Second Semester Final

During the second semester my writing has gotten worse. I ran out of topics to write about and was struggling to keep up with the word count. I just ran out of ideas and ended up writing about sports almost the entire semester. If you take a look at my blogs at http://jonathanmah2268.blogspot.com/ and look at the blogs I did at the beginning of the year you can tell that those blogs were more about my life and the activities I enjoy to do. Those blogs received the most comments that encouraged my writing. But as the year went on I was dealing with writers block and got sick of it. So I decided that it would make my life much easier if I just write about sports and how my favorite teams are doing. These blogs were merely facts about sports teams and I knew that this would not improve my writing at all, which was my goal from the beginning of the year. But what I did like to blog about and think has improved my writing is the literature circle letters and the book reviews on books I read during the year. I had an opportunity to tell fellow students about how I felt about a certain book and if they should decide to read it or not. This was the first time in my life when I had the opportunity to write letters to other student abut how I felt about a book and I enjoyed it very much. Even though most of the books that I read were not all that enjoyable to me, I still thought that this weekly assignment has helped me become a better writer. Writing blogs is a great idea that has helped me through many problems, most importantly writers block. This year, my blogs have been all over the place. Some were good others were not so well done but I have enjoyed this experience and I hope that I have the motivation to continue writing on my blog in the future.

My favorite blog during this year is the one that also surprised me the most when I reread it. The link to this blog is http://jonathanmah2268.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-i-got-started.html#comments. This was my third blog of the year and it is my proudest one. I finished this blog in the lab at school during your class and I treated it like any other blog. I was rushing to finish it because I was running out of time in class and I did not want to do it at home. I finally finished with a couple of minutes left and was not think about rereading it at all because I did not feel like it was my best effort since I was rushing. But when I saw that my English teacher had commented on it a week later and gave me very encouraging comments I decided to reread it and it surprised me. I did not know that I wrote such a good blog and it was probably my best one this entire year. I had no idea that I could write this well and was very surprised when my teacher compared it to a college entry essay. This blog was probably the most thought out blog of the year. I wanted to share with everyone why I started to play sports and how it has become a huge part of my life. I started off this blog saying "Sports have influenced my life in a huge way. It has given me confidence, determination, focus, and attentiveness. The traits that will lead me to success." This was pretty much the reason why I started to play sports. I was a very shy and independent as a child and I wanted to get out of that habit. So I played sports to boost my confidence up so I could be able to meet new people and determination, focus, and attentiveness were just a plus to the confidence I received. In the second paragraph of my blog, I wrote a story about how I got started in playing basketball. I explained how my parents forced me to play basketball and what they did to help me get better. At the end I wrote a paragraph about the purpose of why I decided to write about this topic. In the conclusion I emphasized on taking risks and how it may help you but will never cause and damage. Taking a risk can decide whether or not you will become rich or poor and happy or sad. I am very proud of this blog and I had a fun time reading it over and over. "How I Got Started" is my favorite blog of the year.

Having a blog has been great. It has helped me become a better writer, getting me through writers block, and given me a opportunity to share my life story's with others. My blog has not changed the way I write all that much except for helping me stop repetitive sentences. I still use the same style since I was in middle school which is the normal style of writing an introduction on my topic, a story about the topic, and a conclusion. Blogs have made me think about my life as a child and why I am the man I am today. It has given me great memories about my childhood and my past experiences that were both good and bad. I am going to try to continue on improving my writing by blogging in the future but I know that it will be a huge challenge for me next year with everything I have to deal with. I probably won't write blogs next year because I will be so busy with the Sat's, sports, and school but I will try to remember writing in the years to come. If i do continue to write, my goals are to improve my writing fluency, getting out of writers block, and being able to write long stories without getting writers block. My blogs have made writing for me a lot more enjoyable because it makes me think back and reminisce on the past and all the great times I had when I did not have to worry about so much things. This has been basically a school thing for me but I will try to make this a non school related activity in the future. I might even make this a hobby of mine if I want to continue to write. This year has been amazing for me and I loved writing blogs every week. I hope that I can remember to write on my blog in the future so i can have fun and improve my writing. Blogs have been extremely helpful to my writing.

I did numbers 1, 2, and 8.