Blog Post #2 "Blog Post of the Week" Poll

Blog Posts of the Week

Blog Posts of the Week are a showcase of student-curated blog posts, highlighting exemplary blog posts that demonstrate innovative uses of key rhetorical elements of class blog posts. Students vote each week for the top two blog posts (and justify their decision) using the polls I post here. Winners earn bragging rights and other perks to be decided upon by us at the beginning of the semester.

Blog Post #2 "Blog Post of the Week" Poll

1/24/2015

Remember to VOTE & COMMENT. Your comments should include PRAISES & PROBLEMS. Your PRAISES should include a brief, reflective explanation for your vote and, if you want, a comment or two about what other students' sites did well that deserves recognition; feel free to name names here. Your PROBLEMS portion of your comment should include THREE ISSUES you see repeated throughout the blog posts that we all need to consider, address, and improve on (don't name names in this part, though).

THANKS!

25 Comments

Xinxiu Tian link

1/25/2015 03:42:03 am

Personally my favorite weekly blog post is Cindy's post.
First of all, her website is very beautiful and organized, which attracts me immediately when I open her blog page.
In addition, the summary she writes includes all the important points Lahiri and Patricia indicates.
Above all, her post is well-organized and summary tweets are accurate and easy to understand.
What's more, George and Dora also did a good job on summarizing Lahiri's story. What draws my attention most is Dora's map indicating which way Lahiri took from Kingston to Biscuit City. I believe that in this way, readers can understand the storing more effectively.
However, I also notice several problems our classmates commonly have. For example, we are not good at making our blog interesting. Based on personal experience, I struggle figuring out what to link and what picture should I upload every time that I post a blog.
What's more, some grammar mistakes exist because we are not native speaker, and I think this problem can be solved by repetitive practice.
Finally, I would like to encourage our classmates to comment on each other's website page because we can improve through others' comments more conveniently this way.
All in all, I think all of the students did a great job! Looking forward to next week's blog post!

Lianyan Gu (Helen) link

1/25/2015 05:34:23 am

I enjoyed reading Dianna's second blog post. In her blog post, she gave us extra backgrounds about the author and interviews related to the writing. I like the way she arranged the photos and the words. In many of the posts I read, I noticed that many of us have nice pictures but have different ways of arranging them. Sometimes, too many pictures is distracting, misguiding the readers to focus on pictures rather than what we wrote. I think it will be so much more engaging if we can put other elements to our blog posts, such as music, slide shows, videos, etc. These elements will definitely make the blog posts more interesting to read.

Yuelin Guo (Dianna)

1/25/2015 06:54:18 am

I think most of us did a better job on the blog post than last week. I like Xena's page for she did a great job summarizing the two articles and the pictures she put on her webpage. Instead of putting the pictures of the author, which is what most of us did, she uses pictures that can related to the thesis of the articles. Presenting a picture of several Indian women wearing traditional Indian clothes and walking on street in the US reveals the idea of Indian immigrants, which is one of the thing Lahiri presents in her writing. I like Helen putting a map of Rhode Island on her page that gave us a general view of Rhode Island and help us understanding the article better. I also notice that some of us put page number in the post and I appreciated that.
However, one thing I think we should all pay more attention on is when summarizing articles we should avoid our personal thoughts and simply put what goes on in the articles. I think it will be better to express our personal thoughts in free writings.

Pan

1/25/2015 07:14:03 am

Jiayi's Blog Post 2 was my favorite because of its simple and clear layout. The post was very straightforward and the content is easy to understand. Jiayi did not just describe what she read in the readings, she also related to herself by offering her personal opinion. The images she had in this post were relevant and they provided me a better understanding of what she was trying to convey in this post. Overall, this Blog Post 2 is great.
One things that she might want to improve would be some other relevant material like videos or other people's writing and work on the relevant topics.

George

1/25/2015 08:39:08 am

I like Dora's post is my favorite of the week. In addition to the summary and clear website layout, she provides readers with pictures that are closely related to article itself. Her usage both images, which is a route from Kingston to Biscuit City and an outside look of URI library, helps me to put Lahiri's words visually.
Other than Dora's blog post, I think Steve and Dianna also did a good job. Steve's neat website style appeals to me; also, his view that one reading is the vivid representation of the other is really interesting. Dianna applied various media elements in her post, which make it more engaging to readers. A specific amount of media elements such as pictures and videos can greatly help readers to understand.
What I think we all need to improve is the distribution of words and other elements. A site full of words, without a single image is not that attractive to readers. On the opposite, a site full of images and videos is also distractive. Therefore I believe a balance of both benefits readers the most.

