Frankly, Get Down Liberty's posts are hilarious and stand out due to their distinct voice. The first post of hers that I am going to examine is one that she initially posted on Feminist Film in which she analyzes the Degrassi: The Next Generation episode where Emma gets her period.
First, Get Down Liberty's diction (essentially, her word choice) allows her to establish a casual, conversational tone; it feels like she is discussing Degrassi with a close friend. She starts the blog with a direct question addressing the reader, "Can we talk about the Degrassi episode with Emma's period?" which already makes the post seem casual, as though she is having an intimate conversation with her readers. Then, she writes, "No, no, let me try that again, without masking the fully glory of the moment - can we start out with the episode with Emma's period blood?" By using the words "we" and "me" in this opening paragraph, Get Down Liberty wisely starts off her blog in first person and also includes the reader with the term "we" in order to make it seem more intimate and personal. Also, through her clever phrasing, in which she stops herself and then repeats the question, albeit slightly differently, she is able to re-emphasize what she is saying and bring some light-heartedness to her opening paragraph while directly involving the reader in what she has to say. Also, when she repeats the question the second time, she changes the phrase "episode with Emma's period" to "episode with Emma's period blood," thereby emphasizing the word blood.
In case it wasn't clear enough that she's discussing period blood already, Get Down Liberty continues, "The big dirty red stain on her khaki skirt?" Cleverly, this question does not contain any verbs and thus is not a complete sentence. As a result, this fragment jumps out at the reader and, by lacking any verbs, forces readers to pay close attention to the adjectives in the sentence ("big," "dirty" and "red") which describe Emma's stain. By emphasizing the word blood in the earlier sentence, and now emphasizing the words big, dirty, and red, Get Down Liberty refuses to shy away from the allegedly gross, uncomfortable topic of women getting their periods. These descriptive words help illustrate a girl getting her period clearly and vividly. Thus, she fearlessly embraces this taboo topic by describing and emphasizing Emma's period in all of its glory. By emphasizing this, she communicates to her readers just how important it is that Degrassi, too, did not chicken out or avoid confronting this uncomfortable subject matter. Instead, Degrassi tackled this topic head-on and depicted Emma's period in surprisingly graphic detail with refreshing candor.
There are other great uses of diction throughout the blog as well. The writer continually uses first person to make the blog seem like an intimate conversation, employing phrases such as "I mean," "let's talk about," "in all my life," and "for my part" frequently. She also uses slang or conversational discourse throughout the blog in order to puncture her writing with sass and humor. For instance, she uses the term "BFF," as well as words like "corny," "butt," and "crush" which certainly do not belong in an academic journal. These slang words help give her writing a young, hip vibe.
Get Down Liberty also infuses her writing with her own personality and opinions thanks to the content of her post. She doesn't just strictly analyze the Degrassi episode she's talking about, but often deviates from the episode to share her own personal views or stories. For instance, goes into a deeply personal anecdote about the awkward time she got her period at Princeton, jokingly refers to her life as being "made up of TV and movies and stuff I do while thinking about TV and movies," and also infuses many sentences with her own subtle commentary or opinions. For instance, she describes the character Paige as "reaching into her cool see-through box purse." By infusing this description with the word "cool," the writer manages to incorporate her own opinion on Paige's fashion into the sentence. While seemingly irrelevant to the blog, little personal touches like these only heighten the post's deeply personal vibe and make the post often feel more like a diary entry rather than a blog. Plus, adding the word "cool" only adds another layer of humor to her writing, as it is clear that Get Down Liberty is being sarcastic and facetious, since there is nothing cool about see-through box purses.
Perhaps most notably, the writing in this post stands out due to its beautiful, illustrative descriptions which allow scenes from the episode to come alive in the reader's mind. Phrases mentioned earlier like "the big dirty red stain on her khaki skirt" achieve this, as well as phrases like "gawky, awkward preteen" to describe Emma, "Paige's hand, chubby with babyfat" to describe teenage character Paige's hand, or descriptions of Emma "walking slowly, bowleggedly, to the nearest bathroom while her BFF, Manny, follows dutifully with a folder pressed up against her butt," which perfectly capture the awkwardness of the scene in which Emma gets her period at school for the first time. All of these vidid details make the reader feel like he or she is actually watching the episode first-hand.
