My English 112 blogging experience

I could still remember that very first evening I walked in my English 112 class. We were already on the second week of the semester and I had missed the very first class of the semester. Upon arrival to the class I met a professor who wasn’t very pleased with the fact that I had missed our first class, however after giving me an extensive lecture she went on to explain to me what the class was going to be all about, and also what I needed to do to make up for the class I had missed. After hearing from the professor that the class was going to be a blogging class, I then said to myself, what the hell is a blog? I mean, I’ve heard of blogs before, but I wasn't exactly sure how to create one, and most of all, I didn’t think I was going to be able to maintain one for the next eight weeks. But nonetheless, with a little hint of reluctancy I eventually chose my topic and wrote my introductory blog. In this introductory blog I told my audience a little about my personal background, then after which I went on to explain why I chose to do my blog on the subject of health and fitness. After publishing that very first blog I was now fired up about this whole idea of blogging for an English class. After all, I knew it could have been a lot worst; we could have talking about stuff like Shakespeare, which probably would have put me to sleep for the entire semester.

Then by the time we got midway through the semester, all of a sudden I felt like I was running out of ideas to blog about, and at that point in time, writing blogs started becoming less exciting, and more of a constant struggle to get through. For the next two weeks or so the only thing that kept me motivated was those weekly feed backs from the professor and also from the other student’s in the class.

To summarize my blogging experience in English 112, I would definitely have to admit that it was somewhat of a different experience from all the other English classes I had ever taken. And the fact that we were only required to write one major paper at the end of the class, made the experience a lot more enjoyable. Now that it’s finally over I’m certainly going miss receiving those feed backs, but nevertheless, I’m still going to continue blogging, because I think that if I continue to write blogs, it could ultimately help me to become a much better writer.

Having trouble focusing

Normally I would write my blogs over the weekends but this past weekend I had to work. And for that very reason I've spent the past few days struggling to come up with topics and ideas to write about. Since yesterday I’ve decided to write a blog about "appreciating the beauties of the human body," but I just haven’t been able generate any real flow. The main problems I’ve been having is concentrating and staying focus. Every time I sit down to write my mind tends to wander off on something else. Below is the introductory paragraph of the blog I’ve been trying to work on for the pass two days, if anyone have any good ideas about this topic or any other topics I could write about, please don’t hesitate to share your opinion.

The human body comes in so many different variations. Whether we’re talking size, shape or just simply our various skin tones, it’s safe to say no two bodies look exactly the same. With that concept in mind many of us, who are not naturally gifted, are force to get in the gym and work extremely hard to obtain that beautiful looking body of our dreams. And even though a beautiful looking body is base on each individual’s opinion, certainly we could all agree on some key features in determining someone who has a great looking body. When it comes to determining the ideal female’s body many would readily agree that a more slender and shapely looking female would be consider having a better looking body than one that’s not as slender or shapely. As far as us guys we need to be somewhat bulky with lean muscles in order to be even considered as having a great looking body. But in my personal opinion I think people should first appreciate the way they look, because not everyone could a Brad Pitt or Kim Kardashian.

Potential sources

I must admit that this idea of blogging for an English class seemed a little weird to me at first. But the moment I chose my topic and started writing, right then and there it started becoming much clearer to me why an instructor would want to use this unconventional style of teaching in a classroom setting. The reason I believe blogging was chosen as a way of educating us students is mainly because of its effectiveness. Blogging I believe, forces us to get creative and venture outside the normal realm of academic writing. From the moment a student create a blog they then realize that they don’t have to stick solely to using written words, instead they could utilize things like images, videos, music or any other media they could think of that would better get their points across. Blogging also presents a sort of competitiveness, the fact that students know other students are reading their blogs, helps to create somewhat of a competitive atmosphere, because of this small amount of competitive pressure, all of a sudden every one's working hard to present their best blog. The other reason I think this method of learning is proving to be so effective to me is, as the author of a particular blog you get to decide what materials gets published on your blog, and as a result I think people are taking full advantage of all the resources available to them in the blogging world.

Well, now that this exiting class blogging is nearing the end, we’re now face with putting together an analysis paper, this paper will serve as a summary of our experience as academic bloggers. So in keeping that in mind, and the fact that I had to come up with three potential sources to support my analysis paper, I went out and search the enormous community of health and fitness blogs. After analyzing quite a few blog sites in my community, I was able to narrow down my choices to what seems to be three reputable sources. These blogs sites came across to me as just simply perfect to support my analysis paper.

The first blog I want to talk about is a blog from a DC fitness trainer that goes by the name Doug. The first thing that caught my attention as I was reading through Doug’s blog was the fact that he was an actual experienced expert in his field. Besides being an excellent fitness trainer Doug has also done things like,

Contributing to Men’s Fitness magazine, ACE Certified News, IDEA Fitness
Journal, and AtoZFitness.com. Featured fitness consultant for a variety of
newspaper and magazine articles, as well as TV and radio appearances. Media rep
for TEAM Arthritis, an exercise program sponsored by Pfizer and the American
Orthopedic Society for Sports Medicine. Fitness modeling in Miami. [Murphy]

The other things I found to be appealing about Doug’s blog was his essay to follow page layout, and also the smooth flow of his words as he wrote his incredibly informative post. In my opinion Doug's blog definitely appears to be the strongest potential sources for my analysis paper.


The reason I chose this next blog to be among my final picks is mainly because, one, its an health blog that supports a lot of my ideas. It support ideas like healthy dieting, it also supports the idea of staying away from foods that are potentially harmful to our bodies. But the thing that interested me the most about this blog was, the fact that the author seemed to be well informed about her topic, and with that she provides extensive information in the form of well researched data. Over all I found this blog to be extremely informative and that’s why I chose it to be one of the potential finalists for my analysis paper.

This third and final potential finalist was basically chosen because of its similarities to my blog in the sense it runs parallel with what I'm trying to accomplish with my blog. This blog consistently follows my mission in informing and educating the public about health and fitness. It also talks about a lot of the same issues that I’ve covered on my blog site as well. Topics like losing weight, fad diets, diabetes and maintaining good health. Even though I might not necessarily agree on the style and formatting of this blog, mainly the color, I think more importantly we share common interest about the things that matters most, health and fitness. So with these three great potential sources it seems like I'm going to be in good shape once I sit down to write my analysis paper.