as expected, acquaintances have been kind to my site. it began as a stunt double, standing in for phone calls i meant to make and e-mail i meant to send. ambition ended there, really - friends check in for a bit of my day, and the occasional stranger gets bored and moves on. no surprises.
i've avoided sweeping pronouncements; politics and religion are certainly part of my life, but they tend to ruin dinner parties. i dislike rants. strike that: i adore rants, but i've attended to the notion that one should pick apart small things rather than skate across great things. write what you know, ad nauseam.
i figured i was due for a kicking from a stranger - kidchamp lacks a comment box, so i sought punishment from the weblog review. ask and you shall receive -
...the blog lacked capital letters. I expected to find the introspective scribblings of a semi-literate teenager. My tearing hand reached to my hair.as expected, the review amused the hell out of me; i do feel guilty, however, about soliciting formal criticism for an expressly casual site. i'm also tired of being so conversational that i don't make sense. my breakfasts are lovely, but they've probably received all of the attention they deserve.
I found nothing interesting, funny or gripping in the actual content. It's a personal journal that would sit happily on the hard drive. It does not speak to the audience, it appears to be oblivious to the audience, and there are references to places, events and people that have no meaning to strangers. There is no attempt to explain and no sense of a personality behind the blog. Her actual use of English is of high standard - non-capitalisation apart. However, she does tend to use colloquialisms which are near unintelligible to me (I am a foreigner), and which, I suspect, are an unconscious imitation of the books she reads. Many of her entries refer to the books she read, but, like many of the other entries, require a prior knowledge to appreciate. I was struck [sic] by her seeming existence in a vacuum, with no reference to the outside world, that I searched for her September 11th entry. That only proved how trite and insular she is.
[...]
I would strongly recommend not visiting this site. The target audience is Lauren, and, possibly Joe and Paul. That's it. The writer is highly proficient in sentence construction, and I would be happy for her to write reports for work, but that does not make her a writer. There is nothing excrutiatingly [sic] awful about the site but very little of any merit.
i like the idea of comments, and i like the idea of an About page; expect them. i also like the idea of a larger audience; i'll try to earn it by treating kidchamp as Real Writing.
i'm tempted to write to my reviewer; i responded to september 11th with a ted hughes poem and a david foster wallace passage. ah yes, but i didn't explain what i was doing. more on that later.
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