Learning to Write Publicly: Promises and Pitfalls of Using Weblogs in the Composition Classroom

Only 23.9% of the students who participated in our study reported having read or written for a blog at the beginning of the semester. It follows that most students would have been largely unaware of blogging conventions prior to participating in this study. Interviews with the instructors who assigned the class blogs confirmed this lack of familiarity with the generic conventions of blogging.

One reported that “[i]t seems that very few college freshmen regularly read or contribute to blogs.” Thus, despite the “strong [scholarly] agreement on the central features that make a blog a blog” that Carolyn R. Miller and Dawn Shepherd (2005) note, many of these students might not have even been able to distinguish a blog from other forms of online writing, at least initially. This is somewhat surprising given that over 70% of students acknowledged using MySpace, which itself has a dedicated blogging feature; but most did not report awareness of having previously read or written to a blog.

Formal Conventions of Blogs: Interactivity

Blogs are often characterized by these formal features: they contain a series of individual entries called posts that are arranged in reverse chronological order, and generally these posts include a mix of personal commentary and links to existing content on external websites. Blogs may also include multimedia components like videos, pictures, and sound clips that link to outside web content. While blog posts are often created by writers in response to events and conversations that happen elsewhere, both in the physical and online worlds, blogs also invite readers to contribute to the blog by commenting on the posts. Thus, even single-authored blogs have an interactive component.

Since most students were demonstrably unaware of blogs as online writing spaces at the beginning of our study, we were interested to see how their understanding of the formal features of blogging would develop when asked to participate on a class blog. Early posts made by students had little in the way of features that would distinguish them from other forms of writing aside from their placement in the Blogger architecture. For example, most students did not include hyperlinks to outside sources or add pictures or video clips. Instead, early posts were text based and included very little in the way of interactivity with other web content and users through the formal feature of hyperlinking. Consider the first student post to one of the class blogs:

Well hello there, my name is Bobby Light. I am speaking for my group who include [sic] Mark Twain, the infamous Charlie Murphy, and Kicklor 14. We are going to be commenting on the short essay called “In Our Glory” by Bell Hooks [sic]. Overall the essay was the better of the 3, it was very detailed and thorough, while still including interesting characteristics of the father’s picture. One explanatory line that i [sic] liked was when she stated “his dark skin mingling w/ the shadows in the photograph.” Its [sic] cool how the author pickes [sic] up every and any aspect of her fathers [sic] picture and gives it a reason or meaning behind it. For example when she states “there is such boldness, such feirce [sic] openess [sic] in the way he faces the camera”. Another question we had was why she choose [sic] to tell us that her sister is a lesbian? All in all this was a very intresting [sic] essay, and an intising [sic] read.

This example illustrates a willingness to incorporate the words of others into a blog post by quoting a bell hooks essay, but reveals that the student does not make use of the technical feature of hyperlinking to existing web content directly. As the semester progressed, some students began to write according to the formal features of the blog genre, separating text into chunks and gradually incorporating pasted URLs, and then working hyperlinks, into their posts. In one blog, posts in early October typically included written URLs followed by commentary, such as in this example:

Blogs about memories are a way for bloggers to share there [sic] experiences with others. Memory blogs give good insight to others about someone’s life and the things that have affected them. A good example of this is the blog “Alice Ghostley”.

http://www.doriengreyandme.blogspot.com/. The blog talks about an older actress from the show Bewitched and how the blogger remembered watching her and being amazed by her acting. The blogger also goes into the death of the actress and how it truely sadden [sic] him.

Two weeks later some class members were hyperlinking certain words to other sources (“A blog gives a person the freedom to express his or her self’s individuality and creativity…”). By the end of the semester, many students were making use of hyperlinks, in addition to incorporating multimedia elements such as embedding pictures and videos into their posts as a way of bolstering their written text. In one class blog, students used YouTube videos to preface or follow a point; in another, students relied more heavily on pictures, including one student who shared a poster from the Department of Labor that helped raise further questions about gender equality in the workplace. By doing so, students demonstrated an understanding of at least some of the interactive, formal features of the blog genre by not only referencing other sources and commenting on them, but also using the technology to include hyperlinks in a way that is stylistically consistent with the interactivity of the blog genre.

The use of formal blog features was aided in part by technology training sessions given to students during class. One of us was asked to give a mid-semester presentation to one class on the more technical aspects of blogging. The instructor approached us because she wanted her students to be able to experiment more with the multimedia aspects of blogging but was not yet comfortable enough with the software interface to do it herself. Following the lesson, an overwhelming number of students demonstrated an ability and willingness to incorporate pictures, video, and hyperlinks into their individual posts. Indeed, following the lesson, 24 of the remaining 27 posts on that class blog included at least one of the aforementioned technical features.

