Questions 1 & 2

1. Coming up with a creative title was by far the hardest part of creating my blog. The “facebook generation” can figure out the technical elements in no time flat but what I realized as I was putting my blog together, was that the majority of my creative juices have dried up. Somewhere along the way writing became painful for me, and through that process I became a very factual and boring author. While making a blog makes writing seem more entertaining, as I’m sitting here writing this entry in my Word document I understand it is just a trick! J I still struggle to start and to finish, I struggle to focus, and I struggle to find things to say that I think others will find meaningful. The benefit of writing a “blog” however, is that it is not an essay! It is a short and casually written piece to provoke thought.

            Making a blog will be beneficial not in the ways I had thought but in many others. Initially I thought writing would become instantly fun as well as easier. Now I am realizing that the benefits will come from reading other classmates work and absorbing their thoughts and styles and also benefiting from their critiques and comments.

            Hopefully writing shorter pieces more frequently will teach me skills I seem to have lost since learning to write in grade school! That is one huge way I think blogging will benefit my writing, instead of trying to crank out a certain number of pages on something that doesn’t interest me I can “free write” in a sense about my thoughts and experiences.

2. Sullivan seems to believe in blogging far more than traditional writing. One of the points he made that had the biggest impact on me as the reader was his comparison of feedback. As a journalist he was sheltered from the reviews and critiques of his audience but as a blogger feedback from readers was instant, raw, and often harsh. Despite the honesty of his readers, Sullivan found the feedback, all of it, beneficial. He shares “To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others, as Montaigne did, pivot you toward relative truth.” One of the biggest aspects of blogging is sharing and allowing others to share back.

            Another point Sullivan makes in his article is that blogging is a more personal form of writing than simply writing articles for newspapers and magazines. Pieces written for a blog can be short, long, personal, impersonal, but don’t have to be written and edited in the same way that articles for papers do. Theres a lot more room for the writer to be creative as well as instinctive rather than edit numerous times. “A writer will instead use time, synthesizing these thoughts, ordering them, weighing which points count more than others, seeing how his views evolved in the writing process itself, and responding to an editor’s perusal of a draft or two.” A blogger can spend time writing what he feels the reader wants to see, and adding his personal touch to each blog rather than dwelling on the technical errors.

            Lastly Sullivan writes of a readers trust in the author. When writing for a paper or magazine the reader takes everything written at face value. There is a trust supplied by the reader that what is written for them is truth. A writer can manipulate quotes to make a piece say what it is hes trying to accomplish. A blog however, opens up a whole new world of evidence for both the reader and writer. Readers can post back information that sheds truth on a blog, or can post links, and other articles for the writer to consider. The flow of information that a blog allows for changes the way people can write and relate to each other more than a newspaper ever could. Blogging is a form of communication rather than an information output. For Andrew Sullivan there was a whole new world of writers he’d never known of.