Blogs for Writing and Rhetoric Courses

Blogs are a common type of assignment in the college classroom, and many Writing and Rhetoric courses will require students to create a blog and compose blog posts.

Blogging has several advantages over other media in a writing class. First, it can expose to professional writing. Many people use blogs to market themselves, including biographic information and a portfolio of work available to the public. In addition, many businesses use blogs to keep customers up to date on emerging products and services. Blogs are interactive. They feature comment sections that allow for some conversation, something that traditional essays aren’t as good at. Blogs also feature design elements that can help people learn about electronic texts. Color schemes, photo layouts, and the placement of text are all important considerations for blog writing.

Three things students should know about blogs

  1. Blogs are a medium of writing that can come in many different genres
  2. Blogs have several features that distinguish them from other types of websites
  3. Blogs are easy to create and useful tools for writing classes

1. Blogs are a medium that can come in many genres

This resource is designed to give students an overview of the medium of blogs, and the genre of blog posts. To make sure we’re all on the same page on the terminology, let’s start with what the difference is between a medium and a genre.

Genre and medium are closely related, although a bit different. Genre is the form of your writing (a business letter, memo, report). A medium is the way in which a piece of writing is delivered (email versus a mailed paper copy, for example). 
Genre and Medium, Purdue OWL

We can look at movies as an example of the relationship between medium and genre. Films are a medium because what all films have in common is how content is delivered, as a motion picture. Films are one type of media that can be used to tell a story.

And, within the medium of films, many different genres exist. Action movies, comedies, dramas, mysteries, romance movies – all different genres within the film medium. Genre is a French word, which can be translated as kind, type, or sort. A movie’s genre can be understood as the kind of movie it is. 

Similarly, blogs are a medium. Like a film, a blog is a platform used to deliver content. Just as films come in hundreds of different genres, so can blogs. Are blogs a diary on the internet? Are blogs a place for objective news reporting? Are blogs communities where people write about a shared fandom? Are blogs how a tech company announces product updates? Blogs can do all of these things and much more. As a medium, a blog can cover many different genres of “blogging.”

2. Blogs have distinctive features

Blogs typically feature shorter pieces of writing, and may often be accompanied by pictures, sound, video, or other media. Blogs (as with most digital media) are constantly changing, and styles and features may change with new trends or new technology.

So, what makes a blog, a blog then, rather than just a website? Here’s a good overview from the YouTube channel WPMU DEV. 

WPMU DEV, “What is a Blog?”

Some distinctive features of blogs:

  • Sense of personal ownership
  • Frequently updated with a series of posts
  • Allow for comments from readers

Sense of Personal Ownership

Importantly, a blogger has a sense of personal ownership of their blogs. A person’s blog is their own personal space, what danah boyd calls “a digital representation of themselves.” Blog posts can cover virtually any topic, depending on the focus of the blog and the interest of the blogger and their audience. A food blog, for example, will include frequent updates with recipes, reviews, or other food-related content.

Frequently Updated with a Series of Posts

Another defining feature of blogs is that they are frequently updated. Each update is called a blog post. Blog posts are often fairly short and may include embedded photo, video, or audio content.

Conventionally, newer updates will always appear near the top of the blog, for a reading experience in reverse chronological order. As a result, regular readers will always see the newly updated content first. Too, blogs generally have a space for reader interaction, through comments after each post.

3. Creating a Blog

If you want to start a blog, or need to for your class, every FIU student has access to FIU-affiliated web space through WordPress at myweb.fiu.edu where you can set up a blog using your FIU login information. You can also create blogs through other website services like Wix or Weebly, or on blogging services like Tumblr or Blogger. In any platform, customizing the layout, colors, headers are all essential to personalizing the blog and making it yours.

In introductory classes, students may be asked to mimic the style of blogs in Canvas discussion boards. If we think of a discussion board as a collaboratively-written blog by all students in a particular class, this opens up opportunities within the writing classroom to practice blogging conventions in an environment internal to the class. Students are able to practice the rhetorical moves of blogging without having to all register for some external website and open up writing to the whole internet.

Canvas discussion boards, in other words, can be a place to do blogging with training wheels. These discussion boards do share several conventions with blogs. As each post is added, it is like a new update from a different blogger within our platform. Students have an opportunity to respond to each other and interact with each other’s content, just as blogs do.

But true blogs do have a style of personal ownership that Canvas can’t quite match! Students can learn a lot about online writing by creating their own online blogs. You can explore the blogs category in the Digital Writing Gallery for examples of blogs created by FIU students in their Writing and Rhetoric classes.

Finally, here are some resources for creating your own blog: