A brief late-night observation

I slept until almost 2:30 PM my time, so me being awake at nearly 3 AM CDT isn't that shocking. Not in the mood for reading a novel right now, I decided to catch up on some of my blog reading (since I've barely visited any blogs the past few weeks), when I noticed something, something that perhaps I had thought about briefly before, but never really had bothered to write much, if anything, about until now. What I found myself noticing when reading through the reviews, interviews, and other assorted stuff on several of the blogs was a distinct lack of a "liveliness" to it.

I'm not the most informal of people when writing. I have had elements of a formal education in how to communicate my thoughts via the written form, but I'm also not super-formal when it comes to writing. But I do try to put something of myself into what I do write; having a distant, journalistic approach to blogging isn't my thing. I use first-person. I worry in places, ponder in others. Occasionally, joke and every once in a while I'll cut loose with a rant or a snarky reaction to something. I'll talk about my past experiences with depression and work-related stress (while never mentioning my places of employment by name, as I do believe in some personal/professional boundaries), all in the name of showing some facets of my personality.

While no one has to do any of the above or more, sometimes I'm reading through a blog and it's as though the person operating it has largely chosen to remove him/herself from the material being presented. It seems as though for many of the blogs that I've read, that the blogger has taken a fairly passive role to the material s/he is presenting. Yes, some will use the first-person on occasion, but it often feels tacked on, as if s/he were writing a plot summary and then decided to use a paragraph or two at the end to interject his/her opinions on the matter. Such things feel bolted-on to me, as if two separate things (description of book, reaction to book) are forcibly combined, rather than an integration of the two taking place. While useful for many as an indicator of how the reviewer reacted to a piece, as a review essay, it is rather wanting to me. Something that I too have to take care to avoid, come and think of it, although I do try to smooth out the differences between the description/opinion by mixing and mingling them a bit more.

Furthermore, when several of the blogs stray away from writing reviews, they feel more like report pieces than anything that would include that person's reactions and assessments of what has been reported. Don't just share that X is coming out, why not spend time explaining why X has had some importance in your life? Some bloggers have made attempts to do this, but sometimes it's hard to tell.

This is not a negative assessment of others as people. If anything, it is a piece that sadly notes that too often I want to know more about the people behind the pieces, but what is revealed often seems bland and uninteresting, as if the people writing are too reluctant to reveal much about themselves. Then again, it could be that I'm looking to go further too much in too many places, but hey, what else would you expect from me, based on my own posts and commentaries over the years?