My Goals as a Writer.

After effectively blogging on a variety of different topics for the past several months, my goals as a writer has shifted slightly. My main focus as of now, is to go into more depth or detail in my work. I think the cause of this would have to be partly due to the requirement changes for the blog posts issued by Mr. Sutherland. Instead of the standard 300 word blogs that I used to be able to write to effortlessly and with ease, I have found out that the going the extra 200 words is an entirely new challenge. The struggle that I have with this is not about reaching the minimum word count, but rather it is focusing on making the content worthwhile to read. The more words that you post, the harder it gets to become less and less redundant in your points. I find it rather difficult to maintain the same level of depth and detail in my old 300 word blog posts as I type out the new 500 worded posts. So this new struggle that I've encountered has slightly changed my priorities on what I want to accomplish as a writer.
Now on another note, a big thing that has been occurring around school are students enrolling for classes for the 2010-2011 school year. My final decision ended up being: English P, HP Pre-Calculus, AP Environmental Science, Multimedia Art, United States History P, and AP Computer Science. To be honest, if all of my choices become approved, I'll become rather nervous. This will be my first time taking any sort of advanced placement classes, and I'm taking two at that. The pressure of schoolwork and grades would definitely be a constant thing on my mind next year. Also, if I would like to maintain as close to a 4.0 as possible, I would need to seriously change some habits of mine. The main point would just be procrastination. I have a huge tendency to work on things the last minute, or get distracted and so if I were to keep my grades up, this major bad habit would need some revising. Now I am fully aware of the fact that AP classes are meant to be taken because a student wants to learn more about a certain subject, or they want it for college credits, but truthfully I think the main reason why I took an AP class is because I wanted a challenge. The curriculum that is currently offered at Alameda High is rather odd. I find that there is a major difference in the regular classes compared with the advanced ones. I find that the advanced classes pushes a student, shaping critical values and skills such as work ethic and being prepared. Meanwhile, from experience and friends, the standard classes are just that, standard. They're not going to be a walk in the park, but the class itself won't push a student over the edge. You'll never find a student pulling an all-nigher due to a regular class, unless they needed to catch up on work, or something. All this is my opinion after all. Some people may feel very differently towards this subject, but from what I've heard from numerous amount of people, this is what I was able to deduce.

One really big thing that's going to bother me though, is that I forgot to turn in my schedule today to the office and so I'm worried about getting into my desired classes for net year. Do you think they'll allow for me to turn the slip in on the Monday we get back? Thoughts? Thanks.

A Revised Statement of Purpose -[WBP]

So I was asked to revise my statement of purpose after the 1st quarter ended.
This shall be my statement of purpose of this blog for the second quarter then I guess.

What impressions do you get of the writing you've done so far?
I feel that my writing has improved, however it still needs some work. I think the content that I write about is relevant to the topic, but sometimes I ramble a little too much, or I get repetitive. Although we have done redundancy practice in class I feel that it is harder to evaluate yourself compared to someone else's writing.

How did your original writing goals work out?
Well unlike many other students, I've actually already revised my statement of purpose. So my original plan didn't work out that well. My revised goals have worked out pretty well. I mean, I wanted to write about topics that I felt were important to me, so it's pretty hard to not accomplish that. The second part of my original statement was to improve my writing. Part of this goal was accomplished, but it still needs work.

How have your goals changed for the second quarter?
They pretty much have stayed the same. For the most part, I'm still going to be blogging about topics that I feel are important. As for my writing, I think I should just continue on and see where it leads me. Maybe if I get enough practice at this thing, it'll actually improve. If not, then maybe I'll decide to actually take my writing improvement goal more seriously.

A new change that is actually happening on this blog is that I've actually decided that I might post some random posts in here that are unrelated to the weekly blog post. And so, I've labeled all my past posts with the tag [WBP] for Mr. Sutherland, and others that are only interested in reading about that. The one's without that label can be considered just off-topic posts.

A Change of Course -[WBP]

So, I've had a week to think about this since my last blog post. My statement of purpose. In class Mr. Sutherland mentioned that the class should blog about something that they want to talk about. Not just some random thing because he required a topic. During the time when the class was writing the rough draft to the purpose of their blogs, I felt pretty uninspired. Looking around seeing everybody write I felt pressured to start as well. So on the spot, I made up something. Culture. Fact is, I'm not that fascinated by culture. I mean I find it interesting, but after a week of thought, I don't want to write about this every week. I've read around on some of my peer's blogs and they seem pretty inspired by what they want to write about. Also it's pretty personal. So, I want to make my blog personal as well. It is my blog after all.

I've decided that I want to write about me. This may be a pretty trendy topic to write about amongst the vast number of students blogging, but this topic is different. This topic has variety. Each blog is about the author. A little piece of the person goes into writing about the blog. So I'm going to be writing about things that matter to me as they happen. Now, it's not going to be 3 posts a day or anything, it's basically a summary of my week.

And this won't just be some blog about how "I went to school today. It was boring. I had a test." No. There's no point in blogging about that. I'm going to use this blog to voice my opinions on a variety a subjects. I hope this goes well because when I usually blog, I don't have much of an audience. Well this time, at least I have some people that I know are reading often instead of those lurkers that never say anything. I hope this blog won't bore you. (much...)

Statement of Purpose. -[WBP]

For my blog, I would like to write about foreign culture. I want to learn about other countries' lifestyle. The food, clothing, music, art, etc. I'm interested in traveling to different places such as Asian and Europe. I have already visited China 3 times and from my experience, it was simply amazing.


I was still at a pretty young age the last time I've been there, but I had no idea the culture would be so different compared to ours. Ever since then, I've been fascinated by other cultures. Their lifestyles are so unique. I believe we could incorporate some of these things into our own lives to benefit us. Some other things may go on this blog as time progresses.



Another purpose for this blog is that I want to improve my writing by expanding my vocabulary as well as work on the way my paragraphs flow, such as transitions and organizing sentences. Wehn I usually write, I just write and write. I rarely ever think of 'Oh, how am I going to transition from this topic to the next?' This often makes my writing appear choppy and not flow. By expanding my vocabulary I can make my writing go in depth and make it more detailed. I can expand my vocabulary by reading more to get a better understanding of where to place words in a sentence to help it flow better. Reading can also help me on transition with paragraphs and maybe I will get some inspiration too. The reason why I want to improve on my writing is to help me in school as well as the SATs. Writing is an essential aspect of school and if I improve on that I belive my grades will also improve.