Although I learned to draw before
I could write, I could say that writing is, in every sense, my first love. When
I was a kid, I used to write (and daydream) of made up names of people and
places in made up scenarios. Yes, I was quite the weirdo when I was a kid – but
that would fill an entire post in an entirely different blog.
Come to think of it, I’m here to
write about the bang I get out of blogging.
Okay. A brief history of my
soon-to-be-illustrious writing career.
I wrote a novella of some sort
when I was in fifth grade (I forgot where I put the “manuscript”). In sixth
grade, my teachers pitted me against other elementary school writers in an
Editorial Writing Competition. Come high school, I joined the school paper and
started out as the Circulations Manager. I ranked up year after year until I
became the Editor-in-Chief. During my sojourn in high school, I was the
resident competitor for various writing contests and spelling bees – and then
there was the Internet.
With my newfound fascination of
the cyberspace came the amazing discovery that I could actually publish my own
blog. So I went to tumblr (because you know, it was the “in” thing for the
writer kids in my batch back then) and published my first (and now-neglected)
blog under the alias “weepingstrings”. This first blog contained random musings
and thoughts, and as if that wasn’t enough, I went on to publish another blog
(still on tumblr) – but this time it’s an art blog.
Anyway, enough of that. As I have
written in my “about me”, I am an “I-write-what-I-want” blogger. If I see
something that I like, I will most definitely write about it. So it is quite a
challenge for me when I learned that I would have to publish a blog on – here
it goes – Clinical Chemistry, of all things!
I mean, how would you turn some
boring subject into something people would want to read?
If anything, starting this blog
(on a platform I am not familiar with) was a challenge. When I was told to
write something about Endocrinology, I was like, “how in the world could I make
my readers understand endocrinology in a totally non-know-it-all attitude?”
Educational blogging, in my
opinion, is a cross between the art of writing and marketing. Why marketing,
you say? It’s because as a writer, you have to think of ways to promote an
otherwise unfamiliar subject to your readers. You have to make it more palatable, in a sense – and to make it
palatable, you have to use the magic of your pen and your brain to rouse the
natural inquisitiveness of your prospective readers.
My style of edublogging, then,
was to present cases that would catch my readers’ attentions first before
delving into the details that I want them to learn. That way, they would be
familiar to the topic I am trying to share and at the same time, their
curiosity was piqued enough for them to explore further into the subject.
To sum up everything I have written
here, edublogging is two things –
Innovation and Imagination.
