Mindfullness Means Full of Mind

          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!!!