The reason that I titled my blog “Old School” is because at the time I was proud that I had never even thought about starting my own blog. I used to think that blogs were inferior, and they would never be seen as credible news sources. I thought Twitter and Facebook were just places where people posted drama, too much information, and scandalous pictures. While there are a certain number of users who like posting those things, I know that I was wrong to make such broad generalizations about social networking sites.
My experience in this class has taught me that I had a lot to learn to break out of my old habits and become familiar with the vast and resources and tools that technology can provide. Coming into this course I did not know much about graphic design, I still do not now, but I feel more comfortable writing for the type of audience that browses the internet often, and who will not tolerate boring or inaccurate information. I would like to use one of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s main principles in there book on remediation as a motto for my writing. Bolter and Grusin talk about combining the old and the new, I would like to use my style as a pure writer and combine it with newer elements to attract an audience. The newer things would likely have to be created by someone else, but that is where the graphic designer comes in. My ultimate goal is to be a sports writer; I will do all I can to make that happen. Ultimately I do not know if that would be possible anymore without some form of blogging experience. Magazines are declining, and some argue that newspapers are dying. Blogs have never been more important, they are featured daily on newscasts as well as ESPN (along with social networks.) It is because of this that my first piece is the first formal reading response we ever posted to the blog. As I look back on it I am still very proud of my effort. One revision I did make on it for this portfolio is that it was wordy. I am going to do my best to use the strategies we have learned this semester for writing for the web in order to narrow it down and polish it. In doing so, I feel that will improve the overall quality. Right now, I do not know if I will change any of the content of that first post for the portfolio. I feel like it was my opinion at the time, and changing it now would only be due to hindsight. I would like to show how I have grown of course, but there must be better ways of doing that.
That brings me to the first major project that I produced for this course. The website I created for my remediation project based on Dave Chappelle as Clayton Bigsby, a black white supremacist. While I agree with your feedback that this may have been better as a blog I was too inexperienced with the blogging world to realize that then. I am also still new to making websites as well so quite frankly I am still proud of the effort I put in, along with the way that I took the criticisms of the rough draft of the site to heart and I implemented many neccessary changes.
One of the things I did when I gave the site a proverbial tune up so that it could be a part of the portfolio was to brand it better. Dave Chappelle needed to be to be a big part of the banner and title of the website, more so than the former title of “The greatest skit of all time.” In retrospect, that was not a good title. To borrow from Kathryn and Michael Summers’s “Creating Websites that work”, such a title does not do a good job of getting a user focused on what the website is about. For now I am going with the “Clayton Bigsby Remediated, Chappelle’s Show Remembered” because it gives an idea of what the website is, but is not too much info for a title.
I would like to be the perfect writer. I’m competitive, therefore I want to be the best at what I do. The fact is, such a thing is impossible. Writing styles are mostly subjective, and even if one person thought I was perfect the only way I can get better is to keep writing. Composing texts and projects for this course has really helped me to determine what my strengths and weaknesses are as a writer.
