My initial impression was a sinking feeling caused by the blog being a dark shade of lime green against a light shade of Lincoln green. This is a very bad contrast, meaning poor legibility. This initial poor impression was deepened by the realisation that the blog lacked capital letters. I expected to find the introspective scribblings of a semi-literate teenager. My tearing hand reached to my hair.
I found nothing interesting, funny or gripping in the actual content. It’s a personal journal that would sit happily on the hard drive. It does not speak out to the audience, it appears to be oblivious to the audience, and there are references to places, events and people that have no meaning to strangers. There is no attempt to explain and no sense of a personality behind the blog. Her actual use of English is of high standard – non-capitalisation apart. However, she does tend to use colloquialisms which are near unintelligible to me (I am a foreigner), and which, I suspect, are an unconscious imitation of the books she reads. Many of her entries refer to the books she read, but, like many of the other entries, require a prior knowledge to appreciate. I was struck by her seeming existence in a vacuum, with no reference to the outside world, that I searched for her September 11th entry. That only proved how trite and insular she is.
The design is unexciting, with few ‘extras’ – no “About” page, no illustrations, and the rare contrast coming from the bright orange of “Powered by Blogger”. It is the equivalent of a piece of paper with some addresses in the margin. She made few entries in July, and June is non-existent, or unarchived.
I would strongly recommend not visiting this site. The target audience is Lauren, and, possibly Joe and Paul. That’s it. The writer is highly proficient in sentence construction, and I would be happy for her to write reports for work, but that does not make her a writer. There is nothing excrutiatingly awful about the site but very little of any merit.