The Final Blog

I have really enjoyed the blog project this year. My class last year tried to set up and use blogs, but failed so I never really had a good feeling about them at the beginning of the year. As I got more comfortable with it, I realized that I kind of like posting my writing online and being able to read what my student peers write. The quality of the of the majority of my blogs is fairly good; since I enjoy blogging, I put effort into my blog assignments. Throughout the year I have tried to have original ideas and write an in-depth response to the prompt. Abraham Lincoln said "Things may come to those that wait, but only the things left by people that hustle." This quote to me is about hard work. I absolutely believe in hard work. It sounds nerdy, but I have never not done a homework assignment or gotten less that a 4.0. I am never tardy, and rarely am excused from class. To me, dedication is just as important as intelligence, for where would you be if you were purely genius, but never did anything with your brilliance? Not as far as if you were of average intelligence but worked your tail-bone off.Slackers annoy me to no end, people that never turn in assignments or indulge in drugs. They don't seem to realize that hard work does pay off later. Or maybe they just don't want to realize this. Either way, I can't see a legitimate reason to not at least try. Because lets face it, its not that hard to study for a little word power test or do a simple little blog each week. These blogs seem like easy points to me anyways, doing them is not difficult. Adding a little more time and effort to make them better is not going to ruin your day, so you may as well at least try. 


Not only have the blogs been fun to write, I think they have made me a better writer. A few of the posts were something about how I could do better on something so they really made me stop to think and reflect on my abilities. Also, numerous of them are about making connections to other pieces of literature,  and these made me think deeper about whatever we were working on at the time. This blog has made me a better writer in general. One of my favorite things about it is that I get to use any writing style that I want. I don't have to write in a formal essay format or in a pre-decided way. My blog is one of the only places where my true voice comes out in my writing. It is probably pretty easy to distinguish, since I have a fairly distinctive style. My style of writing often includes a slightly sarcastic tone and can contain a rant (as is shown where I go on and on about slackers, also in another blog about vultures for the poem i recited). When I write about something I am truly passionate about then I just can't stop writing and that evolves into a huge chunk of writing that can sound like me just whining. But, I suppose that is what I sound like in my pure writing, so I'm glad that I had somewhere in my 9th grade English career to let my style be shown. Writing formally gets boring after a while. And when I get bored while writing, the quality of it goes down, that is why I think my blogs have been pretty good all year. 


The last thing that my blog has helped me with is getting more comfortable with technology because I was dreading the computer part of these assignments all year. I may be a teen in the Age of Everyone Has as Ipod and Cell-phone and Laptop, but I am technologically challenged and I could swear that all computers hate me. I didn't know the difference, until recently, between a web browser and a search engine. Sometimes I can't figure out how to use Microsoft Works. It's pretty sad. This blog hasn't necessarily given me all the tool and knowledge to be tech savvy, but it has given me confidence that I can make some computer-related things work. I'm not as afraid of technology projects for school now. And all because of a simple, little blog. 


I have truly enjoyed blogging this year,
For the last time, 


Alena