When we started this blog, I thought “this totally sucks, we are going to have to post about boring topics that we discuss in class.” I mean, don’t get me wrong, I liked the thought that Professor Brooks wanted feedback from us and cared about our opinions, but I knew that blogs to other people were so much more than that. When I think of a blog, I think of either depressing things people post about everyday, or I think of the new type of blog which is something like tumblr. I have never really had a blog and I never really thought I would even start one. I did do some “blog” posts on myspace back in middle school to share some of my poetry and get feedback, but I never thought of actually creating a blog and using it often. I didn’t think of this as a personal blog until we actually posted about different topics and how we view them. That’s when I realized I could make this a reflection on not only class topics, but about me in general.
When I look at my blog, I remember when Professor Brooks asked us to personalize it by choosing a theme. When I was choosing my theme, I really was just thinking “I want something green.” Not the whole background being green because that’s TOO much green, but definitely a subtle, fresh green that pops out. That’s where the grass and dew picture came from. It gives that sort of subtle green that I was looking for, but it really wasn’t enough to POP. My blog does look sort of BLAH compared to the cutesy, colorful themes other people chose, but I think that just shows how much I don’t care about the appearance of very much in my life. As you can tell, I don’t try and pull people in to get to know who I am. So, I didn’t try and my my blog all sorts of flashy. I guess that sort of reflects who I am and what I believe in if you look at it in a different way.
As for my audience, I believed first and foremost the person who would be reading it the most would be Professor Brooks and of course my classmates had to respond on blog post but that didn’t mean all of them would be reading mine in particular. I did refrain from saying things in certain ways or using certain words, just because I knew this was a blog for class. There were even times where I wanted to just go off on some people in our class, but I stayed classy.
Besides the way I wrote and how my blog looks, I believe I used many other strategies that appealed to my audience. First, I used pathos throughout my entire blog. From my very first blog I used pathos strongly, “So live or die. It’s all about the way you choose to do so. If you choose to live, make the choices that will allow you to live life to the fullest and make the most of it. And if you die or choose to die, choose to die in a way that was worth the fight.” It really hits you hard when you think about being dead or alive. It gets you thinking about your fear of dieing and wondering if you will actually live a good life. I even used pathos when I reflected on a quote from the movie She’s the Man when I said, “words may mean absolutely nothing to anyone else, but to me it’s all about friendship.” I mean you feel a sense of happiness and joy when you think about laughing with all of your friends over a quote in a movie. It gets you reminiscing to a time and a place where you did the same thing. You even saw this connection with my audience based all of the comments I got from this post. Classmates said things like, “sooooo funny” or “this movie is hilarious.” I’m pretty sure I brought some people a bit of joy when they were reading my blog post. And if you ever saw She’s the Man, you’d be laughing in your head, too. Pathos was also portrayed in my post about the song that represents my relationship. “We don’t know whether we will be together forever or how we will make it work, but we know that nothing between us will ever change anything.” With that, you can truly feel the love when you are reading it. It connects to a lot of people when you read through the comments as well, one of my classmates even said, “Looking through the different options of posts to read I almost skipped this because it was longer, but then I saw the song title and the 3 years 6 months and I was hooked. I’ve been with my girlfriend for almost a year and 4 months and I can relate completely.” This just shows that I truly connected with my audience through the use of pathos. Reading my blog post made him think about the true love in his own relationship and it really made him happy.
The second rhetorical strategy I used was Identification. When I chose to speak about my life with my boyfriend, I completely connected to my audience. I feel like everyone got to know me and see me in a different light. I also did this when I posted a picture of the two of us from the first dance to our last dance in high school and I feel like people could use this to relate to them because I look different and it’s cool to see how much I have changed. I feel like I truly caught some of my classmates eyes and related to them when I wrote about something truly personal and that shows through one comment my classmate made “This song is appealing because it brings back a lot of good memories and an interesting point. When you’re in love its funny how much time you can “waste” spend sitting around not caring what you do.” It made me really happy to hear that other couples just love spending time doing whatever as long as they are together and this showed me that I truly connected to my audience by showing them who I really was.
I used the rhetorical strategy exemplification throughout my entire blog as well. When I used the poem in the movie gray to show the true meaning of the movie, I was using exemplification. I was connecting something to what it refers to. I showed the relationship the poem had to the rest of the movie and it’s connection to the overall meaning to the movie. When I wrote my blog post about the song that represents my relationship, I opened using “3 years 6 months 18 days and counting” to connect people to my blog and show them that it actually refers to my relationship just as the music video and song relate to my relationship.
This blog definitely wasn’t what I thought it would be. Yes, it was an assignment to post on our blog, but it was a time where I really reflected on myself and my beliefs. I actually started to like reading other classmate’s bogs when we had to post something with emotion. I don’t think it is something I’ll maintain because I feel like my feelings aren’t something I want shared unless asked to do so, but maybe I will keep a private online journal type of blog to reflect on things going on in my life.
Carolyn Graham 