Reflexive Summary – My Blogging Experience and Growth in Semester 1

Person walks down a road (Williams, no date)

My first experience with blogging

I have never blogged before, so this was a strange and new experience for me. I used to be more of a viewer of other people’s blogs. And for me, blogging is a window to share experiences and knowledge, and the purpose of a blogger is only to share. But after becoming a blogger, I realized that blogging is more than that.

I found that blogging is very helpful for knowledge acquisition. Because if you want to export knowledge, you need to know it very well first, and blogging, unlike essays and other biased academic writings, has a platform on the web and is aimed at a wider audience. Therefore it requires the author to present the content expressed in a more readable and simple way, turning complex and boring knowledge into short, attractive words. This requires the writer to be very well versed in this knowledge. This is one of the things I have learned the most from my first blogging experience.

Challenges in blogging

As mentioned earlier, blogs are aimed at readers of all backgrounds, so care needs to be taken to express oneself simply and output one’s ideas in an attractive manner. I found this to be the most challenging. Before sharing knowledge and expressing opinions in a blog, one needs to have a certain breadth and depth of understanding of this knowledge in order to better engage readers with a blog and to output opinions effectively. I often seek out information from a variety of sources when blogging, not just papers, but also web articles, news, journals, and even videos. So this requires a high level of ability to integrate information. In addition, once the information has been consolidated, it needs to be exported, and it is also a challenge to express the ideas with attractive headlines and words.

Unlike just writing articles, blogging also requires a certain amount of web knowledge since the platform is a website. For example, how to illustrate the article, put in links, add cover images, upload and modify the blog, comment on other people’s blogs, and so on. It’s also a challenge to know how big the font size is on the screen, and how long the paragraphs are so that readers don’t have to struggle to read them. As a blogger, not only do you need to write an attractive post, but you also need to pay attention to the above issues sometimes.

Growing up in Blogging

I think it is because blogging is a first experience and there are many challenges that I have grown a lot from this experience. First and foremost is the ability to integrate and export knowledge, as well as a deeper understanding of what I have learned. Blog writing is all about what we have learned in class, but for blog writing, we often need to access information and knowledge outside of what we have learned, and then think about how we can express this knowledge in a short and powerful way so that readers can understand it better. Then needless to say the ability to use a computer to upload blogs with comments, I got a complete experience of being a blogger during this course.

It was an invaluable experience that gave me a deeper understanding of blog writing and aroused my interest in it.