BLOG: da Internet à sala de aula

Abstract

Intimate writing diaries represent a text of a confessional nature. They show personal narratives with specific characteristics of the genre, with dates, subjective marks, informal writing and colloquialism. For years they were written in notebooks and locked up and hidden by the authors so no one else would read them. Around the 80 s, the adolescent planners came out. Using an industrially predefined model, the planners were filled out every day as a diary, but included new semiotic elements, such as photos, candy wraps, magazine clips, among others. They also differed in the presence of a participative reader: the texts were shared with friends, and notes and comments were written in the planner pages. With the arrival of the Internet, the diary and planner merged into the blog, which uses virtual resources to become an interactive, hypertext, and multimedia genre, emphasizing the reading and writing process for young blog producers. At the same time, writing is the major communication tool in the virtual environment, acquiring peculiar characteristics due to a faster communication and less typing. According to Bakthin s theory on the discourse genres and Marcuschi s digital genre concept, the purpose of this study is to perceive and bring out categories inherent to the diary and blog genres to analyze and compare them with the purpose of mapping a potential route for planners and blogs of teenagers, discussing the public-private contrast in intimate writing as well as their main linguistic features, noticing the advantages and disadvantages of their use as an auxiliary tool in the learning process of writing and reading in the Portuguese language. The study was motivated by the debate that digital writing can harm the development of text production of young adults, which was not observed, since the syntax structure is maintained and the variation occurs in the vocabulary, which doesn t interfere with communication. The results point at the use of blogs in education as a supplement to the learning material and as an incentive to reading, writing, building critical argumentation and standpoint, bringing the students closer to the daily school of life