I love to write, and I love having people see what I’ve written- this coming school year will be my third year writing for the Hinsdale Central news magazine and my first year as a copy editor for the school yearbook. However, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always viewed people that blog frequently as wasting their life away. Most people today for the sake of attention, whether they realize it or not. Students write to draw positive attention from their teacher so that they can get a good grade. Authors of books write to draw attention to the deep detail of the world they created, or of some event that has happened in their lives. Newspaper columnists write to get the attention of the public focused on the events going on in the world. Sportswriters write to show everyone the phenomenal athletic ability being showcased each and every day. These types of writers that I have always been familiar with, the ones that I enjoy.

In my eyes, bloggers and their works were the complete opposite of these other writers were doing. Being a (somewhat) tech-savvy teen, I spend a lot of my time on the Internet, and have been exposed to a lot of blogs. After reading them, I came away with two general conclusions.

The first was that the blogs have no real purpose. Like I said, most writers today write for attention, but with the blogs I’ve seen, I can never tell what the true intention of the author is. The topics could be so random, and the posts themselves could range from extremely cheesy to extremely detailed, and it really made me questions the motivation of many of the authors. I would search something, say, One Direction, and I would come across blogs that supported them and that bashes them- I even found one blog that only pretended to focus on One Direction and instead wrote about the Illuminati conspiracy.
The second thing, which is directly connected to the first, was that the blogs had no sense of organization. Some writers are bound by certain requirements (for example, news stories are often bland because they are filled with fact, which isn’t always that exciting) but are still able to churn out a phenomenal piece of writing. I was sure that some bloggers were good writers, but since they had no restrictions on what they could write, it made their writing very hard to follow. That, combined with the lack of purpose, make, to me, a very bad thing to read.

Recently, my dad and I were talking about my plans for the future- a summer job next year, college, and my life beyond that. I mentioned how much I enjoyed writing in school, but that I only viewed it as a secondary option for my future, since many writing jobs are becoming obsolete. He thought that I should continue writing as much as I possibly could, even outside of school, to try and improve, in case something unexpected came along and I got the opportunity to write for a living. Of course, he suggested the one thing that I was opposed to- blogging.

I was blunt in my response: “Why?” And my dad gave me the best reasoning for it that I have ever heard, and probably will ever hear. It would allow me to keep my writing skills sharp, it would allow me to write about my thoughts, not just a school topic, and, if I showed it to the right people, could help me in the future. So now, here I am, writing a blog post. About blogging. Unoriginal, I know. But the very idea of a blog is still very strange for me, and I could think of nothing better to write about, considering that up until about a week ago, the thought of me writing a blog seemed absolutely repulsive. So in the coming weeks, I’m going to try to write, and write in a way so that I sound like a blogger while staying away from the things that bloggers do that bother me immensely. Whether or not it will work, I have no idea. But I hope it does; otherwise, well, I have just written a blog post about how stupid I think I am. And that’s definitely not a good way to start.