Farwell RWS

One of my all time favorite bloggers, Coco J. Ginger, once said “I don’t want to go viral, I want to set hearts on fire.” This defines my blog life, and yes I surely do have a blog life. For me, blogging has always been a place to release my mind; it’s a place for me to express my strife, my successes, and my pains – not even necessarily for anyone to read, but for me to be able to look back on (looking back on life is something I do often). My blogs are also a home for me to express my “writer’s voice,” as my high school English teachers would call it. In all ways that a blog can be comforting, it is to me, so when I was told to create a blog for my RWS 100 class, I was honestly really excited. I didn’t take much time to personalize it in the beginning, but I added a few things to make this blog feel more like home to me. In this blog post about my blog, I will explain how I used the layout styles of color and images to persuade my audience as well as explain a particularly popular post and the rhetorical strategies I used for it.

            Upon choosing a theme for my blog, I wanted it to really represent me considering the fact that I was in a class full of people I did not know; I wanted to make it so that it would speak for me. Color is a crucial detail for me and has been since I studied the psychology of color. A pale aquamarine is the color I chose for my background because it evokes the enhancing of creativity and inspiration along with calming and balancing the mind and emotions. An emerald green is used for my quote at the top of the page that states, “It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way,” a quote by Ernest Hemingway and a quote I really love – it represents my view on writing and it fits in with the fact that the blog is for a writing class. I chose an emerald green for the quote because that color signifies inspiration and an abundance in emotional well being and creativity, fitting because I consider this quote to be very inspiring as it pushes me to believe that writing is a skill that is learned, therefore pushing me to study really hard in writing classes, but it also tells me that when learned and used right, people will think you’re born with it. The last apparent color on the blog is a lime green used for the post titles and it embodies playfulness, youthfulness, and naivety, all of which I feel are a part of my personality and represent me well. Color is a tool of persuasion because of its mental impact on the human brain. Color changes how we feel when we look at objects, for example being in a red room is much different vibe than being in an earthy green room. Vibe is what I wanted color to do for my blog, I wanted my blog to come off as a calming, trusting, and not too bold but not too subtle vibe that invites viewers to look and make them feel tranquil when reading.

In addition to color playing a large role to the persuasion of my layout, I also added interactive fish that viewers can feed at the top of my blog. I have these fish in my personal blog as well and to me they represent my hunger for the world. These fish swim around all day waiting to be fed and when they are fed (by clicking on the pond) they frantically swim towards the food and no matter how much “food” they are given, they never stop eating. That’s how I view my consumption of the world and it’s teachings; I will never stop learning. Where to place the fish on my blog is also symbolical. Since birds prey on fish, I thought that positioning the fish underneath the birds would symbolize how vulnerable I still am from the dangers of the world. Another image on the blog is at the way bottom. It is a picture of my face from an amateur photoshoot years ago with the quote, “a little lost, a little found.” My face defines this quote as I stare both blankly and passionately at the camera and that exact juxtaposition defines me. I am neither lost nor found, but I am looking. Adding a picture of myself helps create credibility in my blog. It’s me opening up to the world my identity, something many bloggers conceal. It’s a picture that is mysterious but still real and that’s exactly how I want my blogger persona to be portrayed. It’s my face, my blog, my voice, and my life – and that is what I want viewers to see both in my RWS blog and my personal blog.

A post that I am particularly proud of in my RWS blog is my “Superwoman” post. The assignment was to find a picture, explore the rhetorical strategies used in it, and explain how those strategies helped convey the message of the image. In my explanation, I used very strong diction to make bold conclusions, pathos to help the reader feel what I felt when I saw this image and I also applied identification to increase my connection with the audience of freshmen’s who also find sexual temptation to be very everywhere in college. I left my personal opinion at the end to close the post because I wanted it be strictly business before I went into how it personally affected me, employing the cause and effect strategy. I found this to be very effective because it got the most comments on out of all of my blog posts. Death by aids is a subject that is sensitive and hard to accept, but I found that through strong uses of rhetoric, death by aids could be portrayed in a way that will push people to have a realization of how important protecting oneself is – that was my goal when I was writing this post and I feel successful through the comments that were left. A student commented that, “this ad is incredibly eye opening to me especially at this point in life,” making me feel as though my identification strategy worked well. Making my writing relatable and interesting to the reader is something I’ve always strived for in all of my works.

Having a blog in this class has been a great way to create a connection amongst all the students and to feel personally connected to the assignments. We can look at each other’s blogs and see personality emulating from it, along with reading their opinions on certain topics we were assigned to talk about. I think this was a great way to communicate to each other in class and get to know each other a little bit more. My personal blog has been one that I’ve been maintaining since 2011 and I will continue to post on it as life continues to send me on journeys. I want to thank Professor Brooks for giving us the opportunity to express ourselves in a judgement-free place, our blogs.

P.S. feel to check out my personal blog anytime! farewell RWS classmates!