Weiwei Zhong

1/25/2015 11:58:45 am

I like Diana's blog post best. The good organization and layout of her blog post is very attracting for visitors to read. She inserts pictures is between different parts of the blog post rather than put them in the middle of an single paragraph. Putting them randomly can be misleading sometimes.
Besides, I like her the part she relates the idea from Tuan and two selections. She comments that both author share the opinion that the accumulations of experience and emotions strengthens people's attachment to place.
After reading the new blog posts, many of us use multimedias like photos and music to diversify the blog posts. We may consider what to attach and where to put them.
I see some of us are really good at blog designing, and we can communicate the skills in class. Sometimes, I find putting pictures are not an easy job for me.
We can exchange our ideas in the free writing, so that we can better understand the readings.
Finally, putting number in the blog post title makes visitors easier to locate the posts.

Qinyi She link

1/25/2015 01:26:03 pm

Among all the post, I prefer Zining’s second post. I think she did a really good job summarizing two articles and connecting their content. Moreover, she adds interesting pictures to illustrate the post such as the location of Kingston and the view of Rhode Island. After reading the posts, I think we should add more related images to make the posts more descriptive. Moreover, the posts would be better if we can find a way to create a flow of the post.

Yuchen Hu link

1/25/2015 01:31:47 pm

I voted for Jiayu this week.

I really like the format of how she carried out her discussion in this post. Just one passage and there you have the summary of and reflection upon these two readings merged into each other. Also, instead of just sticking to the original idea mentioned by Lahiri and Price, she/he actually introduced her very own idea: place and self-identity. I like that part the most.

Jiayi Ye

1/25/2015 01:53:59 pm

Bella's post is my favourite post this week. First of all, she did a good job in summarizing two articles she read concisely. Even though I have not read the Tuan's paper, I get the main idea of this article after I read Bella's post. In addition, she also links these two articles to Tuan's book. She relates the articles this week to Tuan's book from two aspects; one aspect is "intimate experiences of place", another is how meaning of place is maintained and enhanced by literature. I also like the style of Bella's website, which is clear and attractive.

My only suggestion for Bella is to add citation at the end of the post. Some of my classmates may also make this mistake, so do I. Moreover, some classmates forget to write summary tweet and discussion-questions. Thus, it is better for us to pay attention to details.

Shao link

1/25/2015 01:55:28 pm

I voted for Dianna as my favorite post this week. Her site looks beautiful and clean because of the good layout, relevant images and video. I really like the fact that she introduces the author before the summary. She also uploads a video about Lahiri, which makes the post more interesting to read. My favorate part of the post is the "Reaching Out to Tuan's Space and Place". She mentioned that "place is given value by human beings and people give value to place because of the numerous interactions with place and deep emotion towards place" and supported it with points from "Rhode Island" and "Place". I think this is a great way to have a better comprehension about the reading and I should do it too next time.

I think most people have used images to make our posts more interesting to read. However, the sizes of the pictures are sometimes weird and cause distraction; Also, some sites have really eye-catching background images that also may distract readers' attention. Finally, I feel some difficulty reading some posts because the words are too small.

Mayer link

1/25/2015 02:03:36 pm

I voted for Jiayi's blog. She wrote very good summaries that represent the main idea of the original essays, and she had very impressive thoughts in her combined paragraph, which I did not think about. She also brought some interesting questions that worth discussion. By the way, she made very delicate website with those pictures.

Xena Huang

1/25/2015 02:05:48 pm

Everybody seems to be the fun of pining out locations on map, which is good, since that's a powerful way to introduce a place. I voted for Dianna, for I love her inserting buttons of "learn more about" the author-- that's very thoughtful and actual attempt to invoke conversation and exploration.
I guess our problem this week is mainly based on the text. Maybe it was because that we are summarizing, many of us seem to give up to be interesting...

Even Guo

1/25/2015 02:11:01 pm

I think Yufei really did a great job. The organization is really good. For every essay, the writer divided the summary into several parts: synthesis tweet, summary, most pressing thought and discussion. Instead of putting all those into one big paragraph, Yufei designed the blog very well. However, I noticed that many of us only put pictures as supplements. Besides visual content, we should add other elements, as audio and video, to improve the overall quality of our websites.

Hanxin Zhang

1/25/2015 02:19:47 pm

I like Dora's post. The layout of her website is simple and organized, which enables readers to easily navigate. As for her blog post, she included several pictures of Rhode Island to vividly show readers Lahiri's experience there. The summaries are well organized as well. She mentioned every important point of both articles and made it concise enough.
However, I did notice that many of us make grammar mistakes in our writing, and I think we should work on that more in the future. Also I think we can be more creative than just putting some pictures along our posts, such as videos.

