Blog #10 To Blog or Not To Blog

This semester I learned endless ways on how to improve my writing. I learned which words to stay away from like "society" and "very." I understand the different uses of point of views and how they effect the reader perspective on the story. First person point of view tends to give the reader a better understanding versus a third person limited where the narrator knows things, but not every single aspect. I also learned that when I am writing a research paper I need to use quotes to back up each claim I make in order to provide evidence for my claim. Writing is a long process that needs to be constantly revised. Rhetoric and Composition taught me that through peer review and Criterion, I can improve my writing. These two helpful items helped me become a better and more thorough writer. 

I am unsure if I will continue to post on my blog. However, I like how the blog is fun and creative, but I personally prefer to write in my own journal. There are many pros and cons to having an online blog. Some pros are that you can share your blog with whoever wants to look at it on the web (some people, like myself, may also view this as a con.) Another pro is that blogging lets you share comments with others; it is much more social than keeping a personal journal. While I enjoy editing my fonts, backgrounds, and pictures on my blog, I also enjoy watching my own handwriting change over the years as I continue to write in my own journal. Some people view blogging as a con because you cannot keep up with how one's style of handwriting changes.

Although I enjoy blogging, I will probably continue to write in my journal rather than post on this blog. Here are some extra pros and cons of posting on a blog.

                 Pros:                                                                                         

• Fun and creative                                                                      
• Social 
• You can comment, share pictures, include links
• You can look at other people's blogs
• fast and easy (for people technologically capable)

                 Cons:

• Not entirely private
• Can not watch hand writing change over time
• Can not use when there is a power outage, if you have a dead battery, etc. 
• Someone could possibly hack your blog 

Blog 9 "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape"

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape by John Ashbery

When I initially went to the link that was given to read the poem, I read the poem, but then I decided to listen to John Ashbery read it. I knew that the poem was a bit odd because it contained cartoon characters and there had to be a deeper meaning than Popeye having to leave his small and peculiar apartment.

When I heard the actual reading of the poem, it seemed to make a little more sense to me in the fact that the audience was laughing in the background. Although it was still difficult to understand the entire meaning of the poem, I think that Ashbery mixes a technical form with cartoon characters to add ironic humor to his sestina.

Ashbery also uses enjambment in his poem to create a sentence structure even though he writes a sestina. 

The repeated words in his sestina are thunder, apartment, country, pleasant, scratched, and spinach. While Ashbery follow the techniques of how to write a sestina, he incorporates many humorous lines using his “end words.”

My favorite line in the poem is “the thunder soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder, The color of spinach.” I liked this line the most because who would describe thunder as the color of spinach? The entire end tercet is just funny to me because of the odd way Ashbery combines all the repeating words. I find it really interesting how poets can just combine the words in the final tercet and it makes sense. Although this poem did not make complete sense to me, the end tercet made me laugh in the fact that the entire poem is all odd, funny, and poetical all at the same time.