Getting the Hang of Blogging

After months of neglecting myNoggin, and just reading other blogs, I think now I've gotten the hang of writing in my own. Whereas before, I felt really reluctant to post anything, now I just sit down and write about what comes to mind.

The reason why I didn't warm up to blogging right away is because I never was the kind of person who kept a journal, a diary, or whatever. I always doubted whether anyone would care or would want to know what I thought. You could say that I let the "inner critic" stymie my writing even before I had a chance to consider what I thought about sometimes.

Getting over that stumbling block wasn't easy, but I guess being in an English 101 class this semester helped (I'm actually retaking it because I dropped the ball when I first signed up for the class and although I passed, I knew I could do better, and I plan on doing just that this time around.) We're using this new book which the publisher provided for free because it uses a different approach than the one usually drummed into students (You know, the rigid, step by step process from outline to final essay) and they wanted to see how effective it would be in teaching students to write well.

Basically it says that bad writing is fine as you begin developing your ideas, because what often happens is being too citical so early in the writing process shunts the flow of creative thought. After generating your ideas and maybe discovering what you thought about a topic, then you undergo a process of revision and reflection to polish your paper, essay or any writing assignment, for that matter.