Another Friday, it is time for another #EF – English Friday Challenge from BEC. Theme for this week is about what is BEC means for you. You can write anything for this challenge, as long as about BEC. You can write about the learning session, mentors, admins (perhaps), and also about some inputs for BEC. So… what am I going to write here *thinking*?
I think I want to write about this, how BEC effecting my blogging activities. When I was working in one of West Africa countries, I didn’t post on my blog like I used to. You can checked my 2014 report to know which month I was not actively blogging. But since August 2014, when I was coming back to Indonesia due to on-leave, I have had quite posting more actively on my blog again. And on December 2014, due to one of the famous blog and his giveaway for the whole month, I became active again with my blogging activities.
One of the post he chose to be posted on his blog was about AFTA. We, him and me, were talking about English in our life, then came along a friendly dentist who also like blogging, in order to be ready for global competition such as AFTA. Then, after the discussion on his blog, on January 5th, 2015, three of us launched Blog English Club, where we, blogger, can learn and improve our skill together.
I don’t want to talk about the history about the club, we already posted so many regarding its background on our own blog before it has its own blog. Instead of, I want to talk about how BEC effecting my blogging activities recently. The first effect I felt is that I am more confident to post consistently on my blog, at least one English post every week for the challenge. Are my posts have mistakes on my English posts? Of course, English is not my mother tongue.
But no worries, we make this club to learn English and how to practice it through writing. And we also have mentors, who are willing to share their knowledge to all members, to help us on learning English and practice it on our posts. As long as we are willing to learn, there are so many things we can get from them. There are several things I remember about writing in English from them, which are:
1. Never translate from Indonesian to English. This is the common mistake that we are, Indonesian, do in writing English.
2. Always check and recheck your writing before you publish it. Do some proofread.
3. Never forgot about the whole story. Connection between paragraphs are important thus people who read the post will get the whole picture, no different interpretation among them.
And those lessons, number 2 in particular, actually also have been effected my Indonesian posts. Like my yesterday’s post, I did a recheck before I published it and it reduced from 1,200 words to 890 words. I was amazed when I did it with the result, even though after it published, some bloggers said that it can be reduced more. Therefore, I really love BEC and its effect on my blogging life, but wait… I still have another story to tell about the other effect.
It is about the two persons I have mentioned earlier. They are considered as a pro-blogger, well, at least for me (and some others), they are. From them, I learn so much about blogging, such as traffic of a blog, why we do blog, what to blog, and many other. Every time we are not in a meeting about BEC, we were talking about blogging, sometime the green-backpacker and the it man joined the chat and asked the pros also. We exchanged links about blog, even though mostly I was the one who received rather than give a link.
And the more we talked (and reading) about blogging, the more I am interested in it. Recently, my search terms on google are mostly about blogging, such as Alexa rank, page rank, numbers of blogger, 2015 blogging life, etc. After reading those articles, I feel that I want to post things about blogging, based on my own experience as a blogger. Just like this post, I categorize it under Blog English Club and Blogging. By the way, the next post about blogging will be like Dani, Theme, how to choose, set and why I choose this one.
Let me end this post here by saying that BEC does effecting me in so many ways. How about you? I can’t wait to read all of your challenge’s post.