The Formation of the Process

I have only written one other blog before the one I created for English class, and it was mostly written to communicate, while studying abroad in Ecuador, what I was experiencing to my family and friends. I may live during the technological age, and I do use Facebook, but I generally would not choose to post my information on the internet or to write for such a broad audience. In fact, much about this class has been a new experience. Many times I was not sure what to expect or what was expected of me, and so my blog posts were my best attempt to capture the essence of what I believe was both desired for me to learn as well as for me to produce.

As is true for me at the beginning of every course I take, I am more likely to put in more effort than might be necessary, at least in the beginning, to ensure success, until I know what is truly expect of me for the course and how well I will naturally do. Basically, I am an overachiever deep inside, be that a virtue or a sin. So, with this in mind, I remember getting home the night the first blog assignment was given, and spending well over an hour composing my post “Love Land,” describing the place where I go skiing in Colorado. I wasn’t sure if I would even use the content in my personal environmental ethics essay, but I wanted to describe the scene to the best of my ability, so that my classmates would be able to see into my life, my passions, my ability (or lack of ability, depending on the judge) to write, and my love of God, the Creator of all things. So from the beginning I wrote not just for the grade, but to convey something greater to all those who would read what I had written. I did not envision others, unaffiliated with OU, stumbling across my blog, although it is possible. But I did foresee that maybe other friends of mine would venture onto my “Earth Tones” blog, navigating from the only other blog I’ve ever written, and I wanted to make a good impression.

I still had no idea what to expect for the class and each piece that we read took me into a different realm of the subject of “the environment”. I had previously studied most of the topics we covered in several of my geography classes, but I continued to learn new information through the means of a variety of writing styles. These different styles often also affected how I wrote. At times I wanted to respond with my personal opinions and reactions more so than to analyze the rhetoric, and at times this inclination led to a lack of clarity in my writing. I do believe that as I grasped a better picture of what a “blog post” really consists of and what was required of me, my writing improved.

It is not necessarily that reasoning that presses me to believe that my post on “An Unspoken Hunger” was far from the greatest of my posts, even though it was one of the first chronologically. I clearly remember writing it late at night, which produced more than a couple of grammatical errors, but it is my lack of clarity in some ways that makes me deem it less than worthy of praise. I so desired to comment on the pantheistic nature of the writing and how it compares and contrasts with my own beliefs about the nature of, well, nature. And so I failed to really clarify what I was trying to write, while still putting together a semblance of a response to the tone, structure, and theme of the pieces. In contrast, by the time I wrote “Eat Meat?”, I understood the scope of what a blog post should include and was able to narrow down some ideas and discuss them with better precision, while still including some personal response. Perhaps the quality of my work in these two examples was prompted by my emotional response to the writers and whether I agreed or disagreed with their writing. This I do not know for sure.

I do know that through the various posts, I came to better recognize the elements of rhetoric in the readings, even when not directly commenting on them in my posts. Knowing that my reflection would be posted on the internet for all to read, I was careful to read through the pieces, noting points of interest and effective pathos, logos, and ethos along the way. I believe that I was fairly thoughtful in my analysis, occasionally even writing far too long of a response (as in the case of “Cradle to Cradle”). As an overachiever at heart, I attempt to own my work, taking pride in the effort I put in, but I also was genuinely interested, for the most part, in the readings. I have not had much opportunity to rhetorically analyze writing in the course of my college years, and between this class and my Spanish literature course, it’s been a pleasure.

Analyzing, however, the writing of my classmates, I did not do as great of a job. I attempted to be thoughtfully critical, both including grace and truth in my comments, but sometimes I only gave praise and sometimes I attempted to critique only to add too much fluff over my suggestions. My classmates seemed to also have trouble with this balance. Instead of analyzing my work I would generally read comments that agreed with one part of my prose and saying “good job” without questioning my opinions or adding to my thoughts. Despite this, I was able to take knowledge away from both my own posts as well as theirs, especially when these thoughts were not presented in the class discussion. I guess people are not as shy when it’s mandatory for them to write something and to have others have read it. In my case, these posts helped me to formulate ideas about the readings before coming to class. And through discussion, revision, reading, and analyzing, I have certainly formed ideas- about the world, the environment, and about words. Even in writing this essay, I’m not sure what to expect, but I know that I have taken something away from the process and have taken a step forward in my college journey.