Hello everyone,
Let's talk about something different today and let's go explore one of the most important thing that allow us (as readers) to distinguish between different blogs and bloggers within the same blog, even more than the actual interface or graphical style that in most cases tend to be very similar between blogs.
Yes, let's talk about the content that populate the various blogs we follow and more in detail about the writing style the blogger decide to use to present the information to the reader.
The writing style is an important choice for every blogger as it may differentiate between the number and type of readers the blog will have the possibility to attract from the total blog readers pool.
In order to understand what are the choices that a blogger has when writing a blog post, let's pick up five blogs from the many I follow as an example of the various styles present on the web and let's talk about the positive sides and negative sides of each approach before doing a final summary.
Let's start with Micchi's "Hau Omochikaeri" blog and more in detail about his weekly news posts on the erogè/visual novel world.
Micchi's style reflect what you could see on many news headline on many online newspapers and is one of the style that recently is getting "re-used" a lot on the blogging world.
It looks professional in terms of visual style and the actual content is simple, easy to read and goes straight to the point pointing to the source of the news with many links and little-to-none personal comments.
It is a writing that attract lots of peoples who are searching for the latest news and information (good), but is at the same time a style that doesn't allow for big discussions and don't create any sort of community relationship between reader and blogger.
The second blog to get analyzed is Marth's "Marth's Anime Blog" and to be more precise on his stripped-bare episodic coverage of many current series.
His writing style is very simple and is generally composed of 2-3 paragraph with an episode summary and 1 paragraph of personal impressions over the episode that is being talked.
This is another of the common blogging style over the anime blogosphere. It has as positive side the clear separation between impressions and summary, but at the same time forces everyone who has actually watched the episode to directly skim through the summary to read the impressions.
The third blog we'll talk about is Algester's "Algester's Mind Dump". While his style is pretty much consistent with little changes over the course of time, I picked up the most representative post (with basically 0 images) from the archive to show up another writing style present on the blogosphere.
Did you get some painful headache after reading his post in the screenshot? Don't worry, it happens to all of us at the beginning. This writing style focus on the content, and not on the presentation giving us the dreaded wall of text effect with tons of information to read and understand in each row.
While this writing style actually gives lots of interesting info when you read it with care, it may turn off many casual readers who just found randomly his blog on the net...
The fourth blog I picked up is a particular one. It's from Snippette and is named "Lemmas and submodalities" and represent one of the smallest nichè inside the already small nichè of editorial bloggers of the anime blogosphere.
The content vary from post to post ranging from Symbolism to Philosophy, but only one thing remain constant in all the articles that is something I call the "research of perfection" all within a blog post.
All the posts he makes are filled with one of the most complex and mind-wrecking combination of words and concepts that require quite a lot of time to read and understand fully.
It's a style that never grow old and you can read any of his posts even after months without losing anything in terms of enjoyment, but at the same time it reduce the number of possible readers to a small selected fews who has the time and the knowledge to be able to read his essays!
As fifth and last blog we have M3rry's "Verbal Rubbish" that contains many random visual novel related posts with a very interesting writing style.
The posts are easy to read (as long as you know some common WEB words), written with a personal language that is easy to relate to.
The colloquial style used permit everyone to join in the discussion without feeling weird and he gives off some "friendly" vibes when answering to comments of random external readers.
While lacking the authority that only a professional writing style can give, this style is one of the best to create community of people talking about the anime/visual novel world.
While I just presented five of the styles present on the blogosphere, there are many others out there to find just by browsing random blogs. The real question is, what is the "best" writing style out of these?
I think the best style for each blogger reside in what makes the blogging hobby fun, in these ten months I tried many writing styles ranging from the professional one to the simple-and-down-to-the-point-episodic one.
In the end I stabilized myself into an episodic simple writing style that may be resemblant of M3rry's colloquial style, without giving too much care about trying to sound professional, but keeping some sort of consistency between posts.
The results in terms of readership are very different between the various styles, but there is no point writing if you aren't getting any fun out of it or not? :P
I still would like to change a bit and try other writing styles as well, but it's very difficult is to change how a particular blog works especially after many months of blog history and a consolidated readership...
I suggest anyone starting up a blog in these days to try as many styles as possible at the very beginning in order to clearly understand what is the ideal one for him. :)
And you fellow blogger? What is your current writing style as a Anime/VN blogger?
And you fellow reader? What is the writing style you enjoy more as a reader?
See you soon,
feal87