Review on Elinor's Blog Post

http://divebeneaththesurface.blogspot.com/


I recently read Elinor's blogpost about "The Fault in Our Stars," by John Green, which has been getting a lot of buzz lately. I usually don't enjoy books about cancer (they're depressing and often simplistic) but from her post I got a really good sense of what the book is about and even want to read it now.

I thought that something Elinor did an unusually good job of balancing out summary and reflection. Many of the blog posts (or anything, really) I read are either very descriptive and boring, with little insight, or very deep and reflective with no background information, leaving me utterly confused as to who these thoughts are about. Elinor explained the situation, then jumped into analyzing the character and infering on why Hazel (the protagonist) acts how she does. On a related manner, she also structured her post really well; her paragraphs were flowy and topical, and the order they were in made perfect sense.

She also empathized with the character, which really added a bit more of her writer's voice and personality into the post. Just from reading the post I think I can empathize with Hazel, too. Elinor talks about cancer and the effects it can have on your life, which really made me think more about how much I take for granted and how much I do not understand. My dad has thyroid cancer, and I can only imagine what a horrible experience it would be to be a young girl with that type of illness. I am really very grateful that I am healthy. Elinor starts the next paragraph predicting what will happen next in the bok based on  the main idea, which I think was a really smart thing to do. The main idea and prediction are both very interesting and signifigant, and she did a great job blending them together.

I think that this is one of Elinor's best blog posts. Part of the reason I chose it was because I was interested in the book, but it was also her good writing that made me write this post on that. The post was complete, good gramatically, and flowy, with big words that actually served their purpose(es) instead of merely being there to be there and be big words just there. She did a really good job going in deep and thinking about the character but then also pondering so very kindly the world. Overall, I think that Elinor's greatest strength was balance; there was just the right amount of summary, description, reflection, personality, prediction, analyzing, and universalness (is that a word?)