Our second seminar was about “What makes an engaging blog post.” As we have already written several blogs on different topics, purposes, and styles, this seminar was to share our experiences and our ideas about blog posts.
First off, I want to summarize what we talked about in the seminar. According to the sequence of the PPT, we discussed the importance of pictures, emojis, and content in blog posts. For the first two visual elements, we agreed that they made the blog more eye-catching and drew attention. However, I also reckon that the pictures could cause misunderstanding if not connected with the content. Following that, we discussed Dr. T’s question: “Should we put selfies or pictures of ourselves in the blog post?” This question was led by Anna’s answer to the previous question about “pictures could show proof that you were there (in traveling blogs).” As an answer to Dr. T’s question, I think Olivia’s answer stood out the most, as she talked about privacy problems, stating that on the internet, giving out your own pictures could cause some unexpected privacy problems, and as AI is “rising up,” people might use your pictures for bad purposes. As for emojis, we agreed that it could express some feelings and emotions that can’t be expressed through only text. For example, the laughing emoji: 
.However, some emojis may still cause different understandings, like this: 
. This smiling emoji is sometimes seen as a sarcastic emoji or a negative emotion; however, some people think it just means smiling. Also emojis like 
also have different understandings; some think it is laughing out toooooo hard, but some just think it’s crying.
To summarize that part, we had a small debate on “Visual content is more persuasive than textual content. ” I had a point that the visual content is the “attractiveness” and the textual content is the “persuasiveness.”
For the next class we discussed whether grammar was important in writing a blog post. Most people thought that it depends on the purpose and content, and some people also thought that grammar doesn’t really matter that much. I thought that it kinda matters because it might cause bad first impressions from the audience. The last discussion was how comments could help improve blog writing. We thought that comments that aren’t related aren’t important. But other comments could help by encouraging you, improving your mental stability, improving language accuracy that you might have not noticed, etc.
The leaders of this seminar were Eliza and Shell; they had very sufficient preparation, and the PPT had many examples of blogs that had their own unique styles. I liked how we had a specific sequence for “When we make a statement” so everyone had a chance to speak and express their ideas; it made the seminar less chaotic and showed the good management of the leaders.
For this seminar I got a 77; I lacked “high”points. But overall I think I did a good job expressing my ideas on the topic “How to write an engaging blog.” To improve, I think I could connect more of everyone’s ideas and maybe make rebuttals and connections or add-ons. For the next seminar, as a leader, I will also try to lead the whole class to a high grade and also show good management like the last two seminar leaders have done.