Reflection on my blogging

Looking back at my first blog post of this semester titled What good bloggers do I must say that I’m not overly satisfied with my blogging throughout the last couple of months. The main two points about my blog that I thought needed improvement most were the regularity of my posts and the creativity of my topics. While I don’t think my blogging experience during the summer semester was a complete failure, there are still many negative things I have to criticize about my own work. So let’s start with the bad, so we can eventually end it on higher note

As I mentioned above my main criticism about my blogging during winter semester was the irregularity of my posts – turns out it’s still my biggest problem. Looking at my timeline you’ll see: nothing has changed. I still procrastinated too long and then at the beginning of June I panicked and had to write nearly all my blog posts in a short span of time. Which I obviously could’ve avoided if I just had overcome my laziness early enough and had written a few more posts throughout March, April and May. I don’t even know why I always postpone writing my posts, since it doesn’t take me too much time. Of course, I have to do some quick research, but my posts don’t have to be as elaborate as the culture essay that I had to write this semester. In the end the reason for my irregularity-problem is really only laziness. Maybe I should set myself stricter deadlines in the future, but I’m not sure if I followed these up. Anyway, to sum it up, unfortunately there wasn’t any improvement in that area. 

My next criticism was the creativity of the topics I blog about. I often have the problem that I sit down and think about something to write about and not one idea seems to appear in my head. Maybe I’m just not a creative person, or I just think too complicated, but a lot of times I just find it difficult to find topics I’m interested in enough to do research and write a whole text about. Most of the times I write about things I heard on the news, that just occurred and sometimes I throw in the obligatory (and not very exciting) post about a TV-series. It works okay, but it could work better. Still, even though I just complained about my lack of creativity for a whole paragraph, I think some improvement has happened during this semester compared to my last (though that wasn’t very hard as the bar wasn’t set too high). I do like to think my topics were a bit more interesting this time around than during winter semester, but maybe I’m just imagining stuff to make myself feel better.

So these two points still aren’t working out, but there’s one thing I’m fairly satisfied with and that’s my writing. I believe my writing improved again during this semester and part of it has to do with my blog posts. For me writing isn’t something you can learn by studying phrases and concepts – you need practice to get better. Even if I don’t put much thought into a blog post, I think in the end every crappy sentence I write somehow helps me to improve. Of course I don’t see an immediate effect, but I do believe that it helps me in the long haul. Also, the more I write the more comfortable I get with using the English language. 

To conclude, there is still much room for improvement, but at least I worked on a few areas and some things have gotten better. I definitely need to become better at time management and set myself stricter deadlines, so I can avoid the stress of having to write nearly all posts during the last few weeks.