What my past hides ~ Only you know
Style
The layout is yours, I presume, and you get props for that. But it's, um, scary. What is that false face, divided in two, around an annoyingly scroll-bound entry box? I don't know what it is; I imagine some sort of elfin illustration garnered from a local renaissance festival? And what does WS write in...is it Macbeth? False face must hide what the false heart doth know. In any case, you need to change those links. They're too hard to read, blue and all, and the white vlink color is equally illegible. You do have a profile, and a bio, which should be a useful tool for the reader. But yours is abstract, and evasive, and incomplete. You ask for ideas for things to post on your "get to know me" page. One big problem is that you roam about in the past tense: "my name would be Byron," "my grades used to suffer," "my marks where (sic) high." So what? Why would your name be Byron? Why did you have poor grades? Why is your job boring? Why do you love photography? You get the picture, no?
Substance
You aren't afflicted with the "describe my day" malady: you really can be very descriptive and involved with your writing. Recently, you're into reading the Bible, and linking parts of your life with passages that you read. This is executed particularly well in this entry. But honey you really need to learn a few basic things about grammar. In this entry, you make several inexcusable mistakes. Please, please learn the difference between "its" and "it's." It's so easy. Seriously. "It's" is a contraction. It means: it is. It's raining. The dog comes inside because it's cold. And "its" (without apostrophe) is possessive. Use this whenever you are writing about something which belongs to a subject. For example, "The dog stuck out its tongue." "The child couldn't find its hat." Got it? And learn the difference between "too" and "to." The former, "too," means "also." I want to go "too." I also want to go. The latter, "to," indicates location. "I want to go to the store." Put together: I want to go to the store, too. Or, better: I, too, want to go to the store. Please email me with questions. If I could rid the world's writers of these grammatical habits, I would be a very happy girl. Furthermore, your ability to construct meaningful prose (this entry is nice) is undermined by the grammatical shenanigans.
I know that you don't spell well, and you tend to write (sp) after "difficult" words. Why not use the spellchecker? This poor spelling infliction is painfully obvious to me in your, gulp, poetry.. Straight up, here, you cannot write a damn poem (maybe I should stop my sentence here) about a dictionary (or I could end it here) and misspell (it gets better) the word alphabet. ALPHAFUCKINGBET. I have inserted the "fucking" to demonstrate to you that words are more than a series of letters. Alpha+beta=alphabet. No one I know spells the letter "alpha" as you have: "alphe." Beyond this...this painful nightmare, please consider what you're saying when you write poetry. I'm going to translate this, er, poem, "The Dictionary," into prose. Ready?
The dictionary is a reference book which contains an explanatory alphabetized list of words. It is a book listing, a comprehension, or restricted selection of words. It identifies usually the phonetic, grammatical, and semantic value of each word. Such a book listing: the words of a particular category. A book listing of language translations. A book listing of words or other linguistic items.
This clearly makes no sense at all. A book doesn't list a comprehension. The words aren't organized into any categories. I'm going to stop now, because I'm damn positive that I've put more thought into reviewing your poetry than you put into writing it. And if I allow myself to glance at your poem "The Thesaurus" once again, I might freak out.
Suggestions
Stick to prose, or read some decent poetry (some might say even the Psalms qualify as such) and try to imitate it. In your best entries, you're delightfully honest with yourself. It is nice, actually, to read about someone who takes her self, and her words, seriously. Your entries about religion aren't fanatical nonsense; rather, they honestly connect what you read with the way that you understand yourself. Do more of this. You need to push yourself to become not just a keen observer of the world, but also a skilled participant in the world of words. Get the grammar stuff straight. Learn to use a spellchecker.
B-
You get this grade only because of your diary's grammatical earthquakes. I enjoyed reading this journal far more than the last I read. Except the poetry.
