fallen verses

“What makes me fall in love with your WoW blog” by Larísa

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I like some WoW blogs more than others. There are blogs where I eagerly lick every single word that comes out. They’re so excellent that I always feel I’d wanted a little bit more. And then there are other blogs, some of them actually very well established, with hundreds or thousands of daily visitors, who leave me absolutely indifferent.
You could say it’s just a matter of taste, a gut feeling or something like that, but I’d like to explore it a little bit more. What exactly is it that makes me fall in love with a blog? What do some blogs have that other lacks?
* * *
After some pondering I realized that I should go further back in history to find the answers. – all the way back to the old Greece. I think the well known authors and philosophers from that era would have become excellent bloggers. They really knew how to catch an audience.
According to the classic rhetoric you should use your Ethos, Pathos and Logos, which is exactly what many of the best bloggers do, whether they think about it or not.

Go. Read. Probably ignore the links because they won’t mean anything to you (which is okay).

Back? No. Alright.

Okay… I think Larisa raises some really interesting points about breaking down stylistic elements of communication. The examples meant quite a bit to me, because I read those blogs every time they post, but for the rest of you, I hope the ideas made sense even without the highlighting.

I think those classical elements (ethos, pathos, logos) are pretty much inherent in human communication whether it’s formally assembled or purely random conversation. I also think the -os that is dominant is going to strongly alter the way the communication is presented. Not that there are hard and fast rules involved, but the more logos-directed, the more likely you are to find more structured, ordered types of communication.

Really, lists and thesis-oriented paragraphs favor communication with discrete and/or sequential data. Mostly informative.

Getting into pathos and ethos, there is a breakdown of the form into something more free-flowing (ah, no hating! sweeping generalisations!) where disparate elements can go together. There is no need to contain and, for that matter, you can conflate and mix metaphors all you like when you don’t need to prove anything!

Blogging fits an interesting niche, I think. As a method of communication, it serves well enough in any mode. (though I think there are limitations to the medium, but that’s another topic) Poetry, as a method of communication, I don’t think fairs all that well with logos. We tap into pathos, perhaps ethos. A lot of poetry is about bypassing reason. In a way, you could call poetry a form of propaganda. Political poetry (most especially from the “wrong side”) could easily be considered propagandistic. And anyone who know any literary criticism should be able to BS about the propagandistic nature of poetry about love, or nature (and how the poem/poet reinforces stereotypes/the patriarchy/heteronormativity/[insert -ism here].)

Is that all poetry should do? Should verse be instructional in a factual sense? There are some poems that present factual information. I think those are mostly side effects of the trope of the poem rather than the point. Would an instruction manual in verse be poetry or just a collection of really bad rhymes?

As part of a much larger question of what is poetry, and what is art, and what is artistic prose that is poem-like, we can consider the nature of poetic communication. I’m fine with keeping poetry in the realms of the emotive rather than the intellectual, but that excludes poetry that plays with language without meaning… it’s a fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy line.

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