OBLIGATORY LINK POST
I entered the New Zealand Bear's New Weblog Showcase contest, and one of the requirements for entry is to link to 3 of the other contestants. I’m chafing a bit at the thought of boosting the competition, but a deal is a deal. I'll try to say something nice, but no guarantees. Oh, and if you liked the Sea Story, make sure to link to it if you’d like to help me win. Now for the competition:
Finding the Still Point
Actually, a fairly decent piece. She gets you in a particular state of mind by describing a difficult yoga pose & goes on to relate how that feeling of balance relates to events in her life. It's well written prose that really gets the feeling across. I feel like I'm right there inside her tights with her.………um.……… yeah…… well, anyway, the only complaint I have is that she could've done a more complete job of summarizing specifically what Dorothea is doing for her so that the concept of "balance" would seem more concretely relevant. Dorothea’s post is pretty vague, and so the conclusion felt like it was lacking a little punch.
Noted With Relief
A standard blog entry technique, which I use myself, is to introduce a piece of someone else's writing, quote the piece, and then add a touch of one's own insight. Here, it's a case of "2 out of 3 ain't bad". He mentions a Robert Bartley piece in the WSJ, then quotes it, but fails to follow up with what he thinks it means in either his own life or relative to the world at large. The entry is incomplete, uninformative, and uninteresting as a result. He appears to do this a lot on his blog.
We're not going to beat Dean
This starts off well enough, some commentary on Howard Dean's much-vaunted ability to raise money via the internet, but it soon wanders off-point, devolving into a spreadsheet of Democratic fundraising numbers. This probably should've been broken up into 2 different posts, each being a little more focused & tightly written.
One more, “just because” I don't feel like being nice any more:
just because you can does not mean we will
There was a time, many years ago, when I wrote in all caps. I figured it was faster, and it saved me the embarrassment of failing to capitalize proper nouns. Fortunately, someone was kind enough to take me aside and inform me that it really would be better if I WOULD STOP YELLING WITH MY KEYBOARD ALL THE TIME and type like a normal human being.
This blogger has taken the opposite approach to qwertyian laziness, and screwdrivered off the shift & caps lock keys. Frankly, it's flat out a disservice to your readers to eschew proper grammar & punctuation. It makes the piece difficult to read with any degree of fluency, and it distracts from the message's content by focusing the readers attention on the message's form. Not that this particular Luddite screed against genetically modified food would be any more convincing even if it were written in a readable format. Overall, it’s just poor form, poor reasoning and a damn poor entry.
My piece, on the other hand, has vivid imagery, colorful descriptions, a link whose relevance is immediately apparent, and a witty visual punchline.
So, if you’re a member of the Bear’s Ecosystem, remember to link the Sea Story.
posted by Harvey at 11:30:41 PM permalink HOME
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