devin's reflective essay final

        This school year is coming to an end. As I look back at all the posts I have published, I  found out that a popular topic that I write about is sports. I have posted forty nine blog posts and I have seven posts about sports which is more than any other topic. Other topics include technology, debates and book reviews. Then, there are the usual response posts that are assigned for homework. I am sure inspiration influences my topic selection. What I will examine and analyze is how I choose what to write about and how blogging is different from normal writing assignments.
       The post that surprises me the most is the post about my predictions of the upcoming NFL season. This is because it is a prediction post and if I get it wrong, people might rip on me. Before the season had even started, someone had already disagreed with me. In the end, I did get it wrong in terms of who will win the Super Bowl in this quote, “Super Bowl champion are the colts. They lost the Super Bowl game last year, but they will come back and win this year.” It was not the Colts but the Packers that would go on to win the Super Bowl. Luckily, no one gave me a hard time for that. My format for this post was to analyze each division and league in football and predict who will come out victorious. Then, I predicted the who would be the worst teams and even the match ups in the playoffs. For this post, I had to refer to a sports site so I could remember which teams were in which division. Then, I analyzed each division and picked a winner. Out of the winners, I picked the best team to win the championship. It is much like a bracket. My inspiration came from the hype created before the NFL season. There were many story lines including why they let a player go and coaches who were in danger of being fired. I was part of this hype because I love football. I was also compelled to write about this because this was a new style of writing in which the piece is about something in the future rather than a piece about something that has happened. Overall, I was intrigued by this form of writing and it seemed to work fine as there were no harsh replies or responses.
       This open ended writing is different from other writing assignments because there are fewer requirements. Sure there are minimum word requirements as well as the need for CDs but that is mostly it. The voice doesn’t have to be formal as in this quote,”I agree that having an oc as head coach helps the offense, but the problem is finding a replacement.” Part of informal writing includes the use of acronyms such as oc (which means offensive coordinator). However, other writing assignments don’t allow informal words because there isn’t really an audience except the teacher. Blogging has more audience as it is published on the web. Voice isn’t the only difference. Assignments in writing class force us to meet page requirements. This page requirement is usually longer than one page and that makes me very sad. There is also a different essay style for every large essay. We could be doing compare and contrast and then switch to persuasion. For blogging, anything that is appropriate can be written and there are no guidelines restricting you. There will be no specific points that tell you how to write a classification essay. Blogs can range from sports to politics to the environment. The posts can be totally random and free. I prefer the more open structure of blogging better over the academic essays.
       I get my ideas from the media. This is because the media is very influential and you can’t escape it. Media includes news and especially for me, sports. This is also a form of media,”Facebook is an addicting website and I have to admit it's distracting when I do my homework. There are a ton of stuff to do on that site.” I have to say that Facebook is a form of media and I was inspired to write about it because i use it. It’s all about the media. I would not write about something that I don’t know about as it may result in misinformation and fallacies. Popular news topics are something that can be researched about and is worth three hundred and fifty words. Another thing that inspires me to write are my grades. This means posting two blog posts every week and responding to books that i have read in class. An example is this,”In The House on Mango Street, the window is a symbol. What is this symbol?” The books give me a topic to write about because I can focus on one element of the book and I don’t have to contemplate as much about what to write about. Basically, the book is the inspiration. However, the media is more influential than books because the former has more info than the latter.
       My goals for next quarter are plenty. First, I have to learn how to analyze books more quickly. This will allow me to get on my blog post faster instead of spending time looking for evidence. Right now, I am pretty slow at finding evidence and often have to refer back to the book to find more evidence. Another goal I have is to get past writer’s block. I believe this will be the hardest obstacle to get past because there is nothing you can do about it except think, maybe for a very long time. Defeating writer’s block will allow me to finish blog posts faster. Even in this post I encountered writer’s block. My final goal is to write more about sports. Sports is year round and there is plenty to blog about. A ton of info is waiting for me whether the sports news is recent like the 2011 baseball season or in the past like the 2001 football season. It’s like oil. I just have to tap into this resource. These are my goals for next quarter.