Tag Archives: writing style

Day by Day

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Today marks the end of my brief return to daily blogging. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be going back to posting (at least) twice a week. It was fun, really.

I feel like I should use this time to reflect on what it’s been like to go back and forth between posting rates.

At some point this past year I realized how valuable each post could be when writing only twice a week. A post that could have been timely quickly becomes anything but just after a few posts. I’m not running a news site here which depends on how quickly I can get information out here or anything like that, but on more than one occasion I’ve felt my posts have less impact simply because I fired them too late. Not only that, but more frivolous entries were technically taking up the “space” of possibly better ones. The Fujoshi Files posts, for instance, sometimes felt like they were not worth being one of the two main posts during a week. This is why in some instances I had it be a “third post.”

Then again, I am well aware that this is a self-imposed limitation and that if I really wanted to I could still try to post daily. It’s just a preemptive measure I’ve set into place for when my workload gets heavier.

So over the past six weeks I’ve made 42 posts, including this one. I have to say, daily posting doesn’t feel as easy as it used to be, but I think it’s because 1) I haven’t done it in a while, 2) this being my vacation time meant I had to also juggle a lot of other activities, and 3) months of operating under a reduced schedule has changed my writing somewhat. With two posts a week, I could sit on a topic for much longer and massage the words out. I don’t have any conclusive evidence, but I think my posts had gotten longer and more elaborate as a result. Trying to combine that mindset with seven posts a week has been something of a challenge.

Another thing I’ve thought about is that idea of writing every day to get better and how this differs from writing enough for multiple days in advance. Writing one hour a day every day is probably better than writing 7 hours in one day for the entire week. Still, we’re all busy people and sometimes that’s just necessary. I myself had to build up a reserve because I was spending weekends in situations where I wouldn’t be able to post. All in all, it sometimes felt like too much and yet also not enough.

Maybe I just needed more hours in a single day. Wouldn’t have it any other way though.

What Does “Accessibility” Really Mean?

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It’s the final day in my matchup at the Aniblog Tourney, and compared to when the voting began, both featured matches have had a surprising turn of events, leading to extremely close vote counts. It’s been a lot more thrilling than anyone anticipated, and this unpredictability has me asking a simple question: What do fans want in a blog?

Writing Ogiue Maniax, I’ve gained a reputation for having an intelligent, yet accessible writing style that has given me a unique voice online. I am constantly working on improving all aspects of that voice, and I work towards having my posts be fairly easy to digest while also encouraging further thinking. But the Aniblog Tourney has made me well-aware that there’s always room for improvement and change, particularly in the area of accessibility.

Looking at anime blogs, the most popular ones tend to be “episodic blogs,” or ones that review shows episode by episode, laying down summaries and opinions on a (mostly) weekly basis. Most commonly, the latest shows are the ones that get episode blogged the most, though there’s nothing stopping people from doing the same with older shows. Not only do the more well-known episode blogs get more hits, but they also garner more comments, and as the tournament has showed us, have their fair share of staunch defenders and loyal supporters. In these, the most prominent of episodic blogs, their voices and content have reached a great number of people.

So I wonder, is the fact that I write in what’s often categorized as an “editorial” style holding me back from improving my accessibility?

I know that this sounds suspiciously similar to “Why isn’t my blog more popular?” but that isn’t really what I’m saying. Instead, it’s that anime fans appear to feel more comfortable with the episodic mode of anime blogging that has me thinking hard about the way I write. How can I reach more fans without scaring them off with meta-posts such as this? Would I be able to encourage more people to examine anime and their own fandom by adopting an episode blogging format?

Don’t get me wrong though, I like the way I write, and the basic format of Ogiue Maniax isn’t going to change any time soon. I’m not even sure if I would be able to even pull off Ogiue Maniax-style episode blogging all that well. It’s just something I wanted to contemplate. Though, if any of you are up for the challenge, be my guest. Out of what’s currently there, I think Unmei Kaihen‘s style is roughly where I’d be aiming for, as I always feel like I learn something from reading his Giant Killing posts.

On the Usage of Profanities

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It’s about my persona ain’t nothing like a man
that can do wha he wanna
Ain’t nothing like man on that you knew on the cornna
See ’em come up and fuck up the owna
See ’em throw up Westside California

-Ice Cube

Personally speaking, I do not prefer to curse. Even on this blog I usually try to find other avenues. But years ago I asked a relative with a similar stance towards profanity a simple question: If you’re quoting someone who cursed, do you quote them exactly or do you still put in your personal filter? His response was a hard-line  “absolutely not.” It was at that point that I began to think about the nature of profanity as a part of the English language.

