Why blog?

There are many reasons why blogging is a major component of ES2007S, Professional Communication: Principles and Practice, the course I teach at the National University of Singapore. Key course objectives include facilitating discussions of communication principles, encouraging students to practice various communication strategies, and promoting opportunities for them to develop their written communication skills. In that context, the logic of blogging falls neatly into place.

One reason for using blogging is that each student's blog becomes her platform for summarizing, analyzing and synthesizing ideas, presenting opinions and even story-telling on a number of communication topics. Because responding to any given post assignment can be done independently, where and when the student chooses, she also has time to mull over the topic and address it without the sort of pressures that might exist in class. At the same time, because the post will, in turn, be read and responded to by classmates and by me, the student writer needs to be aware of the demands of her authentic audience. When she reads that audience's comments, she needs to take their perspectives into consideration, at which point she can either respond to those accordingly in follow up comments or ignore them (perhaps at her own peril).

Another reason blogging makes sense for the course is that it's a chance for the student to consider and reconsider her means of written expression. Communication, especially of the professional sort, is not just about assembling information, thinking ideas through and developing opinions. It's as much or more so about expressing the information, ideas and opinions in a manner that demonstrates clarity, concreteness, conciseness and yet completeness, coherence, courtesy and grammatical correctness. (I'd add to these well known 7Cs of writing what I call the "mother" of them all: creativity). In the various course blog posts, the student can and usually will take these criteria into consideration. Not doing so might bring on the critical wrath of the teacher and/or any number of highly competitive classmates.

A final reason that blogging suits the course is that it is an Internet-based exercise, and in that way, a very current means of understanding, shaping and reshaping one's thoughts on a whole range of issues for anyone in cyberspace, while at the same time, archiving the process and product. The growing blog eventually evolves into an open-to-the-world interactive journal, a place where one's reflective character comes to be illustrated with words, audio and video clips, still photography and cartoons, website referrals AND feedback.

Appropriately, at the end of any blog post, week, month, term or year, the writer can sit back and take stock of the whole concoction, glowing perhaps with self satisfaction, or alternatively, flushing the whole thing or any part of it into the cyber-septic tank with a quick click.

My list of reasons for using blogging is not exhaustive. To learn why a professional coach sees blogging as important, check out this link.