go pro – go blog
Gardner Writes ยป Faculty Academy 2006 Podcast: A Conversation on Blogging at UMW got me thinking about encouraging and facilitating BSU faculty and support staff blogging. Not that I’d personally want to do it, really, but if what they’re doing at UMW is at all typical (and I’d suggest it is), then writing a blog has become part of being a professional. (Which also reminds me that I have to post more often.)
This growing use of blogging by professionals lets me rework the Weblogs and Wikis course for next fall, moving it outside the BFA and outside the personal use of weblogs. It means that the course can
- bring in disciplines other than writing
- focus more on professional development and portfolio
- focus more on technique: process but also genre style (informal, loose, light punctuation)
- focus more on rhetorical practices in blogging: sprezzatura, kairos, appeals, decorum…
- focus more on the social use and place of the blog for the professional: writing as a pro to a broad, even non-specialist readership
To my mind, blogging has always been about the personal expression of the professional self, a supplement to the work we do. The growing popularity of blogging in the professional and scholarly domains highlights the writing we all do as part of our work. I don’t mean that blogging is a fad, but with blogging we’re seeing public writing by professionals come into its own. Time to change the image of the blogger.
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Yes–much of blogging involves sprezzatura. (So does chat in Second Life, for that matter.) Something like a popular essay, but more for the nonce, at least apparently. I would like to consider this rhetorical analysis in more depth and will look forward to reading more of your discussion.
Thanks for the link.