Yufei link

1/25/2015 02:52:30 pm

First, I love Dora's design of her blog post. She puts a map which shows the road the author goes through from Kingston to Biscuit City. It's very creative and engaging. I also love Diana's blog post. She puts many pictures and a video to make the post look attractive. Besides this, she makes the first word of each paragraph bold, so that it's very clear for the audience to navigate. Overall, Diana does a really good job in the second blog post. I vote for Diana!
As for problems, I think some of these websites still need further upgrade of templates. For instance, they need to delete some pages attached to that template, which are not meaningful and useful. But overall, everyone does a really good job!

Sibel

1/25/2015 08:11:13 pm

I voted for Jiayi's post because I think that her summaries are both clear and interesting. I also really liked her webpage's design and the pictures she used on the homepage.

Cem

1/25/2015 08:47:27 pm

Dianna’s use of multimedia and design for this blog post is more than sufficient and interesting. She supported her writing with pictures of the author, maps of Rhode Island, and the video of an interview with Lahiri and more images as well as links to other sources.

A problem I saw in a lot of blog posts is the lack of subheadings. The second blog post is a long one, reaching approximately more than 800 words, so it gets a little boring to read. However by dividing the blog into parts, subheadings, or questions, it could have been made easier to read through. Just like last week’s blog posts, a lot of the blogs this week, are missing supplementary elements such as audio, images and video. These are essential in order to draw the attention of the reader.

Zeyu Zhong link

1/25/2015 10:28:36 pm

I like and vote for Jiayi's blog.
First, the front page of her blog is very beautiful and shocking. Every time I went to the blog, I feel like I am standing right at the seaside.
Also, the match of color is fantastic. The background color is a large picture and is mostly white, therefore the pictures that are put in the blog are not going to conflict with the background color. Speaking of the pictures, they are fabulous. I really admire that Jiayi could find so many beautiful pictures and put them on the blog properly. I love them very much.
Finally, the comment options at the end of blog is very thoughtful, it is very convenient for people to leave their reply for the blog posts if they want to.

Young Moo Yoo link

1/26/2015 01:12:48 am

I enjoyed reading Jiayu’s blog post 2. She exactly points the important parts from the reading assignments. Her post is succinct and easy to understand. Especially, her synthesis paragraph shows the readers what the authors are trying to say clearly. On top of that, the pictures she uploaded help the readers to have a better understanding of her blog post. Additionally, the layout of her webpage is simple so that the readers can solely focus on the post.
We all need to focus on the citation. Even I made a mistake. I think it is important to cite every ideas that comes from other people because, other than that, it is stealing other people's thought. Also, simple webpage design will help the readers to concentrate on the blog posts.

Caroline Luo

1/26/2015 01:43:01 am

Personally, I appreciate Yufei's blog post #2. His structure is clear. I love the way he organises his post: putting tweet at the very beginning of each part, which gives readers a clear understanding of what he discusses in the following part.
About what we can improve, I agree with what Shao said above. Even though the use of photos, videos, and other multimedias are helpful for readers to better understand the context, overuse of them is sometimes distracting.

Zining Wang

1/26/2015 03:19:23 am

I voted for Zining's website. I like his pictures and layout. The organization and structures are good, too.
Other students also did well on pictures and design. Their blogs are attracting. Some student used videos or music, which is creative.
I hope some students can include everything listed on the requirement clearly. In this way, readers can easily find.

Guangye Zhu

1/26/2015 03:40:49 am

Personally speaking, George's blog is my favorite blog post for following reasons.
First, his discerption sticks to the timeline of the illustrations, of both authors. Such discerption enable readers who read both articles before to easily follow the blog post.
Second, he use comparisons in both articles. For instance, he compared the lives of Lahiri before and after her moved to Rhode Island. The difference between two different life styles clearly states the influence of "Place" in her life.
What's more, he uses pictures of the girl to enhance such comparisons. It's a good idea to put different style photo to achieve such goal.

Minseo Kim

1/26/2015 03:41:48 am

I thought Steve's blog post was the best this week. I think he summarized the story in a clear way. He posted the tweet summaries in the beginning so that readers can easily know what he is talking about.
Other students also had well structured websites. However, I think we should all work on adding images that are helpful for readers to understand the blog post.

Bella

1/26/2015 04:01:23 am

I voted for myself this week because I feel my picture and content of writing is more interesting and related. Most of the blogs this week only contained limited pictures or special layout. People are just finishing tasks not really want to write something. Also some of the classmates didn't complete all we should write about. We lack personal reflection for this blog.

Hae-Rim Lee

1/26/2015 04:59:43 am

I thought Minseo's blog post 2 was outstanding. He synthesized both readings clearly including all the important ideas. I really liked his summary about Lahiri's Rhode Island because he did not use words from the text, but of his own words. However, the blog post 2 could have been better if he had put some images and other visual effects.

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