So you've got a blog...big deal. Who doesn't?

Well, I've started thinking a great deal about blogging. What does it mean to keep a blog? Is a blog a journal that you write and reveal to the world? Is it a public diary? Why would you want to have a public diary? Yuck.

But a blog might be a space where I can reflect on things that I worry about but don't vocalize; perhaps it's a space where I can say something scholarly in a way that won't bore people to tears. Then again, it might. Perhaps a blog might be another site of rejection: what happens if you write a blog that no one reads?

So I've been thinking about dictionaries a lot lately (another sigh from the non-existent audience--"What's new about that?"), and wondering why using a dictionary, apart from Dictionary.com, seems to be so difficult for so many people. In fact, I just came from a presentation where a colleague reported that her students (who are also my students) struggled with words like "paradoxically," "ubiquitous," and other words that I thought were "ubiquitous" enough in everyday college discourse that they should be able to recognize them. But do we ask our students to read so much so quickly that they fear stopping and looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary?

Or are readers afraid of dictionaries? Is there something intimidating about a dictionary? Do we fear being wrong about the meaning of a word? These are just questions...but perhaps I can find some answers.

Whew...no misspellings found. I guess I can publish now.