Reflection on this course

This is the 4th week of lesson and even if we met just only 2 times I can state that my knowledge on blogs has improved a lot. Before starting this course I had only heard something about blogs but I didn' t really know what blogs are, how they work, and what is their purpose. I learnt in this course and surfing Tecnorati all the day long that a blog is a website where entries are displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject such as e.g. rugby, travel, politics; some function as more personal online diary where people write about their daily grind, however, their most important goal is to share information and give advice or suggestions to the topics discussed. Blogs are a great source of selectioned information but for sure you need to have time to take part to these discussions and also to be interested in them. This is also the reason why bloggers try to catch people's attention with effective sentences, colours and pictures. A typical blog combines texts, images and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Moreover, links are often used in order to facilitate other bloggers. What I found most striking is the language. The language used to communicate on a blog is very colloquial and informal because people are more interested in the content instead of the grammatical accuracy. There are a lot of slangs even difficul to understand, short forms, and symbols like :-)). I find this aspect very interesting and important. I know some words in slag and how English young speakers talk when they are together, how they text short messages because I lived in Ireland but if you study English only at the college you don't really know how young people communicate between them and a blog is a good way to start. I sometimes prefer writing something without giving attention to accuracy and language because I feel free to express myself in a foreign language giving importance only to my thoughts. I like using short forms particularly when I text to my Irish friens because they use abbreviations everytime and I had to learn them. If you can write only 160 letters in a short text the use of short forms like dis= this, r= are, txt= a text, 2= to/ too, ye= you and so on is obvious!