Reflective Essay

            Looking back at my blog posts over the past quarter, I see several patterns in my writing.  First of all I have some posts that are very well written, but at the same time there are some that are clearly not my best work, along with this there are posts that are very long, but also thoughts that are short.  I noticed that for many of the well-written ones, I had an emotional connection to the topic, and because of that the post turned out very well.  Many of the not so good posts appeared as if they were slapped together at the last second with little to no thought.  This is probably because they were.  In my writing, it seems that in some of my blog posts, I randomly came up with a topic from what ever was on my mind at the time, and in others I write about something that I can connect or relate to.  It seems clear that writing about things that I can connect to helps me to produce much better writing then simply writing about the first thing that comes to my head.

            One of my bad posts is the one I titled “Keeping Up”.  In this I go over where I wanted to be with my education, and also where I was at the time.  Honestly, this is a very boring topic that no one wants to hear about.  I chose this topic because at the time I happened to be thinking about my grade and decided to write the thoughts I had about it down.  The major problem I had with this is that I only had “a few” thoughts on this.  This limited my writing, once I ran out of ideas it just kind of ended.  I also didn’t have much of an emotional connection to the topic.  Talking about my grade doesn’t require me to care about my grade.  Even though I did care about my grade, it doesn’t mean it has to show when I write about it.  If I got anything out of looking back at that piece it is that I don’t always know everything I need to know about a topic before I start writing about it.

            Even though there are a few assignments that I didn’t do very well on, there are still others that turned out near perfect.  One of these is my response to a picture we were shown in class of a girl reading a letter.  I titled this assignment “Girl Reading a Letter”.  I believe the reason I didn’t do so well on this is that it was fun to write it.  It was fun because we could be creative and funny in the story that we create.  This in a sense of an emotional connection because you care about what you are writing about.  Unlike “Keeping Up” this didn’t end abruptly, it kept going until I reached a point where I felt it was a good place to stop.  I could have even kept on writing and turned the short story in to a full-length book.  I of course didn’t do this because I didn’t have enough time, and of course the proper writing skills, but the main point is that the reason I was able to write the story so well was that I actually had fun writing it. 

              I believe that what controls the quality of my writing is my relationship to the subject.  This is why writing about subjects that I don’t care about doesn’t benefit my writing and writing about things that I do care about does.  I explained when I talked about “Keeping Up” that I didn’t have an emotional connection to the subject.  This is because I didn’t have fun writing about the subject.  Some people may think that an easy solution to this problem is to simply only written about things that they enjoy writing about.  But in life there will be plenty of times when I will have to write about boring things.  What I have to be able to do is create a connection between me and the topic.  For example I could have looked at patterns in my grades over an extremely long period of time and see what ideas come to my head about how they got that way.  Eventually I will find out so much information that I will have a sufficient amount of opinions that I will be able to write an extremely well written paper on such a simple subject.  In other words trick or force my mind into caring about the subject.  I feel by doing this I can write about anything come across no matter how insignificant it is.  Stories on the other hand don’t require this extra thinking.  In a story you can simply make it up as you go along and end up in any place you want.  As long as a story is creative it is well written.

            The way I see it is that for any writing that isn’t a narrative, research must be done.  If I have to write about something that I don’t know much about, I shouldn’t try to make it longer by stretching each individual detail out, I should do it by adding extra details.  Research can be anything, it can be searching the Internet for facts, or it can be someone looking through their mind for extra details they didn’t realize they knew about the subject.  As I said earlier an emotional connection to the subject is needed.  This connection comes from opinions developed about it.  These opinions come from facts and details known about the subject.  And these little facts and details originate from research.  This explains why some of my writing was good, and some of it was bad.  I knew a lot about some of the topics I wrote about, but very little about others.  Research is always the key to producing a good piece of writing.

            Next quarter a plan to make sure that I know enough background information on a topic before I begin writing.  If I do this I am sure that the overall quality of my writing will greatly improve.  After looking at my blogs over the last quarter I realized that the reason that some of them weren’t as good as others is that I knew more about some of the topics.  If I can do more research on the topics that I don’t know as much about I will be able to form stronger opinions, and in the end, produce better pieces of writing.