Sunday, July 17, 2011

Can I blog whine for a moment?




This post is a departure from all things breast cancer. I just have to get this off my chest though...

UUUGGGGHHHHH... sometimes blogging frustrates me.

Okay. Feeling a little better now. I've been writing this blog for a couple of years now. And for the most part, I enjoy it. I am frustrated pretty often but its not the kind of frustration that makes me want to quit. It is the frustration that you feel when you know there must be an answer to your question but you cannot find it. I get frustrated with all of the technical issues of blogging -- what template to use, how to find advertisers, how to drive traffic, topics, SEO, blah blah blah. All the stuff that makes the sharing of my thoughts just a smidge like work. I don't like that part so much. But, honestly speaking, I don't hate it. If I did, I would have ended this blog after my last surgery (or maybe even sooner than that).  

But today, my frustration and whining is about something really annoying. The plethora of bloggers in the universe who simply cannot write. I'm not talking about folks who write short posts -- about one or two paragraphs -- because being succinct is not a crime. In fact, it is the "preferred" method according to many blogging experts. *shrug*  You can see how often I do that. (...uh, that would be never for $100 Alex)

I am talking about people who -- like me -- take to the internet to spit their own thoughts about whatever strikes their fancy and along the way gather up followers and commenters like dog hair on a new sweater. That is the good part. Building community is usually a good thing. My problem is that their writing sucks. How do you follow someone on a medium that is based upon literacy... who writes as though they are, well... illiterate? That's like loving a singer who can't sing. (Oh, wait... I might be on to something now...)

I just read a very ridiculous statement on facebook. It was funny -- not particularly true but interesting nonetheless. The writer of the statement was so excited about the comments that she was receiving on facebook that she immediately decided to write a blog post about it. Since this person was someone I did not know and had not heard of, I traipsed over to her blog to read the expanded thoughts surrounding this particular quote.

GOOD GRAVY! I thought my head was going to explode. Utter garbage. Run on sentences. Incomplete thoughts. Pitiful punctuation. It was a nightmare. And honestly, she never supported her initial premise. It was a headache. I noticed that she had a string of comments following the post which completely baffled me. It seemed that other people understood her gibberish. And found something great in it, something worthy enough of commentary at least.

I was baffled. How does that work?

I am not the grammar police by any stretch of the imagination. If you've read this blog more than once, you're quite aware that I write in a very colloquial style. I write the way that I speak and sometimes I use incomplete sentences and such. But how does it work that someone can post the literary equivalent of a spam email -- with misspellings, poor grammar, etc. -- and have tons of people following them, commenting (showing love) and providing incentives for advertisers to pay to be there?

Help! I need feedback on this one... what draws you to certain bloggers? Am I being too harsh about this? (I've been known to do that from time to time)

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