Blogging Connections

This blogging assignment has helped me in so many ways. I have found many different and might I add interesting connections through the literature we have read in class and through the way we are to write about them. Also, by just blogging about what you have read allows you to mediate on the literature, rather than just read it once or twice and be done with it. In our, Guide to Blogging Criteria, it has many different prompts that we can use to write of off and by doing so, we engage in the text further than we would have that that we could. For example the first prompt on the list is to give an interpretation of the work and use quotes from the text to make your interpretation plausible. This not only teaches us how to support the things we say, but it also makes us search for a better answer rather than just the one that we might make up in our head. Searching the text for details to support our theories or arguments is an excellent way to engage in literature, because you are focusing on the voice of the text more than the voice of yourself. Of course, your voice needs to be heard, but your credibility skyrockets when you are able to back up what you are saying on a particular topic with an exact quote from the literature.

A connection that I can see from the instructions of the blogging project and the activities that we have done in class is that they all involve a new way of engaging literature. For example, one of the prompts asks us to translate the work we have read into a painting, short story, or a poem and we actually did this in class. Well, we have not translated any literature into a short story or a poem, but we have painting in class to help us engage with the Book of Joel. I painted a huge red moon because of when in the text it said that the moon dripped red with blood. I then painted around it beautiful colors that intertwined each other to give it an abstract feel, which was supposed to reveal to be a sunset. I did this because despite all the horrible and sad things the Book of Joel talks about, there is a section in the book were it talks about restoration and Christ saving the ones that believe in Him, or at least that is what I got from a section of the text. I abstractly drew the sunset around the moon because that part of the book reminded me of Christ and for some reason whenever I think of Christ I think of the sky and the beauty it holds and how it reflects the beauty of Christ. Painting is an excellent way to view literature in a whole new light, one in which I truly enjoyed.

Obviously, we have read a lot of depressing things in the class, but surprisingly, I have been able to find more meanings behind the works that we have read in class because of the activities and blogging that we have done. Instead of having a judgement based off of what the text means by simply just reading it once or twice, I have been able to find more meanings behind the text. By blogging, it has helped me either to focus on a particular subject or point in the text where I am able to dissect that and that alone and perhaps even relate it to my own life. I think that by relating it to my own experiences has helped me the most because I am able to bring past emotions and feelings back up when I re-read a particular text. By doing this, I feel that I connect with the author or the characters in the literature when I do this, which has absolutely changed how I read in a very good way.

Blogging, like I have said earlier, allows us to extend the reading process by engaging in the text in new and exciting ways. It allows you not only to make a connection with the text and yourself, but also the text and other texts. By doing this, we grow as readers because we are able to bring in outside sources to the text we read. All in all, we, as readers, are expanding our mind to interpret things in new ways, which will help us in the future when we read other literature. I have been able to make this work for me; however, it was not very hard to adapt to this form of engaging in literature. Whenever I read the Bible, I usually always have my highlighter, pen and journal with me, so I can highlight things that stand out to me, and then go back and record my thoughts about what it meant to me. By doing this, I am able to go back to those thoughts when I re-read the same passage of scripture, but usually what I find is that I find new things that stand out to me and I interpret in new and living ways. I find that no matter what you are reading it is always important that you take something out of it, as long as it is wholesome for your mind and soul.