[ neoblogical ]

In other words, a LOT has happened since my initial couple of posts. I finally got that $%&*@ thesis finished. It was a real bear. But it went over pretty well with my committee and I’m pretty happy with it, too. I’m sure it would benefit from additional editing and finishing. That’s been the problem with my academic career thus far… I’m so busy with family and earning a living that I seldom get to write more than a couple or three drafts. Well, I’m not starting off as a very prolific writer, so I’m going to keep it short just to get some meat on the bones of this blog.

By the way, my thesis turned out not to get around to talking about Frontlne Milblogging after all. The problem was that I couldn’t talk about a subgenre of blogging because I came to the conclusion, as I was working out the theory of blogging as genre, that blogging is not a genre after all: blogging is a new medium, combining users, technology, audience, culture, and content in new ways, but it is not a genre. The technology/medium of blogging supports numerous genres, as does the technology/medium of the book. This led me to disagree with prominent rhetoricians Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd. For a graduate student to disagree with academics on the level of Dr. Miller is very risky and intimidating, but I believe that I ended up on firm ground, and I did so through a loophole in Miller and Shepherd’s own paper on blogging as genre. I’ll come back to all that and post some more thoughts, and my thesis itself, soon.

So, I received my M.A. in Professional Writing a few weeks ago from Kennesaw State University. Then, after a two week “break” (ha!), I started my Ph.D. in English with concentration in Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional and Technical Writing at Georgia State University. I’ll be including you all in my new journey as we go, so stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Digital Culture, Doctoral Studies, Genre Studies, Online Life, PhD Studies, RhetComp, Rhetoric