BTBF Reflection: Final Reflection

As I am saying goodbye to Syracuse, I am also saying goodbye to this blog. The inquiry of food and identity was initially overwhelming. So, for my first assignment I stuck close to home and explored my Nigerian culture. As I watched videos and read more articles in and out of class, I realized that I wanted to learn and write about food from both a cultural and not cultural perspective. Posts like my munchies reflection and my recipe illustrated the internal perspectives related to cultural foods. For example, we want to preserve our food (create a legacy) and have others explore the flavors and meanings behind each dish. Posts like my PSA and my graphic novel reflected the external perspectives related to cultural foods. For example, the impact of cultural ignorance is often rudeness and a lack of understanding when it comes to new and different foods which can have real world implications (especially economic implications). While navigating these perspectives was my intention, projects scattered throughout the course, such as the advertising reflection and engaging with two articles of homework, gave me opportunities to expand my thoughts or explore a different part of the Food and Identity inquiry. 

I never expected that college writing could take the shape or form. I expected to be participating in essay writing with a heavy focus on analysis. While I have worked on analysis, it was regarding different forms of media. My writing has been mostly reflective or an exploration of a different genre (such as graphic novel or critical summary). The diversity in writing this blog allowed for my ideas to fully flourish because they were not confined to words. I was allowed to use pictures, drawings, music in my videos, editing skills and so on. With the blog, I expanded what it meant to convey a point and what that process could look like. Moreover, my blog was not a finalized product that I submitted and never looked back at. Even after I submitted the link, I could go back to my old posts and take ideas from them or find something I want to expand on. I could even edit how something was written. This part of the functionality of a blog was helpful because I could be my own resource: it was a way to track my thoughts and ideas. Also, a blog is inherently interactive. I was able to rely on comments as a form of feedback and guide. Ultimately, the blog format was more helpful, to my own surprise, than it was hindering.

At the end of last week, I created five goals to improve my website in both content and functionality. My goals: 

1) Get rid of all my typos and work on editing my sentences 

2) Try adding pictures 

3) Generalizing fonts, font size, colors, logistics 

4) Working on weaving in connection to other blog posts

5) Go through comments and add feedback for each post

I was able to work on all these goals throughout the week. For example, I re-read the posts that Rebecca pointed out in our interview, and fixed up their typos. My 10 in 1 post had certain numbers repeated, so I deleted the extra numbers and made sure the bullet points were lined up. 

As for my goal to add more pictures, I found this hard to do. This goal originates from experiencing Lhianna’s blog. She has pictures (I think of cats) scattered throughout the blog that make her blog engaging and give it a quirky trademark. For every post that didn’t have a picture, I pinpointed an important part of the post that could be visualized. For the post regarding Rebecca’s feedback and interview, I added thought bubbles. For the articles in conversation posts I added a school cafeteria since the main point was lunch box bullying. For the 10 in 1 post, I added a picture of Thailand since the article was about Thai food. 

I also generalized my fonts. I put all the texts in Times New Roman to contrast the header, which is in a more handwritten font. Initially, different posts had different fonts based on the google doc that I copied and pasted from or the article I was quoting from. I changed the color of my fonts from white to black because the white on pink background was a hit or miss for many viewers, and it is easier to see the black print. But, I kept the comments in white to keep some of my original idea of what the blog should look like. 

I realized that for my 4th and 5th goals, I didn’t have much work to do as I had been doing this throughout the course. Many posts  included links to sources mentioned in other posts: this is especially noticeable with the munchies video. So, for my 4th goal I simply added links to other posts I thought were related. For example, my 10 in 1 post was related to food tourism in Thailand, so I added a link to my critical summary portfolio which was also about food tourism. As for the comments, the feedback I already didn’t incorporate was my choice as the author of the blog. Most comments were incorporated in one way or another or were positive and not constructive.