Task#3: Blogging Itself (And All That...)

So many questions...

Having used a blog for a whole year (anyone interested in what I did, go here) and being a regular reader of several blogs (my favorites: Alan Sepinwall who writes about TV; a lawyer out of Philly who goes by the named The Field Negro and writes about race in America; and my favorite cranky middle-aged white guy Joe Bageant who writes about class in America: the three topics besides baseball and music I think most about other than school), and, last but not least, being an English teacher, I have actually thought about some of the questions about blog writing.

To be pedantic for a sec: good writing is good writing. The blogs I like I think are written well--as was Martin's (ah, that Paideia education paid off). The power of the blog, to me, is its immediacy: the reader wants to get to the meat fast and skip the appetizers. And the blogs I know I like generally get to the point pretty quickly. But not always: Joe Bageant is as discursive as I am when I write (read my blog questions--read this entry--: it takes me forever to get to the point, not something I'm proud of). That said, I think the blogger has to address a wide audience, even given that the blogs I read are pretty niche driven. Still, not everyone was a lit major in college, and the good blogger, I think, has to keep that in mind. Write forcefully, clearly: make the point understandable.

I understand that there is a difference between what I as a teacher use a blog for and what the bloggers I read use their blogs for. I require something specific in response to my queries and postings, unlike, it seems, Martin does on his. My blogs are mandatory. FN, Alan Sepinwall, Joe B., they're just giving their opinion, and as such, there is a conversational tone to their writing, a kind of writing that is not the kind I generally teach. It's clearly not formal. But again, that's its power too. As such, I don't require a formal voice on my blogs; and the results are for the most part fine. Some responses are better than others: some more thoughtful than others; some better written than others. But the point for me, on the blog, is not as much the writing as the response to whatever the question is I posed, or the response, honest, immediate, to whatever we read or watched.

The pitfall here, in using the blog for class, is that the form lends itself to sloppiness. The writing may not be formal: but the mechanics, spelling, don't suddenly not matter. So sometimes an entry can read like something just this side of a text message. I get sloppy too (thank goodness this thing spellchecks). In the future I am going to be more stringent about the composition and writing of the blogs themselves.