Blog 6: Connecting the Dots
After reading over my previous blog posts, the themes from one post do not tie into other posts. The topics that the previous blog posts have been about are: being opportunistic, transaction costs, team leadership and organization, and transfer costs. When I am writing about these blog posts I try to focus on explaining the situation and how it ties into the prompt or theme of the post. What ends up happening is I fail to provide enough detail of the situation for the reader to understand. For example, in “Blog 4: Team Leadership and Organization” I should have went into more detail about how JROTC is structured or in “Blog 5: Transfer Costs” I should have explained how appointments at academic advisors and McKinley are prioritized like on what the appointment reason is. It is difficult for me to connect or incorporate the themes from previous blogs to the current week’s blog because I find writing very difficult and not enjoyable, the blogs are hastily written last minute or very late at night, and I am not used to the Socratic dialogue way of the lectures that I am just not understanding the concepts as best as I could.
I know I can relate previous themes with some of the other blogs if I started writing earlier and had enough time to think and structure my writing. Looking back, I could have mentioned opportunism in “Blog 5: Transfer Costs” by saying, for example, it would be unethical if one student needed to get into a required class to graduate but their friend uses Illinibucks to spite them. I could have discussed transaction costs in “Blog 4: Team Leadership and Organization” by discussing how having one student instructor per recruit made training more difficult. As I have stated in the first paragraph, even if I started writing earlier I still might not have been able to relate the two different themes together correctly to the situation.
My process for writing these posts have not changed since the first blog post and my writing process for these blogs are not optimal. I begin writing these blogs last minute Sunday morning or a little bit earlier Saturday night after midnight because I find writing extremely difficult as I would reread my paragraphs multiple times per sentence, it would make sense to me, and then I would receive feedback that its confusing, not just these blogs but writing assignments in general. Hearing that what I wrote is confusing frustrates me because it takes me hours to write even just one page assignments. I have had a lot of trouble improving my writing because I keep getting conflicting advice on how to write unlike how to calculate consumer surplus where there is a correct formula to calculate the correct answer. In writing, there is no set formula and the correct answer varies.
I wish future prompts have more explicit instructions on what it wants students to write about because I have misinterpreted some of the prompts. For example, the first blog was writing a memoir about the assigned economist’s life and I thought memoirs are written by the author of a specific time in the author’s life. This lead to me writing the memoir in the first person which was not how the prompt was expected to be written in. I think it would help if a short part of one class session is spent talking about the week’s writing prompt and answering questions that students might have regarding what they might want to write about for the prompt to make sure they are able to connect their writing to that week’s prompt correctly.
I know I can relate previous themes with some of the other blogs if I started writing earlier and had enough time to think and structure my writing. Looking back, I could have mentioned opportunism in “Blog 5: Transfer Costs” by saying, for example, it would be unethical if one student needed to get into a required class to graduate but their friend uses Illinibucks to spite them. I could have discussed transaction costs in “Blog 4: Team Leadership and Organization” by discussing how having one student instructor per recruit made training more difficult. As I have stated in the first paragraph, even if I started writing earlier I still might not have been able to relate the two different themes together correctly to the situation.
My process for writing these posts have not changed since the first blog post and my writing process for these blogs are not optimal. I begin writing these blogs last minute Sunday morning or a little bit earlier Saturday night after midnight because I find writing extremely difficult as I would reread my paragraphs multiple times per sentence, it would make sense to me, and then I would receive feedback that its confusing, not just these blogs but writing assignments in general. Hearing that what I wrote is confusing frustrates me because it takes me hours to write even just one page assignments. I have had a lot of trouble improving my writing because I keep getting conflicting advice on how to write unlike how to calculate consumer surplus where there is a correct formula to calculate the correct answer. In writing, there is no set formula and the correct answer varies.
I wish future prompts have more explicit instructions on what it wants students to write about because I have misinterpreted some of the prompts. For example, the first blog was writing a memoir about the assigned economist’s life and I thought memoirs are written by the author of a specific time in the author’s life. This lead to me writing the memoir in the first person which was not how the prompt was expected to be written in. I think it would help if a short part of one class session is spent talking about the week’s writing prompt and answering questions that students might have regarding what they might want to write about for the prompt to make sure they are able to connect their writing to that week’s prompt correctly.
It seems you have provided your own critique in the second paragraph of this post. Perhaps you know why you procrastinate in writing these posts. I don't know that, but I will point out that if you think you are not a good writer than procrastination is a way to confirm the hypothesis. If, instead, you started earlier int the week and gave the post sufficient forethought, maybe you would surprise yourself, about your ability to write. I don't want to delude into thinking it will only take a few posts to becoming a good writer. It will take lots of practice. The question for you is whether you want to begin in such practice. You might try it to see if it seems to have some value for itself. I think you practice things that you like to do. All I'm suggesting here is that you can't know whether you like something without trying it first.
ReplyDeleteLet me also surprise you with a different question. Who should you be pleasing when you are writing these blog posts? You might think the answer is me, but that would be wrong. You should write to please yourself. And yet, you should be fairly demanding of yourself in that. Pleasing yourself means you've satisfied your own requirements for what a good post does. Where do those requirements come from? That's the question that you should try to answer. My belief is that students need to develop a sense fo taste about what is pleasing. You develop this by reading other people's writing (not just blog posts in our class) and finding what in that writing you enjoy. If you emulate what you like, you will be learning to please yourself. In the process of doing this, you will develop your own voice. It takes work and effort to develop this, but once you have that, you will find the writing comes much easier to you.
What I write should be acceptable to me. I have always enjoyed reading fiction like fantasy or sci-fi books because the writing is adventurous, captivating, and thrilling compared to mandatory assigned reading. I can see how I could possibly incorporate those three qualities into future blog posts but it does not or cannot transfer well to writing memos as I am doing in my BTW 250 class.
ReplyDeleteWhen I write, I try to answer the prompt as straight forward as possible to minimize my chances of going off on tangents or confusing the reader/grader.