The perfect combination

        I think blog writing holds considerable merit because it helps writers to develop a voice -- and to focus on getting a point across clearly. Academic papers put so much emphasis on the actual language used that the actual message is often jumbled and loses coherence. With a blog post, we can forget about strict grammar rules and syntax and diction and so on and just write. This allows for us to focus all of our attention on what we are trying to say -- and that is always the overall purpose of writing something -- to get a point across. I think academic papers have an importance of their own, as people need to know how to form sentences and paragraphs into a cohesive argument. Therefore, I think that writing blogposts in conjunction with more formal papers is the best way to develop a strong writing voice. I enjoyed the mixture that we did in this class, and I felt that it was very well balanced. Blogs also allow for much shorter assignments, which opens up room to work on a  much larger variety of topics and techniques. I think that this is one of the things that is great about blogs -- the variety of things that you can work on. With academic papers, you spend days or even weeks focusing on one certain technique, where as with blogs you could work on 3 or 4 in just a couple of days. But on the other hand, term papers allow you to work harder on perfecting something specific. Once again, this shows that an optimal approach for develop writing technique and voice is a combination of the two.

Jewish cat!