A Favorite Blog

I often struggle with how to format my blog. There are many aspects of blogging that I fail to understand.  While writing a blog post I think about the following: different ways to express myself, what to say, what’s actually appropriate to say, how funny I should be, how serious, how formal, and how much I should share about myself. Recently, in a moment of frustration I wrote a blog post about how terrible having mono this semester had been. I immediately regretted it after posting. It came off as too personal and whiney.

Reading other blogs can help a writer to generate ideas of their own. I once had an English teacher in high school tell me that your writing style is often reflective of the writing you read. We tend to imitate the writing styles of other writers whether consciously or not.

While searching through the various blogs for our LHSP class, I found very different examples of blogging styles. While I was initially drawn to the blog, “Bookslut” for its kookiness and tendency to veer away from formal styles of writing, I became frustrated by the lack of structure to it. Some of the blogs seemed overly complicated and difficult to explore. Others, like the “Literary Saloon,” seemed too simplistic.

In my free time, I enjoy reading lifestyle blogs where the writer inserts anecdotes from their own life. It adds another dimension and immediately connects the reader to the writer. I think that when there’s a good balance between the details of the authors and the topic.

My favorite blog because of this was author Dani Shapiro’s “Moments of Being.” While she doesn’t necessarily discuss books that she has read, I really enjoyed the way she connected her personal stories with larger topics at hand. Her blog is very simple and easy to navigate, yet modern at the same time. 

Her writing style really drew me in. It is what I would love to emulate in my blog. It is very reflective and at the end left me with a feeling of peace. It’s writing like this that challenges the norms of the literary world that we have been taught. Blogging is changing the way people read and the way writing is produced.

She also provides links to her writing that are easy to find. However, I wished that she would add reviews possibly of other literary works? Although, I understand that this blog is in part a vehicle to promote her writing. 

It works though, I am now curious about checking out her more formal writings because I was able to explore her through the blog.