Response to blog entries

At the beginning of the year, I was intrigued by the idea to blog about the reading assignments.  I had not ever kept a journal like you used to require, but I did keep a blog in Ms. Majerus' class last year, and enjoyed it immensely. I began writing with some uncertainy as to what was expected of me, but soon found a tone I enjoy writing in, because it captures my thought process well.
In fact, the blogs are one of the things I have enjoyed most from this class. They allow me to record my thoughts on specific pasages and characters, and now I am really enjoying looking back on my thoughts on old books. I also am surprised by how much my tone has changed over the course of this semester. I have noticed that, as my undersatanding of how casual these blogs can be grows, my enthusiasm when writing them increases as well. For the first couple of months (while still being interested in my topics) I was going about writing blogs unemotionally and I think they were kind of boring (no offense to my past self). Now, however, I get excited writing them and often have to catch myself and slow down before I get TOO far off topic--which bring me to another thing I like about this assignment. It allows me to just throw out thoughts as they occur to me. In papers, I often find myself having to exclude points of interest because I cannot smoothly incorporate them into the content. While blogging, though, I can be very informal about mentioning side thoughts (kind of like Howie's footnotes). The only downside to this is that sometimes I get annoyed at myself for not leaving the extra time to write individual posts for all of these miscellaneous thoughts.
Regarding the blog vs. journal debate, I think that either would work very well in the future. Each has obvious pros (blogs: easily accessible to everyone, no bad handwriting, easy to rewrite stuff; journals: private, I personally find it easier to write essays on paper before transferring them to Word) and cons (blogs: easily accessible to everyone, you need to actually be at a computer to make a post; journals: no one else can see them unless you share them with friends, bad handwriting, not always there if you want to make an entry).
To conclude, I would just like to say again how much I enjoyed the blogging aspect of this course, since it has provided me with an easy way to see my growth throughout the semester. They show me which books were my favorites (Song of Solomon, Sun Also Rises, The Stranger), because I write those posts much more enthusiastically than the others. I regret that I have not examined the work of my peers as much as I could (and probably should), but I intend to do that more often in the coming weeks as I reflect on my brief but enjoyable journey into the mysterious waters of Twentieth Century literature.