Blog Reflections

After reviewing my blogs from this year, I have noticed that they have become a lot more detailed and descriptive. In the beginning, I struggled with using textual evidence and supporting my claims and opinions. As I kept writing my blogs, this started to improve. By my last blog post, I was fluently using evidence from the text and I was supporting my statements. Throughout my blogging experience, I have always been good at summarizing what I had read that week. I would use detailed claims and make thoughtful inferences. Along with this, I made connections well between texts. My quality of writing has improved tremendously over this trimester of blogging. In the beginning of my blogging experience, I would be very straight-forward with the details I used. Instead of acknowledging important details within the text, I would give a very brief summary of what I had read. An example of this is my first blog post, “Summer Reading”. It was about the summer reading book I had read, Water for Elephants. In that post, I stated, “One of my favorite things about it is how much the characters developed over the time span in the book. As I read, Jacob was the character that really stood out to me. He is the main character and the point of view is through his eyes. As the book continues, Jacob interacts more and more with the circus crew where he ends up. On the circus train, he meets Marlena, who also develops throughout the book. While Jacob develops feelings for Marlena, more and more information about her is revealed. Marlena is not the only major character Jacob interacts with. He also becomes very close with Rosie, an elephant.” As you can see from this section of my blog, I used very vague terms and did not go into much description about what actually happened in the text. I just gave a basic overview about the facts of the characters. In my most recent blog, “Inferences”, I described the characters in much more detail and gave an example from the text, “Tris has started to redeem herself from her fight with Peter, in which she lost and got extremely injured. She does this by proving her thoughtfulness in an intense game of capture the flag. The trainees are split into two teams: those chosen by Four and those chosen by Eric. Tris is picked by Four, whom everyone on the team has a very lean and thin body structure.” An example of where I used a quote is later in that blog post and says, “Four rebalance by placing a hand on one of her hips and pushing her up to the next rung. She becomes very unsteady by this action and describes the following: ‘I feel the ghost of where his had was, his fingers long and narrow,’ (Roth 161).” Along with adding in more description of the characters, I also stated the reasoning behind the decisions they made. I developed well thought-out inferences and predictions. In the end, I am very happy I got to write blog posts every week because, not only did it help me develop more thoughtful writing, it allowed me to further understand what I was reading.