprecating and approached each post with humour. Maybe if we had good pictures to go along with it we could have really blown up. Ha Kidding.
I did actually gain something from that questionable experience as well as the reading from this week and that is that I intend to take full advantage of this new blog to develop both my writing style and media skills. (And maybe also that 2011 was both a bad year for my internet presence and my hair).
– Caitlin
*Photo sourced from insidefmm.com*
