Confessions of a "granny" blogger!

OR WHY I WILL NOT END MY SENTENCES WITH WTF!

My (ten years junior to me) baby sister, whose opinions I regard highly, has said that my blogs are too long. She was trying to get me to add ads into my blog and use more photos. Apparently, people who have nuffnang-endorsed blogs are the successful bloggers. I clearly am not. I have a grand total of 14 followers, many of whom are close friends and some sweet students whom I have bribed. I am hardly a serial blogger. Though I love writing, I hardly have time to update my blog posts especially during term time when I am juggling with planning, teaching and marking on top of the kids and our hectic social life and other side secret projects that I seem to get myself embroiled in. And I write in long form.

So I went into these so called popular blogs that she told me about. The ones that NETizens on Blogosphere are raving about. And it’s confirmed, I am definitely OLD(er). And I can’t bear the acronyms that they use, or the poor grammar that sometimes comes along with it. And the incessant camwhoring! ( but that’s another blogpost altogether!) I blame it on politics which has destroyed our education system and has annihilated a whole generation of potentially strong writers in Malaysia. C’mon, we have been a British colony until 1957. In 55 years, we have managed to lose potentially the most important legacy that colonialisation (sometimes) bring- a strong education system- and with it, a nation of competent, if not fluent speakers and writers of the world’s most important language (no, it’s still English, not quite Chinese , yet). And I don’t think adding wtf at the end of a sentence is cool, or right, at all. Perhaps it’s because I am a product of an all-girls school that was started by very proper Catholic French and Irish nuns. Perhaps, I am an ole grandma when it comes to writing conventions. Or as my hubby often says about me, you are an old soul.

I am human. Of course, I cuss, but if I am going to add wtf at the end of every sentence, I might as well slash my wrists. That’s not blogging. That’s writing poorly, in bad English. (That’s a redundancy). I may THINK WTF in my head, sometimes,( or all the time if my thyroid is on overdrive), but I don’t need to put it at the end of a sentence.

Which comes back to my main point, I am NEVER going to get thousands of followers for my blog, because I sound, old, archaic and wordy. And I use real humour, irony, sarcasm, hyberbole, persuasion and rhetoric, which I guess can be summed up with one acronym- WTF- by the generation Y bloggers. It’s almost a professional hazard: being a teacher.linguist.grammarian.writer.editor.critic type person that I am, which finds me English knickers knotted in this manner. I admit, I even cringe when the Jesuit padre in church makes subject-verb agreement errors in his sermon, and I am in church, for God’s sake.(no pun intended). But I do calm down after a vigorous prayer session, and ACCEPT and understand that many EAL English learners of the world do struggle with English, particularly of the written form; if it is their second or additional language, hence they will not write or speak in that fluency that is required of a first language speaker. I still blame it on the education system.

Often, I get asked, how are you an English teacher, Miss. You don’t have an accent. Aren’t you Chinese? Aren’t you Malaysian? Being stereotyped and sussed out at the same time. I tell them, my dear students that I am a citizen of the world, and as long as I dream, and cuss in English, it’s my first language. Never mind that it’s the only language that I really feel comfortable ranting in or grew up writing the most in.

So, back to my long-winded blog- I think it’s the age thing, but I am also a very detailed person. I process things chronologically, and I pay attention to detail in everything. Hence I can arrive at a 5000 word blog entry (worthy of one chapter in a Master’s dissertation without the citations) in an hour if I set my mind to it, and this is excluding all the wtfs that I have omitted! Perhaps I should go for a course in concision, precis and "less is more".

So, dearest sister, I am definitely a confirmed Generation X. I think , if I I may say so myself, a pretty cool one too, considering that I own a blog, know how to run it, have facebook, ( but stops at twitting), is on instagram and now use google+ and googledocs and use email daily. I also teach a large number of very young people on a yearly basis, and from them, I have struggled to get the point across that if you do not know your parts of speech, your articles and prepositions and your clauses and what not, FIRST, before anything else, there is little point in going WTF, BRB, LOL or NP with me. As for people of the younger generations whose blogs get all the followers and hits like crazy because they use wtf at the end of every sentence, I am sorry, I shall be happy with my 14 followers and odd and rare comments or limited likes.

I am NOT from generation Y or Z and proud of it! Now excuse me, as I GTG and LMFAO cause YOLO!

R- Sept 2012