At first glance, academic writing and blog posts have extraordinarily little in common. The styles and overall function tend to differ drastically, and the style of the blog posts is more informal than a University paper. Yet, if you look closer, you will see more similarities. How does blogging expand students’ academic writing?
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You become a more self-aware writer
Many young writers are not aware of their voice and their patterns within their writing. They are uninterested and just trying to get through their writing assignments completely unaware of what they are creating. Most students find writing to be pointless and not a useful subject to study. However, when a student begins writing blogs, this is changed gradually over time. They begin to see the value in learning how to write well and communicate through the medium of writing.
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The benefit of a school blogging project
A good way to help get students in school engaged in writing is to create an in-class blogging project. This requires a lot more planning on the teacher’s part, but it has many benefits for the students and their writing. The students can choose the purpose of the blog, submit articles, engage with their audience all while having the supervision of the teacher, who acts as more of a guide to the whole process.
One benefit to this is it teaches students how to plan and structure their writing. Having the drafts written down on paper and group edited by their peers before typing and publishing ensures good copy. Everything that goes on the blog should keep to the overall topic and blog style. Students learn to be more deliberate in their writing.
Another benefit is that students get hands-on communicating with their audience via comments. They are being supervised on social media, learning how to respond to not only fans but negative criticism and people who challenge their worldviews. Due to these exchanges, the students developed a broader and stronger sense of community. Learning how to respond, in written communication, in a timely and polite fashion is a necessary skill for the workplace.
The biggest benefit of blogging is that students become more critically aware of their writing. They are engaging with other students and the teacher on how to write well. They put more time and effort into what they are producing because it is in public view where their classmates, friends, and family can read what they are writing. Students have meaningful conversations about writing techniques, structure, and mechanics in a way that they did not use to do. They immerse themselves in this topic and become better writers.
All writing practice is good practice
Academic papers require strict attention to diction, syntax, and tone of the piece being written, not to mention heavy proofreading and editing. They also must be plagiarism free. The strictness required in academic writing can become monotonous and overwhelming to an unpractised student. Blog posts, while they are no different in the structure department, tend to be more pleasurable to write. Bloggers must still look for different words and phrases and carefully edit their work before posting it online, however, the tone and structure are more personal and allow for more creativity.
Blogging provides a space to share personal experiences and engage with readers. The attention students receive for a blog post increases their engagement with writing overall. They feel happy and like their ideas matter. This excitement and positivity can help students write their academic papers with more enthusiasm and creativity.
Your Research Skills Improve
A blog is not just a collection of the author’s experiences. They require vast amounts of research on your chosen niche. Writing engaging blog content requires a few hours of article research, scanning online articles, other blog posts, even the news stories. The more you write blog posts, the faster your researching and analysing skills become. This, in turn, increases the speed at which you write original content. This increase in research capabilities assists with writing academic papers.
Finding reputable sources faster means they can spend less time researching their topic and more time writing the actual paper, which lends itself to a better-quality writing assignment overall. The speed at which a student can scan and discern the usefulness of a source is also vastly improved with blogging. It decreases the time spent reading over sources and increases the efficiency at which a paper is written. Most students, especially university students have multiple research papers due around the same time, making writing well and efficiently of utmost importance.
Blogging can help students feel more engaged and at peace with the academic writing process. The skills they learn through blogging they can apply to their academic papers, making them engaging and of better quality.
