The First Post

It's amazing that this is my first blog.  I was so excited about web-logs "back in the day" -- not so many days ago -- of their inception.  I thought this format was made just for me.  But then I panicked:  What would I write about?  Who would care?  And most of all, how would I have time to make every post live up to my standards of composition quality (and, you will come to learn, quantity)?  And so, I never started.

Do I read blogs?  Yes, although not nearly as many or as often as I would like.  Back to the overwhelming feelings:  So many good (and bad) blogs, and so little time!  I would like to say that I read scholarly blogs -- writers, teachers, political pundits -- and I do sometimes.  I have found blogs to be helpful when doing research; I don't generally cite them, but I find they often give me ideas or lead me to helpful resources.  The blogs I read most frequently, however, are those of friends and family, especially the ones with cute pictures and videos of their tiny tots.  I am grateful for this invaluable link to the lives of people I love but don't often see in person.

Setting up the blog was easy but time-consuming, mostly because I spent time exploring both Wordpress and Blogger -- even setting up blogs with each -- before deciding to go with Blogger.  I really wanted Wordpress to win out.  I like the open source thing and I wanted to be different from the minions on Blogger ("different," that is, like the minions on Wordpress).  But Wordpress had a lot of issues with Safari and I found the interface a little less intuitive and streamlined.  I still haven't deleted that blog yet:  Maybe it will be my "underlife" (see Erving Goffman and my FemRhet seminar paper, Fall 2007).

I chose this template because I like the sleek black look, and because I knew I wanted to use this great sunset picture, taken last April over the pond across the street from our rented townhome in Franklin.  I'm not tremendously gifted in the visual arts, so I like to keep my visually creative endeavors simple and classy.

The final question I have been asked to respond to sounds just like a question I might pose to my English 101, 105, or 102 students:  When you write in your blog, how is your thinking about your writing different (is it?) from writing in other contexts?  I don't know that I can answer this yet, in my first post; I imagine it is a question I will be thinking about throughout the semester.  But here are some early conjectures:

I am certainly thinking very differently about audience already.  While I recognize that this post will be read primarily by my professor and a few classmates, there is the possibility that it could be read by The Public (insert dramatic music here).  The tone of most of the blogs I read (even the more scholarly ones) is decidedly more informal than the typical academic paper I might otherwise be writing, so that (perceived) sense of genre is influencing my tone and composition decisions.

Interestingly, I find that I am writing faster and editing/rereading less than I usually do.  Perhaps I feel freed from (dramatic music again) Academic Writing Conventions.  In addition, the medium and material conditions of this writing are different: the look of the blog, the autosaving going on once a minute below this text, the knowledge that this will be available to the world the moment I "Publish Post" rather than when I print it out tomorrow and hand it to my professor.  This last quality creates both a sense of immediacy and of distance:  It will be "public" immediately but I will not (in some cases, will never) actually face my audience.  

The fact that I can edit this post any time in the future is also very intriguing:  I like the statement it makes about recursivity, that buzz word we toss around the first-year composition curriculum so much.  If our first-year comp students wrote all of their essays as blogs, would that help them see that writing is not a linear event but requires returning, rethinking, rereading, rewriting?  Or would the linear format of most blogs reinforce the idea that a writer starts at the beginning and keeps moving forward.  I guess that's true, too.  Time for me to move forward....