The Rhetoric of Blogging (Part VII): Closing thoughts on Nileblog

I started out this class with some reservations. I couldn't imagine why I'd want to "blog," whatever that was, but it was a required course. I was pretty nervous about writing a blog; I think that I realized that in the course of doing so, I would probably reveal more about myself than I cared to. Plus, there was this hot-shot local celeb as a prof, and a bunch of very smart fellow students who were probably way ahead of me on this whole blogging thing. So I was intimidated. When I look back at those first few posts, I feel my nervousness. I'd say the rhetoric of Nileblog in the beginning was "tight-assed," but I'm not sure that Aristole would approve. I was trying to engage in logical, intellectual discussion of blogging without giving too much of myself away. I was aiming for logos, with a side order of ethos, hey, I KNOW what I'm talking about. Between the cracks, though, I see the tenativeness, the pathos.

I start to waver pretty early on. In this post, I throw in the towel and decide I suck at blogging. Immediately Brett and Marc come to my rescue with their comments. I knew Brett from the previous semester, but I had no idea who T.G.T. was. It was nice to get encouragement, though. Maybe blogging isn't so bad. I start to loosen up.

I try to get a food thing going, but it fails miserably. Can you feel the pathos? Let's create a community, let me help, okay, let me be "Mom."

But I'm still trying to make some serious, scholarly posts. I find this difficult, and skip a week. I would find it easier to discuss these blogs if I were submitting weekly papers; I know how to do academic discourse. What is difficult is trying to say something intelligent and unique without sounding pompous. I already feel the pull of the blogging aesthetic, the spur-of-the-moment, informal writing that works best. It's hard for me to meld that with the requirement to seriously discuss these blogs. Plus I keep worrying that I'm going to offend the bloggers I'm writing about, which further inhibits me.

Sometime in October, I start to understand the medium more. I'm pretty interested by the interaction between the MSM and blogging over the Harriet Miers debacle. My writing becomes more authoritative (ethos), as I realize that there is no "right" answer and no one else is really ahead of us too much in study this stuff.

Then we hit November, and I think I finally let my guard down. I'm not the only one. A lot of us are revealing more about ourselves than before. Part of it is because it just seems to happen in blogging. A larger part of it, though, is that I'm starting to think of the class not as a bunch of fellow students, but as a group of people whom I want to know and sort of trust. Interestingly, this feeling of trust is being created in a completely open environment which anyone can read. Fortunately, not too many other people do. I end up messily confessing my "angst" on Thanksgiving (how embarrassing) and guess what -- nobody makes fun of me! (At least not to my face). Pathos, pathos, pathos.

After that, I still try to relate my blog to the assignments, but I start venturing off more. Nileblog becomes much more about my connections with the class, and discussions within the context of that community. Interestingly, once I let go of some of my reservations, I think I got more clarity on the blogging issues. Once I STOPPED trying to avoid the pathos, the logos and ethos appeals were also much stonger. I think. This leads me to conclude that blogging is a medium that works best when the writer is NOT constrained to avoid the informal, intimate language of blogging. Trying to be too academic, too authorative, too reserved, too emotionally distant from the subject matter, a la James Wolcott, doesn't work as well. There is no ethos or logos without pathos in the blogdom.

So here we are.

"I am a part of all that I have met." -- Alfred Tennyson