Skip to main content

Blog Reflection

My experience with blogging this semester was fun and explorative. I combined two of my favorite things—baking and travel—into one blog that alternated to explore both topics. I have done blogs in the past, but this one was unique in that it explored more topical things instead of just my day-to-day life. 

For my baking blogs, I tried to use my own recipes. Otherwise, I used recipes inspired off of Pinterest. My recipe blogs included salted caramel brownies, cinnamon streusel coffee cake, peach turnovers, and crème brulée. I created these blogs by writing a short blurb about the recipe, listing the ingredients and instructions, and taking pictures of each stage of the recipe process. For my travel blogs, I wrote about my trip to the Dominican Republic, past trips to Uganda, my spring break trip, a bachelorette weekend in St. Charles, and my summer travel plans. For these blogs, I simply wrote a summary of each experience and included pictures of the place in which I traveled. The blogs I wrote about the publishing industry were a part of a project for this class. I have written thousands of essays and reports, so it was nice to use a different format for this project. My process for writing these blogs included a lot of research, spanning ten to fifteen sources, creating an outline for how I wanted to organize this information, and writing each blog post for a total of three. 

As I said in the beginning, this is not my first time blogging. I have kept a blog since I was in high school that centered more around my life in Uganda as well as my faith journey. I haven't worked on this blog for a while, as I don't live there any longer and I have also just been busy with life and college. But I would definitely be interested in blogging again in the future. I may even try to incorporate that into my career in some way, as I am planning on working in the publishing industry and freelancing as a writer. Overall, I enjoyed my experience blogging this semester and I look forward to applying the skills I have learned for future classes and jobs. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Which Book Genres Produce the Most Revenue?

When is the last time you picked up a book? Yesterday? Today? A month ago? Maybe you're trying to come up with the last time you picked up a book. Some people might say that with all the other sources of entertainment in our world today, the amount of people reading has gone downhill. That would make perfect sense. After all, life is busy. Who has the time to read for leisure these days anyway? But fortunately, this is false. Books, both electronic and physical copies, are more popular now than ever. This is great news for the publishing industry. But you may be wondering, what is it that keeps the publishing industry alive? Over the years, certain genres have become more popular than others. Therefore, writers hoping to make it big (or at least keep the lights on) need to know what's "in" so that they can survive in the publishing world. The question for these writers is: which genres make the most revenue?  In the article “23 Gripping Book Industry Statistics [2023]...

The Big 5

In my last blog article, I mentioned two ways of publishing books: self-publishing and traditional publishing. This blog article is going to focus on traditional publishing for the purpose of exploring which publishing companies are the most popular and how their websites attract writers of particular genres.  According to Olivia Smith in the article, "What are the 'Big Five' Publishing Houses?," there are five main traditional publishing houses (Smith):  Penguin/Random House, Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins,                           Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan Although these five publishing houses still hold plenty of hype in the publishing world, it is hard for writers to get published (Smith). Therefore, as I mentioned in the last article, self-publishing rates have skyrocketed in recent years. But still, the Big Five continue to bring in the majority of revenue from book sales.  Penguin R...

Spring Break!

Spring break!! As is characteristic with most breaks, it went by wayyyy too fast. I definitely could have used another week. I mostly worked throughout my spring break and got ahead on school work, but I did spend a couple of days at my great aunts lake house in Decatur. My family has come to nickname Decatur "the armpit of Illinois," but the one corner of paradise (or at least the one place we all have fun) in Decatur is my great aunts lake house.  My boyfriend, Evan, and I left on the Saturday spring break began and we met everyone there in the evening. "Everyone" was my mom, dad, and my two little sisters, plus a couple of their friends. Needless to say, I had been looking forward to some rest and fun time hanging out with my family. Evan and I had to leave Sunday evening because we both had work, so it was a quick but restful trip.  On Saturday, my mom made chili. My mom has never really been known for her cooking, but she does make a mean chili. I can't ord...