04/04/2003
This is a review of sydney453.diary-x.com.
Content - 40/75pts.
[-]Execution - 25/45pts. Dorothy Parker! But then don't call your own entry "trite." Self-deprecation is a stupid trend, and it should be avoided, especially since the entry really isn't all that trite. It's somewhat trite. In any case, you should be a shameless self-promoter. If you think it's trite, you know for certain that I won't like it.
I hate dream sequences. And here's another one. (Scroll to the bottom.)
The diary is your creation. You are the only judge of how much the diary fulfills your own personal needs.
But I am the judge (appointed by you) of how well it fulfills your reader's needs. And your readers need to be entertained or moved. Dreams, especially other people's dreams, give nothing to readers. For this reason, they don't care about your dreams. I don't care about your dreams. Of course, I don't care about you at all, except however much you motivate me to care about you by your delicious writing. Keep that in mind when you write diary entries for strangers.
On this page, you wanted to write about how much you hate Avril Canada. (Or Avril Linguini. Some people just cannot manage that girl's last name, and I'm one of them.) Listen - Avril came out in 2002. You are too old to have to be exposed to her! Save yourself!
In any case, in the entry, you leaped off onto a tangent and discussed fashion magazines instead, which you found to cater to Avril-lovers instead of Adult Women. They're fashion magazines! What'd you expect? Additionally, I begin to think that their petty, idiotic articles stunt your ability to write an entry in which you convey your disgust of that particular form of media compellingly. My suggestion would be to abandon them completely. Also abandon the Avril/teen term "pissed off" and those dull declarative sentences. However, this entry would have been difficult in any case for you to write, of course, since you do have to justify why you have a subscription, which you never really do, creating a hole in the entry that forces your readers to fall off into pointless oblivion.
I forward the argument that people who read fashion magazines tend to not make good writers, even if they despise what those magazines have become.
I thought that this entry was going to make me moan. Read that first paragraph again and tell me if you want to continue. Declarative sentence about painting that a third grader could write. Then another declarative sentence that a third grader could write, also about painting. But it picked up a bit at the conversation, which leads me to conclude that all of your TV/movie loving has made you adept at dialogue.
Amusing - I don’t curse too often, hell, the last time I had a drink. So you don't curse too often? (Damn, hell, goober.)
And this entry sums up almost all of your superficiality. I think, however, that it doesn't induce a blinding rage, mostly because you're aware that you are and you joke about it. Or maybe it's feigned. Whatever the case may be, I don't find myself disgusted, as I usually would be.
Of course, it is unnerving to hear you use television characters to aid your description of life, such as your less-than enthralling analysis of the woman who sold wedding gowns in this entry. Down with that habit.
And there you have it. The good and the bad. (And the mediocre.)
[-]Grammar/Mechanics - 0/10pts. Typo: I lobe interior design and architecture
From here: Except I’m loosing my voice [ You're losing your mind, and the belt is loose on the skinny man.]
From here: it has somehow made it’s way into a magazine
And that wasn't a typo! A few paragraphs later - the same mistake! Look: it’s distorted way of thinking
Same page: It’s not that he’s a bad writer per-say, it’s that I get an incredibly fake vibe from him whenever I read something he’s written or see an interview with him. [RUN ON!]
Homonyms. HOMONYMS. You're and your. This page: your going to hell!
Periods and commas go inside quotation marks, even if they're not a part of the quoted material. It's Rick "Morelli." and not Rick "Morelli".
If the quoted material ends in an exclamation point or question mark and it's the end of the sentence, don't add a period afterwards. Like you do here: Meaning I snapped, “What the hell is your problem?”.
If you were an ordinary person, I would consider you to have rather good grammar. But you're not an ordinary person. You are a self-proclaimed "grammar Nazi." And since you are a "grammar Nazi," I graded you much more harshly. It was just natural. My verdict? You're not a "grammar Nazi" or a grammar god or a grammar minor deity, even. Quit faking it.
In case you didn't believe me about the quotation marks, I went to the trouble to find proof that my quotation conventions are right and yours are not, unless you're secretly British, which I seriously doubt, considering that you're American.
[-]Readability - 9/10pts. What on Earth are you talking about? Other than that entry, you were rather readable, actually. But that entry left me at a complete loss. I wave my fist in a futile attempt to convince you that TV is stupid, and that's all I can do.
[-]Style - 6/10pts. You read too much for your style to be lacking this much. For example, you write that It's like, "Sweetie, I have years of kickboxing experience. If you don’t look me in the eye right now I’m gonna make you cry like a newborn baby."
The first problem is that it's unclear who's "like" that statement you're going to say. In any case, you shouldn't use the word "like" as a verb (it's not a verb). Break free of those teen fetters! And your sarcasm in the page was dull and redundant. Sarcasm is supposed to be witty, interesting, and bitter. You just said "oh, I love them" when you mean "oh, I hate them." That equals BAD sarcasm. There's no point to that sort of sarcasm because it isn't witty or interesting. That's the sort of failed attempt at sarcasm that has destroyed it as we loved it during its reign.
And then the simile at the beginning of that entry? Your head feels like an alien wants to jump out of it? Disapproved. And also disgusting. And then you had the gall to say that it's your twisted little way of explaining that [you] feel like crap. Your "twisted little way"? You sound proud of it. Stop that. It's nothing to applaud.
Layout - 8/10pts.
[-]Aesthetics - 5/5pts. The layout at the time that I reviewed it featured little bunny rabbits. Aww. I wanted to eat their faces, but, still, aww.
[-]Navigability/Legibility - 3/5pts. The links that aren't visited are a sort of light blue color. The background is either light purple or light blue. How hard is it to read light blue on light blue or light purple? This makes life difficult, especially on your archive page.
Try a dark blue instead. Find this line in your code: a:link {text-decoration:none; color:#aabbcc}, and change that color code to #003366. Don't forget the pound sign.
The fact that hovering over a link italicizes it shifts all of the links down ever so slightly on your archive page. This is ugly and annoying. To fix that, find a:hover {color:#ffffff; font-style:italic} in your code. Take out the font-style: italic bit and replace it with text-decoration: underline This will make it underline when you hover over a link, like on this site.
Contact - 5/5pts.
Updates - 5/5pts. I disregarded the first two months. Imagine that your diary began in February.
Errors - 3/5pts. Image on this page doesn't work. I understand that it's a quiz and probably the quiz's fault that the image doesn't work, but what're you doing taking quizzes? Nerd.
The links for previous/next entries and the last five entries don't show up. It is in the code, however, which is why there seems to be a block of empty space at the bottom of your pages. I don't know why it doesn't show up. I think it should. But, anyway, to fix that error, move that block of code into the table data cell that contains your main entry. Make sure you add a few line breaks between the entry and the first links.
Total - 61/100pts. And that's mediocre. Good day to you.
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