LUDMILA ANDRÉA

The Fine Line Between Brilliant and Atrocious: What I Look for in Political Blogs

1) The National Review has a blog called ‘The Corner‘ and I had already read several posts before I even realized I was reading them. What I mean by this is, I found the posts not only extremely accessible but just easy to read in general.  The blog covers a large variety of topics and I found their writing style to be straightforward and fair. Obviously any writing will have a certain amount of biases attached to it, that is inescapable. But I found the posts on The Corner informative and entertaining and I really enjoyed reading the posts I read. I have added it to my bookmarks for future reference.

2) For me, the writing style of a blog makes a lot of difference. But that doesn’t mean that I can disregard what is being said even if it is written in the most eloquent of ways. For this reason, far right American blogs are just horrifying to me and I had to pick one of these as an example of a blog that I would never look at willingly (or maybe I would but probably only to ‘educate’ myself on what the other side is saying). Bill O’Reilly is not only one of my least favourite people on the planet but he is also not a very convincing, intriguing or otherwise good blogger (Behold: Bill O’Reilly’s Blog). So for this assignment I tried to set aside my strong dislike of Bill and simply critique the writing style. Overall I found it to be somewhat informative but I couldn’t help but sense a strong degree of entitlement and my somewhat short attention span was not having it.

Writing style is integral to a successful blog. A well-rounded, successful political blog is a difficult combination of fair reporting, accessible writing, and careful word choice. In addition to this, the personality of the writer/blogger can often times be easy to detect from a good blog post. For this reason, it is easy to separate which blogs one might read and might steer clear based on partisanship that may not even be explicit. For me, I read political blogs that cater to my interests and political concerns and tend to be left-leaning, but if it’s not well-written and doesn’t hold my attention, I will find my news elsewhere.