Blog 21: Independent Component 21

LITERAL
(a) I, Teresa Melendez Rodriguez, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents 30 hours of work.
(b) Click
(c) Ta-da 
(d) Initially my independent component was going to be to use Critique Circle to have my pieces critiqued but because there was a queue to wait for my own submissions to be critiqued and even then there was a slim chance someone would look at them, I chose to turn to Wordpress, a website I've been using for almost over two years now. I would post my pieces and people would either like them or share their opinions and experiences.
INTERPRETIVE
In my prior attempts to use Wordpress for criticism, I forgot one major component: tags, which are topics that can be accumulated to one webpage so that if someone were to research said topic, it would narrow down the options. Not only that, but it help my blog become somewhat more known to people. After a month or so of blogging almost daily, I now have 18 followers, none of who I know personally and just happened to stumble upon my page.This is essentially because generally my pieces would be shared in a classroom environment with people too familiar or younger than I, and that's something I wanted to stray away from. I was aiming towards and older and broader audience of bloggers who were not gravitating towards just fiction pieces. I wanted to share my opinion and here others' as well.

APPLIED

Ultimately, this helped my answer my EQ because it showed me exactly what people want to read about. Often when someone in my Wordsmitten class shares a piece, they sound either dull or generic, as in it's the same thing week after week. But on Wordpress, where I posted various types of pieces, I received opinions from different audiences as well as approval from different age groups. Depending on what type of writing group one is interested in joining, it is important to know who your target audiences is and what you expect to get from them. Because I'm still at a young age and many of my posts weren't all too constructive, and were more or less rants, I knew I wouldn't receive any distinguishable feedback. But the attention that my blog did receive was rather surprising. Every other post that I published either received likes or a comment, which was more than what I was asking for. I heard experiences from other people going through the same things I was and they gave me advise on how to deal with it.