BLOGGING +++

I must confess blogging has improved me a lot in terms of my writing skills. Having to come up with topics to write about has been interesting and quite challenging. I can now say that I respect bloggers more now that I blog quite often. It’s a skill I think everyone should have. At the beginning of this session, I found it quite challenging to write lengthy write-ups as I am used to my daily work emails where I have to be precise in my writing.

Some of the ways I have improved my writing skills is by going back to basics. I had to review some of my basis like punctuation, grammar, and figures of speech. Of course, I remember many of these concepts however I was not making a conscious effort to use them daily in my writing as I felt the whole point of writing was to communicate to your audience or the recipient of your email. Blogging has made me become conscious of these mistakes, particularly in punctuation. Chatting on social media platforms has caused more harm than good in my writing. When chatting on social media most particularly on WhatsApp, I tend to write in abbreviations with no regard for punctuation whatsoever. Lately, regardless of who I am chatting with, I write words in full. I carried out a little research on why people tend to text or chat in abbreviations and it was a result of the limited number of words expected to be used in a text message in the earlier models of mobile phones.

Another way I have improved my blogging skill is by reading. I like to read inspirational books. I now pay attention to what other writers do, how they write and deduce why they write the way they do. This way, I try to improve my writing. I also take note of new words I am not familiar with so as to improve my vocabulary bank. During the course of blogging weekly, I have been getting feedback from some of my colleagues. Some leave a comment in the comment section of the blog page, while some give me feedback through other channels. This also motivated me to start reading some of my colleague’s blog posts and I must say I have a lot of amazing writers as colleagues. I have also improved my writing by reading the blogs of some of my colleagues who I think are amazing writers.

Blogging comes with its challenges, however, the merits outweigh its demerits.