Blog #3

After years and years of writing essays that mostly focus on analyzing articles or journals, the idea of doing one that will have to reflect my ideas and thoughts scares me. Even as I am writing this blog (giving my opinion) on what our next paper will be about gives me anxiety. Although I love writing papers, with the pass of the years I have come to learn that I am better at writing objective essays. It is easier for me to just follow the rules when writing compared to having to come up with my own ideas or expressing my beliefs. 
As professor Flewelling states in her Blog #3, most English teachers have taught us that “[We] can have an opinion, [they] want [us] to have an opinion,” but that our opinion should never be included in our papers. Also, since I am a psychology student, most of my papers are APA format, which is super structured. We are always told that the less the better; in other words to not get very creative and just answer what we are being asked. 

Despite the fact that I believe blogs are interesting and an easy way of sharing one’s thoughts, like I said before, it has been very difficult for me to really come up with ideas of my own to share. Blogs can be an example of an Op-Ed. As described in an article by Allena Tapia, “an op-ed is an opinion piece (usually in a newspaper) that a freelance writer may need to write on behalf of a client, such as a nonprofit business”. The way I see it, op-eds a re a way of sharing one’s opinion, perspective, and/or beliefs of a particular situation. 

A current situation to which I might respond in the form of an op-ed is the construction of a wall. Most people just agree or disagree without putting much thought in it, so I want to clearly explain my beliefs by actually providing multiple examples. 

I believe that there are available all different kinds of op-ed, each for every individual to support, but also disagree. I think that although writers are giving their opinions when writing op-eds, they are also sometimes keeping for themselves some of their thoughts in order to appeal to a specific audience more easily. For this reason, I believe all types of papers, essays, articles, include some sort objective structure, because at the end we all want to have an audience so we think about who we want to appeal to and then we write.