First Blog Post

This is the first blog post I have ever written.

I teach writing. For a living. I teach students to write about literature. I teach them to write about writing. I teach them to write about what other writing teachers have written about writing. I tell my students in general terms how technology (especially blogs (!)) will change their writing and the writing of their students in the future. And yet here I am, having never dabbled in the genre myself. I have, however, read quite a few blogs--some of these I have kept up with for the last couple of years.

I think I had a prejudice against blogs--something about the way they meld public and private lives and thoughts just struck me as strange and maybe even a little exhibitionistic. Are they journals? (I don't really think so, although on the surface they seem like diaries dressed up a bit and splashed across the internet.) And why do these people have such faith that what they think--about the war, about some book they read, about how cute their new puppy is--is something anyone would care about? Their contents usually read like extremely carefully constructed prose. Prose with a theme--posts generally have a point--a witty observation or critique of society or politics.

This is much more difficult than I thought. I have no theme today, and I do not feel like artificially inventing one. However, I will say this--this blog is going to explore the elements of my life that I have immersed myself in for the last nine years--rhetoric, feminism, technology, composition, and pedagogy.