A Brief and Welcomed Reflection

When the idea of a blogging assignment was initially proposed in class, I was admittedly a little skeptical and not entirely sure how to react. In our generation, things like blogging and forums are practically second nature, but until fairly recently, the concept has never come into play for me as a student. In fact, my first concern was that I wouldn’t know how to differentiate between the casual way that I post entries on my own personal blog and my more professional, academic endeavors.
I feel like these apprehensions were most obvious in my first post. Reading back, I notice a lot of my own hesitations that most people probably wouldn’t pick up on other than me, but are still worth noting. I’m sure that can probably be said for everyone. I’m also reminded by my first post that I had a very difficult time coming up with what it was that I wanted to discuss. The assignment was vague and almost completely left up to our own creativity, so I guess the first week was a bit of an experiment for me. I normally wish more assignments would be more open-ended, but when actually faced with the prospect, I must have been out of practice. I made a few too many generalizations and the whole thing just sounded more like a synopsis than the analysis I was going for. Toward the end of the post, I thankfully notice a hint of the direction I should have been going with the questions I asked.
By the second post, and after reading through everyone else’s, I definitely made a lot of improvements. I think this was right around where I started to gain respect and enjoyment for the idea of blogging in class. My ideas were at least a lot less general, and at this point, I was more comfortable bringing in quotes from the reading and formulating my own arguments. I also think this was the point at which I started applying my blog ideas to our class discussions, which has been endlessly helpful.
Content-wise, I think my third post has been the most helpful for me to revisit. I really, really like the discussions we have had in class regarding the comparisons Shakespeare makes between characters in the history plays, and in my third post, I made my own with Richard and Bolingbroke. There are so few examples of purely good or evil characters in any of Shakespeare’s works, and the first history tetralogy is a real testimony to that. There are no perfect kings.
Shakespeare is never easy to study or appreciate, but when you go about it the right way, it can be incredibly rewarding. There’s a reason his works have withstood the test of time; in a literary sense, there’s really an endless amount of material you can get out of it, and in retrospect, apply back to it. I think that’s the greatest strength of the blogging assignment in that it complements how open to interpretation Shakespeare can be. It gives us the opportunity to muse on our own personal discoveries while simultaneously drawing inspiration from one another.