Post date: Dec 5, 2016 5:44:28 PM
Over the past semester I have been able to compose a site which reflects multiple parts of my personality. When someone first enters my site, they are there struck with the ruggedness of the wood background that flows through everything on the site. I try to then intersperse photos and titles that express more of my carefree personality. I created a page just depicting some of my favorite things (travel and food), one dedicated to my math endeavors, one with some of my goals, and even a resume page. However, most of my ideas and personality comes across in my journal posts. One of the things I am most proud of is the titles of the various posts. A title sets the tone for the entire piece and allows me to express more of my wit.
I did have some struggles with putting together the site. I am not used to using Google sites so there was a significant learning curve with putting it all together. However, I was able to eventually learn the various widgets and webnavigation and am proud of the finished product. Besides the technical side of the my site, I did not have too many problems with finding “my voice”. There is adequate representation of my humor in most of the journal posts along with my analytical side. My tone in most of the pieces is more of how I come across if you were to meet me in person. I enjoy not having to be very technical and precise as I do in math papers or very verbose and well-read as I need to come across in humanities papers. I get to actually be myself and get some of my own perspective out there instead of writing an argument I did not choose.
While I was happy to finally be able to create my own voice, one of the hardest parts of this experience was how much of myself do I include in my writing? There were a few instances where I overly enjoyed what I was writing about and felt like I could talk about a million things forever. Sometimes I did not enjoy the works we read or the questions I was prompted with but could not skip over them as I would have liked. That is one of the frustrating aspects that kept coming up for me. I knew there were some instances where there was not as much of my humor and personality in the post because I was trying to hide my dislike for the work behind a more analytical approach. I did this mainly because I felt like I had to be this “scholarly” person whose writing had to fit into more of how other people write than focusing on what I enjoy. In the future, I would like to trust my instinct more of what I want to write about instead of feeling pressure from other people’s posts to write like them.
I did find this experience beneficial and found out a lot about myself as a writer. I have never been able to express myself so informally for so prolonged a period of time. It was exciting to see what my writing shaped into from beginning to end. While I know I would not have chose done this website willingly, I am glad I had the opportunity to try something and learn a new way to represent myself in the world.