When I first started this five-week final project, I had a hard time coming up with my project proposal because I wanted to choose a topic that I would have a lot to write about. I settled on the idea of writing a blog about different aspects of healthy lifestyles, like workout tips, eating tips, healthy recipes and posts about body image. I thought that having a variety of subtopics to post about would help my blog stay interesting to readers. When I first started writing these blogs, I wrote them with ease, as the topics that I included in my proposal allowed me more freedom and movement in what I wanted to post about within each of the aspects that I have previously listed. Here is a quote from my first body-image post that told my readers what I wanted to get out of this blog:
With this blog I really want to try and educate myself on how to love everything about myself (but not in a narcissistic way). I think that it’s crucial that people become educated in their nutritional health, physical health and their mental health.
There are a few statements from my project proposal that I would like to focus on. In my the executive description of my proposal I said:
I am using a WordPress blog to educate people on how to live a healthier life by informing them on healthy eating tips and recipes, workout tips and body-image tips. Learning easy ways to have a healthier life is important because will improve one’s life as a whole and I think that a blog will help me set the tone and personalize my posts and easily facilitate the information.
I believe that I have followed the executive description fully, as I have produced blog posts that have educated my readers on ways to better their workouts, eating, and perception of themselves. I have also written blogs about have incorporated all of the tips that I listed in the proposal’s description. Also, I said that I wanted to create a personalized tone in my blogs to facilitate the information and I believe I have successfully created a personal tone within all my posts. Here’s an example of one blog post that I believe shows my personality well. I think that my personal tone helped readers connect with me and want to follow me. This is a part of the post that I think exemplifies my personality best:
Having access to food ranging from pizza to burgers to fries seemed like a dream come true, but I found out that after eating these kinds of meals on the daily that I was breaking out and my body felt sluggish. I barely ate fruit and veggies (sorry, Mom) and ate loads of carbs and sugar.
Throughout this project I have gained 14 new followers, which makes me believe that my blog posts have had a positive reaction from my readers.
Although there were things that I followed through fully in my project proposal, there were a few things that I changed as I wrote blog posts. One of these changes is that I said that I was only going to use SkinnyTaste, Self, and Health as my online sites that I would use to find articles for my blog posts. When I looked back at my blog posts I noticed that I used more than these three sites in order to write my blogs from the very first week, though I only used a larger variety of websites to find articles because I couldn’t find much information just on these sites that went very in-depth on the things I wanted to write about. In addition to the sites listed above, I also used sites like Teen Vogue, WebMD, Student Health 101 and the Huffington Post.
After I submitted the project proposal, my professor brought up a great idea of possibly writing blog posts targeting college students. I incorporated his idea of a specific target audience into the first weeks of my blogging project, although as my blogging progressed I opened up my target audience to individuals who want to live a healthier lifestyle rather than just focusing on college students. Here is one of my blog posts where I targeting college students as my audience and here is one of my blog posts where I opened up the target audience and made it more general. Though as a whole, my blog didn’t target a specific audience.
Over these five weeks, I have learned more about a healthy lifestyle than I thought that I would, mostly because a lot of the information and tips that I wrote about had been new information to me that I didn’t know before I had done research on the different aspects. An example of this can be seen in this blog post. I thought that it was interesting that I found more new information about body image during the last week of blogging rather than during the first week of this project. I also learned a lot more information when I was researching for this blog post. I have never been very knowledgeable about what I should eat before and after working out before I wrote that post and I liked that I was able to summarize the information into a simpler form for my readers.
I believe that since I picked “Healthy Lifestyle” as my blog topic that readers were interested in reading my work because they were on a mission to be healthy, too. I always tried to write encouraging things for the readers like I was actually talking to them and I tried to write blog posts that would help them with their healthy lifestyle. I only had one interaction with a reader and that was to say that they were going to do an eating journal to keep track of their food intake after reading one of my eating tip blog posts.
Overall, when I first started blogging I didn’t dig as deep in my topics and link as much as I should have. Compared to my very first blog post, I think that my last blog post for this project had more information and hypertext than previous blogs. My blogs have gotten stronger throughout these five weeks and the sites that I have linked to have become stronger in terms of giving the readers additional information that wasn’t fully talked about in my writing. This blog post exemplifies this change because I incorporated a Buzzfeed video and research articles, like this one, into my blogs, rather than articles from popular magazines that didn’t have the same certification.
For the most part, writing blogs for this project came easy to me until the last two weeks. I was struggling with finding new information about eating tips and body-image tips. It was really frustrating at the end of each of those weeks to try and write blog posts about body-image because a lot of the articles that I came across in my research repeated the same things. Examples of the lack of new information can be seen in this blog post in relation with this blog post. Other than running into repeated information, I didn’t struggle with anything else, other than picking healthy recipes that I ended up not liking, like this one.
This project meant a lot to me. Not only did it educate me on the different aspects of creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but it also really challenged me as a writer. Instead of not writing blog posts because I didn’t have time or couldn’t find any interesting information, I still put out blogs because I wanted to follow the project proposal contract that I picked for my grade. I followed my contract fully to earn the grade I picked.
My contract will be for 150 pts (B). I will post 3-4 times a week. My weekly reflections will be 500-1000 words and will be posted every Monday. All of my other posts will be 500-750 words and posted throughout the week before the weekly reflection. My posts, other than the weekly reflections, will be focused on healthy eating tips, recipes, workout tips, and body-image tips and will include other links when necessary.
Overall, this project showed me that not all writing and academic studying comes easy, but that my writing probably wouldn’t have been as meaningful and informational without struggling throughout parts of it. I do believe that blogging is becoming a big part of literacy because the posts become instantly available to readers in a second once I press “Publish”. I think that since technology and the Internet is so prominent in a majority of people’s everyday lives that there is more traffic and readers to something posted online, like this blog, rather than a physical copy of a book that people have to wait to be released because people nowadays want things instantaneously. Writing and literacy is evolving and blogging and other web-writing is becoming more prominent.
Kendra's Blog 