I originally
started this blog on BlogSpot in 2010 when I was only a sophomore in high
school. As a sophomore in college, I am now revisiting the blog scene again
with a new outlook on writing and blogging. Once I learned that I would be
writing weekly a blog post in my basic news writing course, I was extremely
excited. I had completely forgotten about this BlogSpot account that I had
created about 4 years ago. When I attempted to sign up for BlogSpot in order to
create this blog, I stumbled across my long lost blog, which at that present
moment was named "Fashionista." As I read over my past blog posts, I
wanted to go back into time and hit myself with a dictionary, a grammar book,
and some common sense. My style of writing 2 years ago appeared as though it
came straight from urbandictionary.com.
In Ben Yagoda's
book How Not to Write Bad, Yagoda measures mindfulness, which means to be aware
of your writing in terms of what you are writing, why you are writing, and for whom
you are writing. An important point he makes in his book is
the opposite of mindfulness, which is carelessness. We expanded upon these
ideas and concepts Yagoda brings up in his book in my news writing class. We
talked about the importance of punctuation and the difference between formal
and informal writing. Formal writing is described in my class as standard
written English. Standard written English is complex and complete sentences,
objectivity, avoidance of slang, and derived from Latin. Informal writing on
the other hand, is the blog I created 4 years ago, which did not include or
account for punctuation or spelling, and most importantly it included slang.
Slang may not always have a negative connotation, but its use is most likely
dependent upon who your audience is. Looking back at my old blog post, I can
honestly say I was a careless writer, and I did not consider my audience, or my purpose
under any circumstances. Fortunately, today I am well aware of both aspects.
Although I am not a completely mindful writer yet, I would consider myself far
from careless!!!
