Reflexive Piece

Blogging as a genre was relatively easy, quite flexible and adaptive trying to convey my points of view. My blog had a contemporary, real and personal feel to it that made my ideas come across in a personal easy to relate to way. My blogs genre was based on the concept of teaching or informing others about specific issues through my own personal experience, thus taking on an older sibling effect. The restraints that were presented were the topics that were given out for each assignment, I thought that the whole concept of blogging is that one is enabled to reflect on their own experiences and thoughts however giving us specific topics restricted us from expressing ourselves completely. I wished that I could express myself in my own individual way in order to capture my desired target market. The reason we chose such a personal genre is because we hoped to be able to relate to our specified target market of young adult’s namely first year students, this would engage them into the lives of first year students and our good and bad experiences will inevitably help them in the long run.
This terms work was really different compared to the rest of the years work because working within a genre does not allow one to come up with their own thoughts and express themselves completely without having to fit into the ideas of someone else’s ideals. This term was comprised of group work, which I do not enjoy as I prefer working on an individual basis whereby I can work in my own time and not have to compromise my schedule to fit in with the others.
We generated story ideas through our blog genre as it was based on our experiences, so every topic that was presented we could adapt to an experience that has an element of the topic. The genre we chose made our stories relatively easy to adapt to the topic at hand, although the formal tone that was needed to be applied for the opinion piece was quite challenging as I had to research my topic to a certain degree which minimized my personal tone that I wanted to achieve with my blog genre.
Working within a group was very frustrating as I have a very busy schedule and on weekend I tend to go away which only leaves the weekdays for meetings with my group. I found it very difficult to juggle everyone’s schedule because when I was free then someone always had something that clashed ,thus compromising was essential. I felt quite despondent in my group meetings as I knew that there is always one person who works harder in a group than the others. Our first scheduled meeting proved my theory as only two of the members of our group, including me pitched up for our meeting. However, when we finally came up with our final meeting point we had a very effective working group and the work that was divided was accomplished way before the deadline. Our group worked through the differences between the assignment topics, our own personal contradictions and the character of our blog by first agreeing on a specific character that we wished to adopt for our blog which immediately resolved any issues relating to our blog, the assignments that were given were relatively adaptable to our blog genre as it was easily manipulated around our genre.
This course made me more aware of the actual journalistic process which made me grow in the sense that I realise now that it is not just your actual thoughts that have to be reported but it includes the truth and some research to actually reach a non-bias true reflection of a story. I felt that this course was invaluable as no learning experience is ever a waste of time, I learned more about the connective features on the internet and this will help me to be able to communicate and put my ideas out into the public world. I grew as a writer in the sense that I was able to learn how to write in the correct format that a journalist would use and although I felt that this was a limitation, but I can always apply it to a more forma piece I writing. On a scale of one to ten, I think this course let me grow about a six.
I feel that blogging is a form of journalism as it incorporates writing, reflecting and communicating with others. It embodies the essence of journalism as it is story telling in words and visual elements on behalf of public interests and thoughts. Blogging is even more personal which makes one more relative to their target audience, making it a very connective tool. I find that my strengths lie in my ability to be true and share my real life stories with the world; I find that I have a weakness when it comes to incorporating research and opinion into words. The constraint of the genre helped me realise that I want to write about fun, interesting and personal stories and not necessarily about news and hard fact stories.
The research aspect of the course made more concerned with getting the true facts across instead of just pure opinion however I do feel that exaggerated and interesting stories are better appreciated by the audience as they are more interesting. The bits of research that I did use were well researched so that my audience was reading true facts. Our personal blog genre did not need research but experience and the main form of research that we used was by talking and reflecting on personal matters and issues. I enjoyed knowing that my stories could be read by the world as this excited the story contents. All my sources were really easy to talk to and very real they did not conceal anything that would add an edge to my story. The sources I chose were not randomly picked but chosen as I knew what I wanted to take from each source. I felt an ethical factor of not being able to express myself fully through some words that could be conveyed as harsh however I think I got my message across despite this issue.
I really appreciated learning how to blog as it is a skill that can be used forever and it can help get your message across to the world at large. Blogging is the future and I feel that it is an intricate yet fundamental part of communicating and journalism.