MEGA Meta Post

As we become prey to the stress that finals bring, it is important part of studying to analyze the changes that we have gone through during the past semester, as it can point to a focus for improving in the coming one. In this post I shall focus on how my writing style, as well as analysis of events, has changed over my blog posts.

While I have improved on my analysis of evidence over the semester, I have also allowed myself to become lazy. The concept that regularly escapes me is that of selection; I trouble myself with dense, sometimes philosophical explanations for things when very little is needed. The goal that I have outlined for myself the second semester is to make my points with the smallest amount language necessary to make it effective, and I will accomplish this through a system of revisions I will outline later.

In my first blog post, I made an attempt at analyzing a short video about biological science, and I barely scratched the surface of its sub-textual meaning. My only analysis of the video itself was that it "came as a surprise to me". To start, the word "surprise" has really no meaning in regards of the article and expresses no opinion towards its contents. Thus the "analysis" is missing, and all I have presented is a reaction. This is totally devoid of any sympathy for the reader as I am relying on them to come up with the analysis for me. This is unfair to them, as my job as the writer is to clear up key issues for the reader.

Around my fifth blog post, we had started to talk explicitly about storytelling in class, and that prompted me to start to piece together, slowly but surely, different pieces of the metaphorical puzzle. In my sixth blog post about the play that our class had the pleasure of seeing, Clybourne park, I was intrigued as to the name appearing in the surrounding area as a street. I wrote a short paragraph of analysis that dug a little bit deeper than my earlier surprise and is the first time that I show real progress in the evolution of my posts.

Yet, with the ability to effectively analyze, comes a sense of over-confidence (or at least for me it seams to have) as I started to stray from the analysis of texts and started to spew intellectual psychobabble. This is most evident in my post "Global Suicide" in which I re-explain the philosophy behind an article indicting anthropocentric ideals. What exactly this article said does not truly matter, the only thing that needs to be known  is that it was deeply philosophical and that I was unable to escape that realm when writing my post.

Blog posts should be short, concise, to the point, and interesting - that last post did not meet any of those requirements and was what truly made me start to become aware of my own writing in this regard.

So, how can I begin to work on these challenges?

My main goal is clarity. That means, for me, that I must map out very carefully the points that I want to make before making them, as in my own case, on the spot writing is always a conscious stream, verbose and intellectual as though I am letting all of my thoughts spill onto paper. This has no sympathy for the reader and will ultimately hurt me.

As this post is about concision of though I will sum up what I have said here and then be done:

1) My past blog posts have gone from under-analyzed, to okay-analyzed, back to under-analyzed, while I thought that they were always improving.

2) This deprives my writing of crucial sympathy for the reader and makes it seem as though it is a written stream of thought and not well-thought out writing.

3) The way in which I can start to work on this is by being aware of why I am writing something every moment I am writing it, and to stop myself and reflect if I become unintelligible. It is all about clarity for me.

As this post is partly about concision of thought, I will stop here as I have presented my arguments,
thanks for reading!