I enjoyed reading your blog Shauna. Thanks for leaving it open to your classmates! I don't think you need consider grammar a weakness any longer, your post looks pretty good to me. I have to confess, I am unclear of what we shoudl write about in our blogs. I chose a subject area for my first blog that had been touched upon in the course material and wrote a piece on that subject. I am about to do the same again for my next blog post. I'm really unclear as to whether or not that is the requirement. 

I concur with your emphasis of writer self-awareness as the path to increased vocabulary but I would augment it with reading — vast quantities of reading. One can quickly spot a person who doesn't read and who just watches TV or listens to the radio, they make the most basic of grammatical errors, the most telling of all is the would of, could of, should of error that results from the mis-hearing of the abbreviated form. To me that is always the prime indicator of a person who doesn't read; the other of course is the lack of expressiveness resulting from a limited vocabulary. No amount of writing can compensate for this, reading is required! Cheers Shauna!