Your First Blogging Assignment!
Hi everyone. Well, here we are, and this blog is now working! I’ll show you how to use it in our next class, and this week you post your first post to this blog. It should be more than just a few lines long, and you should really try to make it interesting. The object of this post — the goal of this assignment — is for you to only include pertinent details, but also make people remember those details.
Here’s an example:
Hi there. As you can see below, my name is Gord Sellar. I’m the teacher of this writing class, which is appropriate because I am a writer myself. I don’t remember the place where I was born, in Malawi (in East Africa) but I grew up hearing stories about the place, and I think that it was hearing those stories that made me so interested in writing. As I got older, I began to write poems and funny fantasy stories about barbarians with swords, dragons, and monsters in magical forests. As I got older, I began to write less and less, and got very interested in music, something which I think was good for me. Studying music, I got a better sense of structure, of flow and how patterns work. As a result, when I returned to writing as an undergraduate student at the University of Saskatchewan, I had a much better sense of the unconscious building blocks of good writing style, the things that are much harder to teach and to learn. Other experience in my past includes writing tutorials for blind people learning how to use computers, and I have had several poems published in the past.
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time writing, and when students ask me what it takes to become a really good writer, my answer is usually that someone must (a) read a lot, and (b) read more, and then (c) write a lot. If you give yourself a few years and really work at it, and think a lot about it, you’ll probably get good at writing one specific kind of thing, such as an essay. If you give yourself ten years, you might get good at writing things in general, but you’ll still need to learn the rules of any new genre or format you decide to try. It’s important to experiment and make mistakes, and it’s important to try new things all the time. For example, while I concentrate on writing science fiction these days, I also write articles and reviews of weblogs for a small womens’ magazine in Canada these days. I’m working on a novel, a ghost story set in Korea, but the second draft won’t be finished for a long time, because I’m concentrating on writing short stories for now.
I love writing because it allows me to express myself in a much clearer, more logical, and more powerful way than in speech. A person who is writing something can stop, think about it, and question his or her own ideas. Therefore, when I write, I also learn what I actually think, and I learn about myself. This is a very exciting thing for me. Also, when I write, I am in control of what is being said. There’s less chance for someone to minsunderstand me if I write well, and there’s more chance that I will actually say what I mean, because I can edit my writing to make it clearer and better. Also, I love making up stories and playing with ideas, and there is something about writing that makes this possible in a more sophisticated way than just talking about those ideas or stories.
I’m looking forward to getting to know you all better.
Try to really choose the parts of your life and hobbies and interests that are pertinent to this class. If there are subjects you really want to write about, or if there’s a form you want to master, you can explain about it and why. If you love or hate writing, feel free to explain why. Don’t feel you need to write something long, but don’t just write something short. Instead of thinking about length, try to make what you write interesting, and do as good a job as you can!