The Fruits of Blogging

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Pablo Picasso

I have just passed the milestone of posting to this blog 300 days in a row. Writing a blog has been so personally gratifying to me, mostly because of the community of friendship and support I feel with fellow bloggers on this journey.

So I looked around for studies about blogs and found some interesting conclusions that come from a paper published by the Canadian Center of Science Education. The paper entitled The Effectiveness of Using Online Blogging for Students’ Individual and Group Writing studied a students who were learning English as a Foreign Language. Studying their writing styles before and after a 14-week period of blogging, here are some of the key take-aways that caught my eye:

• Not only do learners better improve their writing skills through blogging practices, they can also build their self-confidence as writers and attract a wider audience.
• Blogging practices play an active role in encouraging learners to experiment, take risks and foster their awareness to be private and public writers.
• Blogging helped both individual learners and groups come up with more engaging ideas.
• As practice time progressed, learners using blogging tried to transform their writings when they acknowledged their audience and expected or anticipated a level of interaction in the form comments, criticism or support.
• Blogging became a space where they could improve their writing, and where numerous readers and bloggers were also arbiters in matters of language usage and mechanics, cohesion, coherence, idea generation, debate, discussion, critical thinking and so on.

I couldn’t find a study that verified the positive benefits of interacting with an interesting and interested group of people with whom one would have never met otherwise and who comment in ways that inspire and delight. But I don’t need a study to affirm that – because I live it every day! Thank you my blogging friends!

(featured photo from Pexels)

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