Seminar reflection 2

The topic of the second seminar was What Did You Learn About What Makes a Good Blog Post. There were two different parts in the seminar, the first part was just normal seminar questions’ discussions, and the second part was commenting on a specific blog post of someone travelling to a place, giving feedback and reasons of whether it was an appealing blog post or not. We discussed on questions like “How do you define an easily identifiable writing style that makes your posts feel unique?”, but we spent most of our time discussing the question “Between true self-expression and the contents based on the audience’s preferences, which can make the blog posts more attractive”, this was an extremely exciting debate, it occurred for nearly two lessons, one student was too excited he even stood up with his notes for several minutes and made a great speech for his own standpoint. Some even debated over how unique writing style was formed, one thought that there’s only one unique “self”, so that your writing style is always unique if you don’t constantly copy and mimic the others, one thought that between two different individuals they may also share a lot of overlapping part to make their writing style and language use very similar. Even though the commenting part was short, I learned that pictures with concise language or descriptions were very important to make a blog post more attractive. Overall, I learned that true self-expression plays an important role in making your blog posts more unique; however, they should also make connections with the audience (like adding good pictures, a fun topic, interesting point of view or language use) to make the blog posts more appealing.  

My score: A4. I prepared this time and listened carefully, but I’m not initiative enough. I remembered that I only initiated 3 times. When I raised my hand and after the leaders chose several people with several turns of add-ons and discussions, they were evolving around a topic that was completely irrelevant to my initial idea. I’m used to the process of getting an idea before I speak in the seminar since we were all taking turn however the discussion is in a flow so that I need to change my idea constantly to catch up, and I think this is one of the most fundamental problems that obstructed me from getting a higher score in any seminar because I cannot make connections with other people’s points and change my ideas within a short period of time. For this I think I need to stop preparing fixed ideas in my mind and listen to others and make more notes to make connections with my initial ideas so that I’m not stuck. 

About the leader’s way of managing the seminar, there was some valuable new ideas: first they chose the less initiative students (that usually get lower scores) to speak first, right after the seminar began. And they also gave us real blog posts to let us make comments on them. This perspective not only made the seminar discussion more interesting, but they could also reach the effect of concretizing abstract concepts and ideas of “appealing and attractive blog posts”, thereby allowing them to be presented more directly, we were provided with a much clearer standard for precisely by just analyzing a real example with everyone else altogether on what makes an blog posts truly engaging. However, because of the great debate between our classmates and how the leaders were giving out more and more time for the debate unfortunately we didn’t have much time left for this commenting part.  

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