Of course making use of the technological features of the blogging software does not necessarily translate into an understanding blogs as a rhetorical genre. In the second questionnaire, when asked, “What distinguishes a ‘good’ blog post from a ‘bad’ blog post?” some students reported these formal features to be of paramount importance, trumping the content component itself. One student reported that a good blog post “has pictures and videos and not just writing” and another suggests “[a] good blog [post] has writing/pictures/videos.” To these students, blogs are by definition multimedia and hyperlinked, and are understood primarily in terms of their technical architecture. In other words, the blog genre was characterized primarily by its incorporation of more than just written text on a static page and should include hyperlinks and multimedia elements.

Rhetorical Conventions of Blogging:  Merging Academic Discourse and Personal Blogging

Other student responses to our post-blogging questionnaire suggest that the content is the most important feature that characterizes a blog post. As Miller and Shepherd (2005) point out in their genre analysis of blogging, self-expression is a common purpose for blogging. The blog genre can be characterized in part by the element of self-expression, which requires honesty, sincerity, and personal investment in a topic. For many of the participants in our study, these same characteristics are what make a blog post worth reading. One student wrote, “I think the only way you could have a bad blog post is if you did not write how you truly felt.” Such sentiment is echoed by others who note that a good blog post “shows thought and makes you ask questions” or “contains emotion of the writer and an interest in the subject.” Further, student writings to the class blogs revealed that they understood the blog genre to be most similar to a personal diary or perhaps a conversation with a trusted friend, where self-expression and disclosure of personal experience is valued. One example is a student’s blogged response to an issue raised in class:

A few weeks ago one of our classmates presented a persuasive speech regarding the negative sides of plastic surgery [. . . ] I’m here to stand up for plastic surgery and say that it has had a positive impact on my life, better yet, my health.

When I was younger, my brother accidently [sic] hit my face with a basketball and broke my nose. It was painful. At first the injury was not so noticeable, but as I grew older my face changed and the broken bone was affecting my breathing. This breathing problem held me back from playing certain sports in school. I grew tired of it, and I decided to undergo rhinoplasty, also know [sic] as the nose job. Everything turned out great during and after my surgery. I can’t imagine how much worst my health would be if I hadn’t found a solution to my breathing problem.

To this student and others, self-expression seemed to be the primary goal for writing. The best blog posts were the ones that were provocative or easy to identify with among class peers.

At the same time, other students reported a concern for writing in a style characteristic of traditional academic writing. These students expressed a concern about grammar, clarity, and brevity and made no mention of personal expression. One remarked:

I have learned that Puctuation [sic] and the tone of the response plays a major part in a good or bad blog. A bad blog would have little or no correct punctuation, and run on sentences. A good blog might have paragraphs and proper English.

Responses like this one suggest that some students believe that following the rhetorical conventions of blogging has little, if anything, to do with self-expression, but whether a post adheres to standard conventions of a formal or academic writing style. In the post-blogging questionnaire, some students reported that neglecting these stylistic conventions can get in the way of attracting reader interest if not fully considered: “You can tell when someone just slapped something up there, and if they did, it makes the reader not want to take the time to read it.”

When asked about the purpose of their blogging assignment in the second questionnaire (excluding those who only mentioned the blog as a requirement for the course), half of the students in our study said that the purpose of their class blog was to share ideas and/or help them to communicate with classmates. Some (14%) suggested the possibility that one could speak on the blog more freely than in the space of the classroom. One student reported that “the class blog wasn’t really an assignment, it was just something you could go to for fun, or to express an opinion you had.” Other students reported similar opinions: the class blog is a space to “share ideas,” “interact,” or “learn about each other.” Noting that the blog space allowed for writing that was free from the academic discourse of the classroom, students reported the blog was useful for “show[ing] your opinions to the class,” allowing them to “be able to express our views without people knowing exactly who was who so there was no Pre-Judged [sic] opinions.” Students felt that it was a space that complemented the work done in the classroom, allowing them “to try a different medium of writing” and, hopefully, “to become a better writer.” The class blogs “allowed [students] to explore the issues and ideas presented in class a little more,” and students found that this purpose helped others keep “an open mind” where students may “express [their] true feelings” and “speak freely.”

With this in mind, we found that the exposure to blogs did lead to a more nuanced understanding of the genre of blogging as a space for self-expression and identification with an interactive online community. Interestingly, however, while the students who participated in our study valued the blog postings that contained self-expression and “speaking freely” to an audience of social peers, they also were concerned about the formal features of speaking and writing that are specific to classroom discourse. Our findings are similar to those of a study conducted by Kevin Brooks, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe (2005), where blogs were primarily understood by students as remediated forms of other kinds of writing, many of which are common to the classroom context. In their study, the instructors emphasized that “weblogging is not a radically new way of writing, but a repurposing of familiar [. . .] print genres” including the journal, the academic notebook, and the filter (notecard) entry. The class blogs for our study likewise resembled, at times, the academic notebook for reflecting on readings, at others, the personal journal, where honesty and expression take precedence over formal presentation and, at others, more formal debate and discussion in an academic style. Thus, while we agree with Brooks et al. (2005) that “[w]orking with technology (regardless of genre) has the potential to motivate student writers,” our findings reveal that the nature of the class blog poses a unique writing situation in which students must navigate between personal expression and academic discourse that is not necessarily characteristic of the larger blogosphere.