As the end of my final semester of college draws near, I am forced to look back and reflect on the classes I took throughout my time as a student here at UNK. During my time in my commentary and blogging class, JMC-406, I had the opportunity to do a lot of writing in a variety of styles. From travel blogs to columns, my writing has improved over the course of the semester. With that said, I’d like to give some insight into my writing processes and also my thoughts on the pieces I created within this class. 

Whenever I blog, if I don’t have a predetermined prompt, my ideas usually come from past experiences coupled with things that I have a passion for. For example, I did many blog posts detailing past trips and adventures that I have gone on. I’m passionate about travel and adventure so I took great pleasure in recalling these events and recording them via my blog. Also, I blogged about the world of combat sports numerous times which is something that I have been passionate about my whole life. When recording these stories, I think my style is heavily influenced by the amount of reading that I have done through my life. I enjoy classic literature and authors such as Ernest Hemmingway, Stephen King, and George Orwell. Doing a lot of reading makes me want to use beautiful language and have my blogs read as though they are poetry. 

Throughout the semester, my class and I had deadlines to meet every week. Certain blog posts had to be posted by certain days as well as social media posts and comments on our peer’s blogs. While I knew these deadlines were coming every week, it was still just so easy to procrastinate the assignment until the day it was due. This is something that is not uncommon in the world of college education but it was also nice to get things out of the way and complete assignments early. When I did have a blog to write, I usually had an idea of what I would write about right away. If it was a topic I was unfamiliar with, I would be left to complete research in order to be better educated and know what I was actually writing about. If it was a story that I experienced, I would usually begin where the story really starts and then highlight the main details without going into the weeds too much. For all of these assignments, I would usually complete my blogs at home. I’d prefer the quiet space where I could really focus and be able to get all of the details correct. With that said, where you write can influence the quality of your material. If I were to try to blog in a loud, crowded environment, I would get easily distracted which would directly affect my writing. 

While I was able to do many different blog posts, so were my classmates. Each week I had the opportunity to read my peers’ writing and then comment my thoughts on their work. I was able to see many different styles of writing and got a look at the personality each person injected into their words. On the more personal posts, I got to see who these people were and what they were passionate about. I got to see what their opinions are on specific topics and how they went about creating a blog post about it. The blog posts we had to write pertaining to our own lives were the easiest to create as we already had all of the information needed to complete the post. The more difficult ones, at least for me, were on topics in which I wasn’t as educated on or wasn’t passionate about. I often found myself reaching to meet the minimum length requirement because I didn’t have the abundance of knowledge on the topic or was just uninterested in what I was writing. My favorite post of the semester was the post I wrote regarding my friend, Jose. He recently was the main event fight for a big organization against a very tough opponent. I was able to be in his corner for this fight and got to see an inside look at the emotion and hardships that ensue after a tough defeat.

Throughout the semester, having typed nearly 18,000 words, I feel I have grown a lot as a writer. Being able to blog multiple times a week, I was able to get in a rhythm of typing where the words would just flow out of me and onto the page. This was a change from when I did basically zero writing consistently. So in this aspect, I’ve learned to love the writing process and foresee myself continuing to blog into the future.