I’ve been making students write blogs as assignments ever since I started handling courses in BAMS. I’ve already seen the gamut in terms of styles and quality. I also tend to see patterns, as well as tendencies both good and bad. And I’d like to talk about these things with you in the hopes of you improving your work.
Now, I understand that I approach blogging differently than some of the other professors in UPOU. The two Dr. Flors, for example, historically makes students write these lengthy entries – sometimes long enough to pass off as a research paper, which in turn requires citations. And if some profs require you to cite your sources in discussion forums, what more with real assignments, right?
I’m going to talk about blogging in my courses, in particular. If I wanted you to back your writing with research, I’d ask you to do a research paper. Blogs are different. It is an opportunity for self-reflection, where your personal insight, opinions and feelings matter more than being backed by a peer-reviewed journal article. There are no right or wrong answers – only how well you relate what you’re thinking.
Before I proceed, please know that I am not an English professor. I don’t have a degree in Literature. I do, however, have above average blogging skills. But perhaps more importantly. I know how it is to suck at writing and I found ways for myself to improve. This is not a manual, by any means. I’d like to think of this article as a set of points to ponder consider while examining yourselves and your writing abilities. I can only offer solutions sporadically. But even if I could, I would not dare to bombard you with instructions or techniques to master. I believe creative writing is a personal journey. You are the ones who should decide how to take on that journey yourselves, and then live with the outcomes.
Blog Length
First, in case you don’t really know, let’s consider length (yes, it matters – sort of). I haven’t come across any convention regarding how many words should a blog constitute. These days, I think it would be wise to look at it through the frame of search engine optimization (SEO). But even that isn’t clear. I’ve checked different sources and the ideal length with respect to SEO could be anywhere between 1,000-2,500 words. On the short end, what we refer to as the micro blog would be around 300 words.
We are obviously working somewhere in between those two. And there is merit in working between 500-750 words. It’s not too short as to cause the omission of important matters, but not too long as to risk exceeding today’s normal attention span.
Now, with all this talk about numbers, I’m going to segue into one of my peeves when reading student submitted blogs – the habit of practicing minimum effort. Yung tipong makalampas lang ng 500 words ok na. Being SEO-friendly is nice, but not a priority for us. This is about the limitations from a story-telling or discussion standpoint.
Five hundred words (or less) is only good for bringing up the salient points in the story you want to tell. Not even the best writers would have an easy time going beyond that. I don’t even think the best writers would even want to try. You simply cannot complete your story or train of thought without sacrificing detail and clarity without saying or writing more. For me, personally, 750 words is barely enough. Actually it wouldn’t be enough for me. That’s why I really appreciate it when you hit the 1,000 word mark in the blog assignments, even if you fizzle out midway through, it means you’re putting in the effort to put those thoughts of yours into writing, squeezing every word out of your brain.
Flow
Another important thing that I’ve seen many students struggle with is flow. For me, it’s over when the blog is written in interview format, bulleting my guide questions. To a lesser extent, strictly following the order of said guide questions is also a sign. Imagination just took a backseat. Sometimes, I feel like it gets so bad, I would think about removing the guide questions in the instructions. Then I’d realize that would lead to even bigger problems.
Of course, the guide questions are important. You do need to address as many of them as you can. But it is also important to exercise your right to take on those questions as you see fit. Just as importantly, it is also your right – your responsibility to add more as you need in order to tell your story the way you want. This is essentially what separates the course blogs from the rest of your requirements here.
Depth
Another attribute that separates the good from the mediocre is what I call depth or substance. Drawing from personal past experiences, or media that you’ve consumed is a powerful ability in creative writing. As I have observed, this is where older students or maybe those who’ve had to deal with great adversity at such a young age (getting low grades in high school don’t count, trust me) have an advantage. At the same level of aptitude, it is easy to distinguish how a 35 year old person supporting a family of 5 while hanging on to his or her 5th job in the same among of years from a 19 year old kid who was home-schooled and didn’t get to go out much before entering college.
I remember watching an interview of Radioactive Sago Project frontman and TV personality Luord de Veyra several years ago. He raised an interesting point that throughout history, we have seen child prodigies in the field of art, music, mathematics and the like. But we have yet to see one in the field of literature. I don’t know how right or wrong he is to this day. What I do know is that I have yet to prove him wrong.
We can write with perfect grammar and semantics. And yet, we can still keep failing at genuinely capturing an audience. I call this hollow writing. To be honest, I don’t’ think there are quick solutions for this.
Life changing events, to me, are the most powerful agents. I don’t want to call them solutions because the bad events are just as, if not more powerful than the good ones. As a teenager, I had my personal issues like every other kid. But what unwittingly started me on my path to who I am as a person today started when both my parents suffered strokes less than two years apart. It was my wake-up call, telling me that my care-free life was at an end. My mother passed a year or two after her stroke, but my dad still went on to live a full life before passing at age 78. Still, that left me changed, and in the eyes of both of them, I was forced to mature earlier than I should. I also believe that this was when I started to really improve as a writer. Every now and then I see old notes and attempts at poetry. I cringe at the sight of anything I wrote before 2001.
While unavoidable in life, I would not hope for any of my students to need something like losing a parent just to be a good writer. Barring such things, thankfully, there are other sources of life experiences to gain over them. You just have to commit to them. Go out, travel, meet new people, fall in love, have your heart broken multiple times, join a competition where you don’t get consolation prizes, get a part-time job that requires leg work, risk something precious to you… those sorts of things.
