This
year, I learned that making predictions and thinking deeply about my books
helps me read more efficiently. Every week I had to come up with a topic for my
blog, so I had to think about my book and dig to find even the littlest detail
that struck me as odd or interesting that I could expand. In previous years
I’ve done post-its or book clubs that helped me think about hidden messages in
my books, but blogs create a more drastic difference, and this year I was able
to connect books I’d previously read to books I was reading more easily than
ever, because I remembered parts of the book I’d written blog posts about.
Writing online is very different
than writing in a notebook, because you have more freedom when you write
online. You can write more quickly than in a notebook, which lets you write
more because you have more time to write. You can also change your idea
mid-post. In a notebook, you have to erase, and re-write, and waste paper, but
on a computer you can just select and delete without wasting any paper. It’s
less of a hassle on a computer, and in a notebook you’re more likely to keep
writing about a topic you’d started off thinking was going to be easy to write
off of, and then realize there’s not much support or evidence for it, so you’ll
write something that’s not one of your best pieces of writing. However, writing
online is also limiting because so many more people can see your writing than
if it was in a notebook. If you have very strong opinions on a controversial topic,
you want to write honestly about them, but you also don’t want to offend
anyone. When you write in a notebook, only a select group of people will read
it, and you can pretty much always control who reads it. Online, anyone can
read your blog, you can always set privacy settings, but they’re less reliable
than they would be in a notebook.
I think people “create online
personalities that project the best of ourselves”, because as I was saying, you
don’t know who’s reading your blog, and you always want to make a good first
impression. On your blog, for example, you don’t want to say that you hate
blogging, or else people who are reading your blog for pleasure won’t want to
read something you don’t really want to write or that you feel forced to write.
Since we have a lot of freedom online and no one is on our backs, making sure
we don’t lie or aren’t truthful, we can make ourselves out to be whoever we
want to be, so why not make ourselves seem flawless?
I definitely think that teenagers
“abuse the freedom that being online gives you on sites like Facebook”
especially recently causing countless deaths from cyber bullying. People do
type things they’d never say to a person’s face because they have the freedom
of making up excuses, like someone hacked their account, or that they never did
such a thing and can delete a message or post online. People also have the
freedom to be anonymous online on sites such as ask.fm where no one will ever
know who wrote a mean comment, so no one can prove you wrote anything and no
one can punish you, since there’s no proof that you’re the culprit. I think the
Internet is a great thing; it’s certainly made leaps and bounds in terms of
progress for research, leisure, communication, current events, etc. However,
the Internet can be awful when it’s misused this way, intended to hurt people,
because the Internet wasn’t made to be hurtful, it was made to be helpful, and
cyber bullying is by no means helpful.
I can imagine keeping up this blog,
but not creating another one. I wouldn’t have created this blog in the first
place had it not been for homework and school, so I can’t imagine making
another one. I also wouldn’t know what to blog about. I could keep up this blog
because it helps me with my reading, and I already know what to write about. I
think blogs can be great, like the ones we keep for school because they help us
and can help others by showing them how blogs helps make reading more effective.
Blogs can also be harmful because there’s no limit on what you can write about,
so you can hurt someone with a blog too. Basically, blogs are good if you’re
using them the right way.
This blog has been great for me, and
I hope it’s been helpful for anyone reading this! Thank you!
