A Blog about Blogging

Everywhere I turn, it seems. someone has got a new blog. They all seem to be for school, too. One friend has a blog for a law school class, the MLIS students have to do one for a Young Adults lit class, and my first years have to do a thrice-weekly blog (about anything they want) as a part of their writing requirement expectations.

I'm fairly new to the blogging scene. This is almost my 50th post, but that's nothing compared to friends who have been blogging for years and run two or three different blogs on different subjects. Having this blog has given me an outlet that I didn't think I was missing, but it seems I was. I've never been a particularly good diarist, but I found when I moved to Japan that I was quite good at recording my experiences in emails to everyone back home. This blog seems to function in much the same way- it's a way to get my voice down in writing in a way that actually means something. For how many people actually go back and read their own journals? I do occasionally, and I read other people's journals if they're eventually published (i.e. Anne Wilkinson & Virginia Woolf etc.) but journalling just for yourself seems a bit, I don't know, insular. I've received comments on here from people that I haven't actually seen in ages, and I love how it functions to keep us in touch. Frankly, most of the time I don't know who, if anyone, is reading, but I appreciate having a forum to write anyway.

I think it's great that the prof that I'm TAing for is on the blog bandwagon. His idea is that if he can get our students writing, about anything, three times a week, their writing is going to improve. As with everything, writing improves with practise, and so I think he's exactly right. I can feel my writing becoming more fluent just from use, just as it gets rusty when I'm teaching and don't have any real reason to write much other than lesson plans and grocery lists. It's interesting to think that this blog, my friends' blogs, or my students' blog, could eventually be a springboard from which some really great writing emerges. Who knows? One of use could end up writing a fabulous novel. But even if we don't, I'm glad that more people are writing because of blogs. Writing is good, and reading other people's writing is equally so. So thank you to all of you who helped to get me interested in the world of blogging! I'm having a blast.