25 Sep Helping Others Through Your Words and Experience

Helping Others Through Your Words and Experience

Writing does many things, including allowing you to use the power or your own words and

personal experience to help others to solve, deal with, or address a problem they are facing.

Think back to when you have faced problems in your life, whether you were grieving the loss of

a friend or loved one, or whether you needed help with managing your time during your first

months as a college student, or you may have needed help with budgeting, for example, and

how it’s quite likely you turned to others for help. They may have shared their experience and

offered you suggestions for how to cope in these situations. You may have even turned to the

writing of others, a self-help book, or a blog post written by someone going through the problem

and sharing solutions.

Here, for example is a list of blog posts where writers use their experience to help others:

5two Education Blogs You Should Follow

The Cool Cat Teacher

Random Acts of Leadership

Leadership and Learning

50 Must-Read IT Blogs from BizTech

Iron Firemen

15 Nurse Blogs to Follow

Social Psychology Network

Now it’s your turn to be the person others turn to for help, the person whose words, in this case

your written words, console, help, and guide.

Assignment Instructions

In Unit 2, you examined some well-written business reports, academic journal articles, and blog

posts. For your Unit 4 Assignment, you will practice applying what you learned about writing

effectively to craft your own 3-4 paragraph, personal expression blog post aimed at helping

others to address a problem.

As you probably know, a blog or web log is a generally informal online journal written by either

individuals or groups. As Caroline Forsey notes, blogs can provide individuals a powerful (and

often very profitable) platform for sharing knowledge, while also providing companies with a

valuable venue for sharing information:

What Is a Blog, & Why Should You Create One

You won’t need to worry about building a website or creating the actual physical blog site itself

for this assignment. Instead, you will be writing the text you would share with your audience on

your specific blog post, if you were to create one.

The post you create should be written to an audience of nonprofessionals (for example, working

mothers going back to school) to help them deal with a specific problem that you have 

experience with and have yourself learned to solve, deal with or address. Write to this audience

to share your experience, connect with them, and offer them guidance. Demonstrate to them

one specific way of solving the problem, based on your own successful experience with this

problem.

Because you want to continue to learn about and explore issues relevant to your field of study,

be sure that the problem that you address is in some way connected to your field of study. If you

are studying psychology, think of your experiences with grief, anxiety, or any other experience

where your psychological well-being was affected. You could write to a group of other working

parents who are struggling with helping their teenager to fit in or who may be dealing with

bullying or depression, if you too have had experience with this issue. If you are studying

accounting, you could write to other single mothers out there struggling with their budget, if that

is an issue you have dealt with and that you have learned to manage.

Remember, use the writing process itself to help you to brainstorm a possible topic, identify your

target audience and main point about the topic, to organize your thoughts and draft them, then

to revise ideas after receiving feedback from others, followed by editing and proofreading. We

will work through each of these steps, both in seminar and the Unit 3 and 4 Discussion Board, to

ensure that you are successful at every step of the process. Here are the steps you will take to

ensure success in this assignment:

You may use one source, briefly, and only to establish the relevance of the problem, for

example. Your suggestion, solution, or way of dealing with this problem must come from your

own experience. If you summarize or use the exact words of a source, you must credit that

source with an in-text citation and a References page citation.

STEPS TO CREATING YOUR BLOG POST:

1. Unit 3 Discussion Board and Seminar: Brainstorming and selecting a topic; identifying

your audience, main point and purpose and creating a plan.

2. Unit 4 Discussion Board: Implementing your writing plan and writing a rough draft; giving

and receiving feedback; creating a plan for revision and editing.