As I have implied, it is unfortunate that lack of depth in your writing cannot be effectively solved within the time frame of a 10-12 week trimester. But I believe that this is something every creative person owes to themselves and is guaranteed to pay off at some point in their lives.
Dynamics
A few years ago, I installed an SEO plugin for my website. I was having trouble posting my blogs properly in Facebook and it was apparently one way of solving the issue. It was also able to evaluate my blogs for SEO friendliness. It was then that I found out how my writing style was anything but. Among my weaknesses was how imbalanced I was with my active and passive voices. And this was the only criteria I only cared for as far as SEO was concerned in my website.
Inexperienced writers or bloggers sometimes have this tendency to start their sentences with I or We. There is nothing wrong with that in isolation. But when more than half of your statements in an entire article are like that, then you might have a problem. You’re not really telling a story. You’re enumerating. Think about it. Enumeration type questions weren’t fun back in elementary and high school. Guess what… they’re not fun to see in blogs, either.
There are ways to solve this. Sometimes, it helps to at least start a sentence with a leading phrase, before the I or We shows up in the sentence. You’ve probably noticed that I’ve done that multiple times already in this very article. A more sophisticated solution is to mix it up and fluidly go from active to passive voice and then back, depending on what you’re trying to emphasize in each statement.
Shifting perspectives can also be helpful every now and then. For example, instead of writing strictly from your point of view, from time to time, you can change it a bit. Write from the perspective of someone or something else, or at least speculate on what their perspectives are. A blog is inherently self-centered. But do avoid being narcissistic. It pays to be mindful of your surroundings. It also pays to write about them.
Grammar and Semantics
There was a time in my career when these were of utmost importance. They still are, particularly in requirements that are more formal in nature. But for blogs… I’ve loosened up a bit. I don’t mind the occasional errors, especially since I am prone to commit them myself. On the other hand, I have great appreciation when I see students have a high level of command of language, whether it’s English or Filipino. Going beyond dry language is the secret sauce of blogging. It’s not just about grammar and proper subject-verb agreements. It’s about meaning – what I also would call substance previously. Semantics is a key to expression and how well you can communicate that expression to an audience. Maybe it can be knowing multiple synonyms and antonyms for a given adjective, all without using the word very (thank you, Dead Poets Society). Maybe it’s the appropriate use of all sorts of figures of speech. How good are you at writing satire or expressing sarcasm? Or maybe it’s simply the ability to be cognizant of what works and what doesn’t, or what’s funny, what’s amusing or what’s downright offensive.
Again, I have great appreciation for those who are already on a level where all these are second nature to them. But there is no need for those who don’t to worry that they’re now doomed to fail. That said, I strongly believe that aspiring writers should strive to get better in this regard. Like much of what I’m writing about here, this will also take time. But I guarantee that reaching this level is a rewarding, and dare I say, liberating experience as a creative.
Artificial Intelligence
I try to have a balanced perspective regarding the use of AI. Some of my colleagues have embraced it. Some are a bit more cautious. Come to think of it, compared to them, I would be the skeptic. But that would be an oversimplification of my stance. I believe that there are things where AI is useful. Unbeknownst to many, AI in some form or fashion, has been used for several decades now. This was covered during my computer science days. I never got into it myself, because my interests lied elsewhere at the time. In fact, it still does.
One thing is for sure, though. What we have readily available today are things we only saw in science fiction in the past. And part of me finds that terrifying – perhaps to the point where I would pause for a moment, and then ask myself if I still want this job of mine.
Grammarly has already been around for a relatively long time now and its use is widely accepted throughout the academe. I don’t mind if anyone uses that software. I start having a problem when people use AI to actually do the writing for them. I absolutely hate it when I start suspecting students are using ChatGPT to write emails meant for me. And I hate it even more when it’s an assignment. There are certain activities where even I would concede that the use of generative AI would be appropriate. But creative writing is definitely not one of them. Blogs are highly contextualized. It’s why I like it as an assessment tool. A blog that went through ChatGPT takes some of your individuality away, even if it’s just grammar corrections – the most overused excuse I’ve seen, so far.
I don’t know if students can actually sympathize. But deliberately passing off AI-generated content as their original work is a betrayal of goodwill and trust. I’ve only been on the receiving end of this recently, and already, I feel a certain amount of cynicism, distrust, and even paranoia when I read assignments or receive unusually well-written emails. The emails, in particular, are too much for me. I’ve received quite a few of them that sounded way too academic. Even I don’t write like that to my PhD supervisor. If you need AI to write an email for you, then I don’t know what to tell you, except that I am so sorry for you. I think you need to start asking yourself if you’re really fit to be an online college student.
Using AI for blogging is especially egregious. You’re asking a machine to write about your personal experiences, thoughts, feelings and reality. Yes, ChatGPT will generate a perfectly written article, at least as far as grammar and semantics go. But is the story still really written by you about you?
Irresponsible use of AI when doing assignments is bad enough. However, using it for self-reflective blogging to me is perhaps as low as it gets.
Closing
Sometimes, I read blogs which made me feel like their writers were trying too hard to anticipate what they thought I want to read. Sometimes, it reaches a point where I think it compromises their honesty and authenticity. And that is the bigger sin over worrying about whether or not I would like what they’re going to write. And you know what makes that even sadder? I don’t even think about what I like or don’t like when I read student blogs. My guide questions really are for the students’ benefit. While it is important to be mindful of guide questions in order to keep the blog relevant, it’s not the only thing that makes or breaks a submission. It’s not about worrying as to whether or not I agree or disagree with whatever is written. It’s about how well it is laid out. And I hope that is something students will keep in mind…. Well, at least when they’re in my class, that is.