Voice

After reading blog posts by ClownInPathos, I was able to connect to the author almost immediately. Why? Because it is evident that Lin has a very, very strong voice. The readers immediately understand her frustration with Chinese parenting styles and how she adores the American Culture through her distinctive voice. Her voice is consisted of simple diction, extensive use of punctuation to form concise paragraph structures, short simple sentences, metaphors, and lots of emphasis on words and phrases.

Lan’s word choice isn’t exactly colossal. In fact, she uses very common, one-syllable words to get her point across. For example, in her blog post America you made it so easy to hate myself, she stuck with the simple word choice, hate, instead of using other more complicated words to voice her emotions toward her Chinese parents. Through the simple, yet strong word hate, it gets her point across directly to her viewers on her mere detest towards her Chinese parents. Furthermore, to emphasize the hate, throughout her blog post she repeated the phrase “American, you made it so easy to hate myself,” to get the point across rather then choosing a stronger word like abhor, loathe, or despise. Also, through the repetition of the word, viewers are able to perceive her strong negative emotions and her stand against Chinese parenting is made obvious.

Secondly, Lan uses a lot of ellipsis in her blogs. Through her constant use of ellipsis, she effectively forms short paragraphs that conveys her message effectively and forms her voice.  When one look closely at Lan’s blog, one will see a lot of “…” in either the beginning or the end of paragraphs. The reason that Lan uses ellipsis often is because she wants to cut off the reader’s minds and make them really think what she’s about to say next. For example, in American ideals let me dream, she said, “...But I don't want to assume that you know this information also...” to make the readers think what she is going to say next by building tension in her sentences and leaving in an intentional silence. It also gives the overall blog a more conversational quality as it hints at Lan’s thinking process with the ellipsis. Also, the ellipsis serves as a point for emphasis in other areas. For example, in the same article Lan said, “well, it all goes back to college...”, which grabs the readers attention and focus on what she has to say next. It also suggests her recalling from her old memories in college with the use of ellipsis. Because of her common usage of the ellipsis to emphasize different phrases, there are lots of short paragraphs that are easy to read, coupled with simple diction; the overall readability of Lan’s blog is very high.

Next, going along with the simple theme in the blog, Lan mostly uses simple sentences to present her thoughts on Chinese parenting. If one read closely into her blogs, she rarely uses complex or compound sentences. She likes to stick with short sentences that can easily and powerfully deliver her message. For example, when she said, “ [Chinese culture] held me back. I can never dream,” she could have easily made that into one compound sentence. However, she chose to use two simple sentences to emphasize how much the Chinese culture was holding her back. By having two simple sentences, it forces the readers to pace out and also adds on to the conversational quality of her blogs and she voices her thoughts through simple sentences as if she were recording a video.

Lan also uses a lot of metaphors in order to better depict to the readers as to what kind of struggles or frustrations she is facing in life. Lan uses metaphors to get straight into the point and creates a sense of familiarity with the readers so readers can better understand her depictions. For example, in American ideals let me dream, she said “present China is an illusion just like past Japan was,” to show that the progress that China is making right now resembles of a time when past Japan was gaining world power. By using metaphors, Lan helps the readers better understand her content as readers are able to make comparisons.

Lastly, Lan uses a lot of visual effects to further increase the readability of her blog and highlight her key points. The topic that she discusses, Chinese parenting, can often times be seem as a dense topic. She fully understands that, and knows that if she wants to grab more readers, she has to make her blogs simple and easy to read. For this reason, as the points mentioned above, she tries to keep everything very simple, from word choices to sentence choices. However, there is more to her secret. Lan not only loves to CAPITALIZE important words or phrases that she wants her reader to pay extra attention to, but she also uses different colors on words or phrases. Through this, when readers are skimming through a dense topic, they will instantly find the key points.

Overall, I do enjoy Lan’s voice. It is powerful, and it is a part of her character and personality. She was able to communicate her point of view regarding Chinese parenting to the readers so passionately (it’s quite a dense topic) that it is something that I want to be able to do as well.