When I first started the weekly blogging requirement, five posts sounded like a lot.
It still does sometimes.
The difficult part is not always writing four sentences or filling a page. For me, the harder part is finding something worth saying five different times without turning every post into another school assignment.
I have noticed one change, though.
Blogging makes me stop and look at things that I would normally finish and immediately move past.
This week, for example, I worked on interviews, a news article, ledes and headlines. Normally I might finish those tasks, upload the files and move on to whatever is next. A blog post makes me ask a different question: what did I actually notice while doing this?
Sometimes the answer is not impressive.
When I worked on headlines, I noticed that a sentence with six or seven words could take more time than a full paragraph. I would change one word, read it again, remove another word, then realize the first version was clearer. I did not expect headline writing to feel like that.
Blogging gives those small observations somewhere to go.
It has also made me more aware of audience. My COMM 310 assignments are written for a professor and graded with a rubric. My blog is public. Someone can arrive on pemosso.site without knowing anything about the assignment behind the post.
That changes how I write.
I cannot begin every article with “For this week’s assignment…” and expect an outside reader to care.
I still have to work on that. Sometimes I can feel the student voice coming back when I write. It becomes too organized. Every paragraph behaves too well.
But frequent writing is making that easier to notice.
Maybe that is the biggest impact so far. I am not only writing more.
I am starting to hear when the writing does not sound like me.
