Why a blog...

The course I'm currently taking, LPW700 - The Writerly Self, requires that I keep a reflective journal:

LPW700 The Writerly Self invites you keep a record or journal in about 3,000 to 5,000 words of your development as a writer with particular emphasis on the period of this unit. This involves you understanding and articulating your insights into why you write and how you go about achieving what you want to convey to an audience. This journal may take the form of an essay that reflects upon the journey that you have made to understand and develop your 'writerly self'.

The journal/essay could consist of diary-style entries or of a more formal reflective piece.

My gut feeling is that this is not really an "invitation", although I do appreciate being allowed to maintain the illusion that I have a choice in the matter.

I liked the idea of making this a cosy, chatty diary. Something I could use to pour all my angst into when the module seems impenetrable, but it would be hard to keep in mind that, ultimately, I'm not writing this for myself. Someone will read it.

In fact, one of the ominous boxes on the assessment marking rubric says: "5. Your work indicates a clear sense of audience". Now, if I just kept a chatty, cosy diary, then I wouldn't be at all worried about who the audience was at all. The audience would, like any unself-conscious diary, be me.

This is why I've decided to keep a blog instead. It will serve to remind me that someone will be reading and assessing this. It'll keep me nervous, on my toes, and stop me from straying off the straight and narrow. Well, hopefully.

The other reason to make this a blog is because blogs are an integral part of my life. I already keep about 10 of them. Some for fiction, some for commentary, some for my students. I love them. I love the accessibility, the democracy, the interactiveness, the visuality of them. I love that anyone with a computer and internet access can make one. You don't need to know any coding (although I do). You don't need to be a graphic designer (although I am). You don't even have to be a particularly good writer (which I can be, on occasion). They allow anyone to make anything that can be stored in digital form available to anyone else in the world with a computer and internet access. It's really the latest word in intellectual generosity.

And like all the writing projects I ever embark on, I needed to create something visual to mark the start of it. And so, although the template this blog is generated from was originally created by FinalSense.com and you can get one of your own there, I did do a little tweaking to the header and footer to make it mine. This desire to visually "brand" everything kind of speaks to who I am as a graphic designer. But perhaps it also says a quite a bit about how much I am affected internally by the consumer culture that surrounds me. I hope not; I hope it's just my desire to create unity in my work, to have something be all of-a-piece. But you never really know, do you?

A blog can be as visually stimulating as one likes. Although many people do not use it that way, it can incorporate practically any form of multimedia. This can, of course, be a distraction. The non-text-based can easily overwhelm the written word. I have to be careful to keep my forays into the visual limited to what will enhance my point. Still, I like having the option of embedding images, audio, video, etc. into this reflective journal. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and since I've got a limit of 5,000 of them, I figure that I might just require some explanatory shortcuts.

Blogs are also like terminals. They can take you to other places. I can hyperlink ideas and take you to examples or illustrations of them. Since I don't have access to a public library, one of my favourite places in the world is Google Books. There's a sublime delight in being able to word-search through a tome I've read and find the exact passage I want in the blink of an eye. Being without a library has also forced me to read a lot of books in the public domain at the Project Gutenberg.

Finally, what I love more than anything else about blogs is that they allow for interaction. Anyone reading this post can comment on it. Many of the writers I know have blogs. As published Gods they seem distant, unreal and unaccessible, but as bloggers I can read their posts and ask questions, comment on their work and comment on the comments. One of my favourite blogging writers is William Gibson.

Last semester I took a course called "Writing History". My project was a spacial and time-based representation of the French Indochina war using Google Earth. In the assessment comments, Kitty, my tutor, remarked that I had not adequately defended my choice to use the Google Earth platform for my project. She had a point; it was a very fair criticism.

This time, I hope I've adequately explained myself.

(800 words and counting)