Blog Reflection

                One thing that I struggled with at the beginning of blogging was summarizing. I was over complicating my blog posts. I was focused on looking between the lines of my book, instead of just reading the lines right in front of me. I learned to overcome this struggle by just blogging about what was in my head. Instead of sitting there and thinking too much about what I was going to post, I would read until like 5 minutes before I had to go somewhere. Then in that 5 minutes I would be in a hurry, that caused me to just write about what was in my head at that time, the summary of what I just read. This also caused the book to be fresh on my mind. However, I still did do blog posts that were not just summaries. For example, in Best Sellers we would be given a topic about what was going on in the reading world. It would usually be about a debate that was going on. He would ask us to write a blog post about what we thought and why. I really enjoyed when we blogged about these debates. It was fun to voice my opinion and read what other people thought about the topic.

            I would say that I have definitely grown in my ability to analyze a text. My post about my summer reading book was okay, but not near as good as my more recent posts. In my summer reading post I do not really explain any part of the book except the beginning. The only thing I say about the end is, “However, further into the book when he meets Mr. Penumbra, they tam up to uncover a secret that will change the world.” This is the only sentence that I used to describe 2/3 of the book.

            In one of my more recent blog posts about Silver Lining’s Playbook I went into more detail. I also included things about the book that was not just the beginning of the book and theme. “I think this book is not very complicated to read, it just has a lot of swearing in it. But don't get me wrong, it is still a really funny book. I also really like how the plot of the story is not what you usually read. It is very unique.” This gives people more of an idea of the book. It helps them to decide more if they think it is their type of book. In my newer post I also give a good analysis of the book when I say, “Throughout the book you will discover that Pat and Tiffany have more things in common than you would think.” I think this is good because it helps give the reader an idea of the end of the book, but not really. It is broad enough so that the ending of the book is not set in stone.

            Overall, I would say that I have improved the most when analyzing by using more description and actually words used in the text. In my older blog post the most description I had was, “In the beginning of the book the main character, Clay Jannon, is a big fan of paper because he just recently got fired from a job at a company that only ever used computers.” In my newer post I used description like, “One thing you need to know about Pat is that he is mentally unstable. He has been in the ‘bad place’ ever since his ‘apart time’ with his wife Nikki has been going on. Pat truly believes his wife will come home to him soon.” This is better analyzing of the text because I used actual quotes from the text. Using the words like “apart time” and “bad place” helps people to get more of a feel on the personality of Pat.