They Say, I Say...

I believe a key concept to take away from the book would be chapter six in general which describes how people may come with counter arguments for the points I may highlight. I believe this could go toward improving my essay in that it encourages me to "hit harder" or develop my points to where they just cant be counter argued without a great amount of evidence. Of course there will always be someone who may disagree with what I say, but revising my essay around counter arguments could make it so fewer people care to contradict my argument. All in all, what I've taken away from the book is just to make my points clear, concise, and support them to the point where counter arguments will be discouraged by the depth I put into my argument.

Presentation (Sorta)

Although this blog is meant to be a reflection on my presentation, I was unable to present seeing as I was unable to get to class. I woke up feeling horrible. Shivering, runny nose, sore throat, couldn't speak very well...nothing short of jut plain bad. However, I'm still obligated to write this blog as an assignment and I shall indeed do that. Hopefully I can present next class. I plan on speaking with the professor really soon on this and hope she understands my condition...

"Blogging" related to my essay (Late)

With the task of having to find a section from the book Blogging, I have looked back through the book and found something I can relate my essay to. The section that I found significant to my essay would be the Topic Driven Blogs paragraphs starting on page 15. I believe this is pertinent to my essay in that I am following a football blog particularly focused on the San Diego Chargers team. Thus it's evident that the blog I am following is a topic based on seeing as the topic is the San Diego Chargers team and the blog exclusively focuses on it. Considering I am writing about the blog, the topic driven section within the book seems easy to relate to as my blog falls into that category.

Changes For Essay (Late)

Based on the writing conferences it is evident that I need to make my thesis more clear and concise.I also would like to make the identity a bit more clear as well seeing as that is the assignment. Those are my two primary focuses in editing this draft. The content of my paper was positively received and was described as focused and staying on topic. Little change will be made to the content by I do intend to put more details into each individual topic.

Research

As of now my research has been going quite well. I’ve been keeping up with the San Diego Chargers blog and keeping mental notes on their progress. As opposed to my initial proposal to try to find identity in each blogger, I have decided that it would be more sensible to observe how the identity of the San Diego Chargers is formed through the writing of the bloggers. Research wise I suppose the main challenge at hand is just trying to observe an identity for a team as opposed to an individual. Each of the individuals have different identities so trying to observe the culmination of each individual collectively seems challenging. Also, considering this is a sports team their identity is really only formed based on their actions during the game. If the team isn’t playing then there isn’t much to tell about them. But nonetheless the team can still be described and their statistics can really show what this team is made of and how far they may go. That is in essence what I hope to find out. What does this team hope to prove to the rest of the league and do their stats support that? So far it’s unclear seeing as the team is 2-3, but they may stage a comeback as they have in previous years.

"Blogging" Passage Response

“For instance, one front-page story on Slashdot in December 2007 was that of the convicted rapist who was murdered by a neighbor who had found his name by searching the ‘Megan’s Law’ database of sex offenders and said that he killed the man to protect his child from being molested…This story is of particular interest to Slashdot users because of the questions of privacy that are raised when we can access increasing amounts of information about individuals online.’ (104-105)

Walker Rettberg, Jill.  Blogging: Digital Media and Society Series.  Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.

I’d personally like to jump in at this point seeing as I feel that this is somewhat ridiculous. How can a person just go and kill his next door neighbor all of sudden? I’ll admit the neighbor was indeed a convicted rapist but I really don’t think that’s ample reason to just go and take away his life. The man killed the rapist in order to protect his daughter when in fact the rapist had never even done anything towards children as he was an adult rapist. It just bothers me how the rapist hadn’t done anything to his neighbor or his children and the guy decides to kill him. It really doesn’t seem like he has a sensible reason for taking away another man’s life. Also, the fact that the information was readily available online is also a topic of discussion. I find it rather interesting that you can just go online and find a person’s criminal record out of the blue. Sure the guy was a convicted rapist but something of that privacy level should at least be found via another method such as on television or radio, not floating around on the internet. I can’t completely side with the man defending his daughter strictly because he didn’t have a true reason in my opinion. He assumed his daughter would be inappropriately touched and thus acted on an assumption based on misleading information.

Interests

Considering it is football season right now, my most relevant interest for the moment is of course the NFL. Football has been an interest of mine for quite some time and regardless of whether its the NFL season or not, I'm always looking into it and watching videos of it. Because of this, I would much enjoy to study a blog that is football related. Particularly I would like to follow my favorite team, the San Diego Chargers. By studying different blogs about my team, I hope to learn how other fans (or critics) of the team think. Post game blogs would be very interesting as it would give an opportunity for me to see how people react to how well San Diego performs during the game. I have my own opinions of the team, but I'm interested in seeing how other people critique my team and whether or not they have similar views to myself.

Who am I as a writer?

In short, I believe myself to be much like a year round athlete in high school. I participate in different sports and yet excel in each of them. I believe myself to be like that with writing. There are different types of writing such as creative, argumentive, informative, etc. and I feel that I am experienced in each one. I believe I excel in more than one category, much like an athlete can excel in more than one sport.