7 Keywords: Blogging, Blog, Assignment, Writing, Framework, Tags, Links

"I used a blog to create a time frame for writing by setting myself the goal of producing three poems a week. This sounds a very clinical approach to a creative process but the blog represents a space to ‘publish’ (although in fact I had the Blogger settings such that the blog stays out of the public domain). It does not take long to build up a body of work that seems somewhat different from a list of Word documents in a folder. I then edited and submitted a selection as part of my portfolio."

"I used Blogger for a 5000 word essay about Kafka’s ‘The Castle’. I saved about 20 ‘blank’ entries so that I could work between those knowing that when I edited they would stay in the same order (it is essential to create this initial set of entries, otherwise Blogger’s chronology plays havoc with structure of argument!). This is a version of the ‘paragraph headings’ strategy for essay planning, and I used relevant quotations to create the titles for each entry."

"The labels gadget can be used to tag the main themes; this is a useful way of discovering if you are heading off on a tangent (or disguise the tangent by adding more on the same theme). The labels list shows that there were 6 themes and by the time I had written the first set of draft entries that seemed about right."

I have very little sense of a start or end of a subject and therefore quickly end up with too many connections and too much information for the intended purpose. Blogger offers a way of writing a 5000 word essay that has a few more layers to it. The printed out blog made perfect sense as an essay, but it was a far better ‘read’ if viewed as the blog (the link to which I also submitted) because I was able to link out to a range of references."