Valerie Spears Blog Assignment
The Emotion Machine The purpose of The Emotion Machine blog is to help people with self-improvement and give indepth reasoning to challenges in life through various psychology research and discoveries. The voice of the blog is informative because the author consistently provides information on psychology books for almost every topic discussed in the blog. He also enlightens the audience on ways to improve with his own ideas and opinions. For example, in a post about exercising, he suggests that the audience find work outs that can fit naturally into a routine, like riding a bike to work, taking the dogs for longer walks, doing physical activities for fun instead of watching TV. The author backs up his views with psychological opinions and how to mentally prepare for working out. The author, Steven Handel, states that his blog is “better than your local therapist.” While the blog does not list the amount of followers on the website, it is booming on social media. The Facebook page for the blog has over 19,000 likes, and Twitter has 38.9K followers. The blog was started in June of 2009 and has over 500 articles. The audience for this blog is anyone who would need some extra inspiration to get through some of life’s challenges. Since the blog has topics ranging from sports performance to the science of psychology, it has a wide range in audience. A researcher interested in sports psychology might examine the sports posts for studies while college students might just want to casually read “Why it’s so hard to be nice in today’s world.” However, all of the audience would most likely be interested in some form of psychology. The blog is not very interactive. There are a few links that allow users to go to other websites or books that the author has mentioned. However, there are not any videos and hardly any pictures. There are not a lot of moving components to the website. In addition, there is no audience feedback because
Valerie Spears Blog Assignment the site does not allow comments. The audience can sign up for free “self-improvement stuff� and tweet, like, pin, or google share the article. However, there is almost no interaction or response to articles on social media. The author does post different things on Facebook and Twitter. He adds photos that are not on blogs. The downfall to his posts are that they are very similar on both Facebook and Twitter. There should be more variety and different quotes, photos, graphics in the posts. He tends to say the same thing or have the same photo on both Facebook and Twitter. He should give variety to the posts. The ethos of the blog is used when he cites psychology books and articles throughout his posts. As long as his audience understands that most of what he writes is an opinion based off the theories of the books/articles, than he can be creditable for helping people understand behaviors. The writer is not exactly argumentative or persuasive, but has a suggestive undertone. He states theories and suggests actions to take to help readers improve themselves. The writer hopes his readers will follow his suggestions and ultimately improve their way of thinking. The blogger does use some pathos. He carefully uses some descriptive language to take the reader to a setting. He uses photos that are related to the topic to help the reader visualize things even more. For example, he uses a photo of an athlete standing up, but slightly slumped with his arms to his side. In the background of the photo is two drawn arms that have raging muscles. This picture represents athletes using drugs to enhance their performance. It then goes into the psychology of being pressured and why athletes might feel that they have to do that. The author does use some logos, but not efficiently. There are hardly any statistics or researched facts within his posts. He seems to only quote theories and then discuss his opinion on them.
Valerie Spears Blog Assignment I think the blog speaks for people looking to understand some of the questions of why we do the things we do. However, I personally found it to only suggest his thinking and did not have good research throughout the blog. The blog is somewhat timely considering that a lot of Americans struggle with depression and anxiety and are seeking self-help. I would recommend the blog if students are struggling with some issues because he does suggest some good ideas.