We can substitute for cursing all we want (and I do), but that doesn’t take away from the fact that curse words carry a lot of meaning with them that is specific to the fact that they are considered profane. There is a certain and special kind of impact that comes from their context in society, and so when you decide to curse, you transmit a message well beyond the surface meaning or even the fact that it’s a profanity. It hints at emotion and personality and any number of things.

You might think that my description is vague, and that it applies to all words, but that’s exactly my point. They can be treated as a part of your vocabulary, like a tool from your toolbox to use when the time is right and when you want to or even need to convey a specific meaning. They can be misused and overused (as was the case with the act of “fifteening,” the addition of excessive profanities in old anime dubs in order to bump up their ratings), but that doesn’t take away from the fact that they say something.

At this point, my non-usage of curses is simply a personal and stylistic choice.

I occasionally find myself in an odd position where I am defending rap and hip hop from criticism. Now while I like rap well enough, I am not a particularly big fan of it, and so I feel kind of out-of-place doing so. However, I think that a lot of people misunderstand rap and hip hop specifically because of that liberal use of profanity on top of the general image of violence portrayed in a great portion of it.

So for me, my non-usage is merely a stylistic choice.

These days, I refer detractors to Ice Cube’s “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It,” as an example of how words and phrases that can be considered offensive can be used to conjure up certain meanings and images in order to send a specific socially relevant message. If you’re unsure yourself, go ahead and have a listen.

Obviously, there’s explicit content.

I think this sort of thing is relevant to anyone who writes, and that includes anime bloggers.

Worth Thousands Upon Thousands of Words

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This picture is here for a reason.

The Aniblog Tourney has me looking at a whole lot more blogs than I normally do, and as I check out one after the other, I’ve noticed a recurring blogging style that many sites follow, and I would like to figure out where it came from.


I also have no recollection where this image is from.

The style is defined by its frequent back-and-forth switches between between text and anime-related images. Sometimes it involves screenshots, but more often the pictures are high-resolution fanart with some kind of humorous caption underneath.  At their most extreme, images and text will alternate at a frequency of one image per paragraph.


Like so.

Now it’s easy to point fingers at “episodic blogs,” but that’s a little different from what I’m talking about, as a glut of screenshots is practically par for the course for an episode review. Also, many times they’re placed at the beginning, with a summary and then opinions following. This 1:1 paragraph to text ratio seems far more common with editorial-style anime blogs.

So I’d like to know, where did this style come from? Using the Aniblog Tourney itself, I checked out the highest-seeded blogs in the tournament to see if it was their far-reaching influence which provided younger bloggers with a stylistic framework, but in all of the cases the connection would be tenuous at best.

I might be thinking about this too hard. Maybe the desire to alternate paragraphs with images at a constant rate goes beyond simply anime blogging to the fact that there exists a space between every paragraph, literary voids which beckon to gain prominence by having art emerge from them. Or maybe it’s that people take screenshots and download fanart in batches first, and then look for ways to apply all of the images to an existing post. I’ve felt that desire myself, as it becomes hard to decide which images to cut from a post, a decision almost as difficult as having to cut out extraneous paragraphs that kill the flow of a post.

Speaking of which, the reason why I don’t really throw in a large amount of images into my posts is because an excess of images has the potential to be detrimental to the writing itself, interrupting the flow of a post as much as a superfluous paragraph, if not moreso. Not to say that it’s impossible to write well with constantly alternating paragraphs and images, but you risk cutting off your writing at the knees just as it’s starting to go into a full sprint.

So if you’re a fan of the aforementioned style of blog-posting, tell me, where did you find your inspiration, if any at all? If you really enjoy those types of posts, what in particular do you like about them?

Am I “Qualified?”

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This is one of those weird blogging about blogging posts. If you have no interest in waxing philosophy on such matters, then I suggest you go watch some anime (because anime is awesome).

If you look at the way in which I form ideas and write them out here at Ogiue Maniax, you will see that I have a tendency to qualify statements, taking simple sentences and complicating them in order to fully explain what I mean. Generally my goal is to remove as much ambiguity as I can (unless intended), but it can be a dangerous habit that can lead to strong assertions being weighed down by too many technicalities.

It’s not so much that I dislike the fact that I qualify statements so often(ah, there it goes!), but rather that I think it’s a good thing for me and other writers to be aware of. We can then know when it is appropriate to try and clarify in great detail what we’ve said previously, and when it is best to let something just stand on its own merits (in my case, this usually takes the form of a bad pun). In a manner of speaking, it all comes down to “how much should you say?”

The other major pitfall of over-qualifying statements is that if done incorrectly it can make your words seem as if they are constantly contradicting themselves in order to keep your opinion “correct.” That’s something to really watch out for.