truth

I'm not sure that I'm doing a good job with these reflections.

They're certainly not helping my find my own personal style, though I think that's less a matter of me doing something wrong, and more a matter of me having had a blog for approximately forever, and spending a long time developing the voice that I currently write in.

As a side note, I had someone outside of class read one of my posts, and they made a couple of comments to me about my writing, which I'll share now because maybe they're somewhat relevant to the topic. First comment: While a lot of the stuff I write is generally true, it does tend to contain a lot of "facts" that aren't actually facts. I guess that's sort of a hard distinction, but what he meant (and something I'll readily admit to) is that while I don't make up things to sway an opinion or alter the point of a story, I will be liberal with the details. In some cases being more specific than my memory actually allows (Nope, no real clue when exactly the D.A.R.E. officer came to my classroom) or leaving out pieces of the story that I don't feel are relevant (the friend in the last post was actually a conglomeration of numerous people I've known over the years and still know). I know why I do it, and it's generally a style thing, an attempt to keep a narrative flowing or sometimes just get it started.

That said, it's a little weird. Not that not being 100% honest in writing is weird. But (and this is the second thing that was pointed out to me) my writing is rather personal. I'm writing in an "academic" setting, for a grade, to be read by a professor who's going to judge me, and I'm incredibly informal. I tell a bunch of stories, and sometimes I swear, I break lots of standard "writing rules" and it feels to me more like a conversation between friends than a class assignment. I'm being personal, and open, and honest, and yet I'm not, in some ways.

I'm hiding behind the little edits that make me sound a lot wittier and help my stories flow. I don't say "like" or "uh..." nearly enough to make this journal sound anything like what actually talking to me would. But that's my style. Outwardly incredibly informal and personal, but with a high degree of internal editing to make it so. (If I'm being honest, I wanted to end that, "make it sound so good.")

Anyway, after that incredibly long side note that might actually make up the bulk of this post... I've had a style for awhile. And partly it's as personal as it is because I started developing it writing fiction, and only modified it slightly to adapt to personal journal writing, and while maybe it isn't appropriate for professional papers, I think it works here and I'm not too motivated to change it. So I wouldn't say that this blog is helping me develop my style, though I would say that it's generally fun to write.

As for helping me connect to the ideas in class, here's where I'm not sure. On one hand, I'm definitely writing about things that relate to class. On the other hand, I feel like a lot of what I do is just say the things that I wish I had the time to say in class or said in class, but wish I said better. And in that sense, I'm not really connecting a whole lot, I'm just spewing more and more of my own ideas, and not necessarily incorporating others. Which, while incredibly easy for me to write, maybe isn't always the point.

So here's where I'm going to try an experiment. For the next couple of posts, I'm going to talk about and argue for something that I'm not really sure I believe. Maybe it'll be something someone says in class that makes me stop and go, "What?" Maybe it'll just be the exact opposite of something I vehemently believe. I'm hoping that I'll be able to write in a way that still sounds like me, while incorporating ideas that are definitely not my own. Certainly, I'm not always right, and hopefully this will keep me a little more open-minded.

It's not going to do anything about that "writing really personally but not being completely honest" thing, but that's why I'm talking about it. I do hope that it improves my critical and higher-level thinking skills, and really, while I love entertaining readers, that's what this blog is for.