Tell the World - Blog About It

By Alissa Perske

ENGL 336.001

Six people sat in the sage green conference room of the Lyric Building, the sound of people walking past, pages of programs turning, and small talk filling the room as they waited for the panel on blogging to begin. Among the six was poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.

Wesley, an immigrant from Liberia, West Africa, led the discussion on blogging and journalism. To start the workshop-like panel, she went around the table asking why anyone should blog. The answers that came out of this were to tell the stories one wants to read, communicate information and current events, contribute to a topic of interest, and share one’s life and opinions. With all of these reasons, the audience is very important.

Before blogging, four important aspects need to be set: the decision to start blogging, a title, an audience, and commitment. This serves as the motivation. “It’s not just getting the traffic to blog...it’s getting the time to blog,” Wesley explains.

She shares that she started her blog, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s International Blog on Poetry for Peace, “after I took a trip to… to Colombia for the biggest poetry festival.” She wanted to tell the world about the topics that matter to her in her own individual way. Her blog includes poetry, activism, what is going on in America, women’s issues, and her life. Activism is, to her, the most important. This includes topics like immigrant abuse and human rights. Although most people around the world are supportive and excited to learn the news as told by a citizen, this is not always the case. Wesley informs the group of one of her readers, who left an angry comment because she was exposing immigrant abuse. She replied to the comment to give her reasons behind her posts. Immigrant abuse is news; she is a news person. “Because you are bloggers, you are news people,” she stresses.

When the discussion is brought around to links and why they are necessary, Wesley answers with three aims – traffic, help the reader understand what you’re writing, and legitimacy. Especially with news posts, research must be done to prove the post legitimate to the audience. “If you hear about a bombing,” Wesley suggests, “and you want to write about it, you have to research.” She emphasizes this in her short list of characteristics for a good blogger. One must be honest, unbiased, and researched.

These three traits got Wesley to a point in her blogging where a student at a Switzerland university requested to write his senior thesis on her blog posts. She had written multiple posts on Barack Obama, and he wanted to write about an African’s perspective on Barack Obama as president. She accepted his request, and allowed him to interview her via email, where she responded to each question with “at least twenty pages a piece,” she laughed.

Blogging is a good outlet for a variety of people because it does not have a strict set of rules. A blog is unique to each person. When one blogs, it says, in Patricia Jabbeh Wesley’s words, “This is my world, and this is what’s important to me.”