Finally, the blog soars thanks to Get Down Liberty's savvy use of humor and sass, which clearly comes across in her writing. She manages to poke fun at Degrassi's melodramatic writing, with sentences such as, "For the uninitiated, Degrassi is a Canadian show that regularly mixes tropes from after-school specials and soap operas to showcase the full glorious horror of adolescence." She also makes fun of character names, such as the character of Spike, by adding that Spike is "called Spike... because she was a child of the 80s in a way that only fictional characters can be," and makes fun of Degrassi's bad writing in general, with asides like, "Degrassi writers like to give you the key to their plots on silver platters like that." Get Down Liberty also uses exaggeration to comic effect, like when she writes about Emma "standing in stained clothing, sighing over the loss of a perfectly good skirt and undies, her first sacrifices to 'Womanhood'" or Emma "worrying about her future breasts like they were an invading force." Both of these uses of humorous exaggeration help capture the monumentous, epic experience of a young girl going through puberty in a profound yet humorous, laugh-out-loud funny way.
Additionally, Get Down Liberty wrote a fabulous piece on her own blog about the sex scene between Clare and Eli.
Once again, Get Down Liberty uses casual, conversational diction in order to spice up her blog with humor and personality as well as an intimate vibe that allows the reader to feel like a close friend of hers when reading her posts. For instance, she sassily starts her post by summing up her thoughts on the sex scene with the single word, "Whatever." As a result, she manages to channel the teen girl speak of Degrassi in a somewhat facetious way in order to convey her ambivalence regarding the problematic scene in a witty manner. As always, Get Down Liberty also peppers her writing with lots of "likes" to channel her teen girl speak and also make her posts feel like stream-of-consciousness rants which capture the way she would casually discuss these subjects aloud with a close friend.
Get Down Liberty also uses casual diction to make her blog seem effortlessly conversational, employing slang like "wingman," as well as words like "ahem," "bleh," and "oooo!" These words all allow her to bring various emotions/personalities (sass, annoyance, and feigned surprise, respectively) to her writing and liven up her posts with dramatic emphasis.
In addition, Get Down Liberty employs lots of humorous figures of speech like euphemism and irony to give her blog her the distinctive brand of "funny commentary on serious issues" that she is known for. For instance, she employs euphemism with the phrase that Jimmy "can't, ahem, rise to the occasion" in order to humorously refer to inability to get an erection during sex. She also uses irony in her phrasing, such as when she ironically exclaims, "Oooo, little candles!" in order to sarcastically convey feigned excitement as her response to the sex scene, although she clearly actually had a negative reaction to the scene and did not feel that way at all.
She also effectively uses punctuation to get her points across. For instance, she smartly uses the tilda symbol (~) in the ironic sentence, "~This is so romantic~" when she is sarcastically feigning excitement as her reaction to the sex scene. Essentially, the tilda serves as a facetious way of expressing how the average teenage girl would write about the scene online, and she thus effectively mimics the way teen girls type on the Internet. As a result, she manages to not only makes fun of teen girl speak but also the sex scene itself. Get Down Liberty also uses other forms of punctuation as well; for instance, she uses lots of question marks to include the reader in her posts and make her blog feel like a dialogue by turning what could merely be definitive statements into rhetorical questions. She also uses exclamation points for dramatic effect, such as in the sentence, "Oooo, little candles!" discussed earlier, in which the exclamation point adds excitement, energy, and emphasis to an already funny sentence.
Finally, Get Down Liberty's paragraph flow wisely draws the reader's attention to certain key sentences. For example, in the third paragraph, she starts with an incredibly long sentence, but, as she grows angrier during her rant and wants to emphasize certain points, her sentences get shorter, culminating with, "Like getting upset that she could ever possibly rite about loving someone else in her own diary. Bleh." Her second-to-last sentence, while grammatically incorrect, smartly begins with "like," as she is continuing to list examples of ways that Eli mistreated Clare. By dividing this last example into its own sentence, and beginning it with the word "like," Get Down Liberty draws more attention to this key example of Eli's mistreatment of Clare and convey's Get Down Liberty's anger. Finally, by ending the paragraph with the one-word sentence, "Bleh," Get Down Liberty brings her rant to a screeching halt in order to convey her frustration with a concise word that effectively conveys her annoyance and sass. By contrast, in her last paragraph, as opposed to using short, choppy sentences like before to illustrate her anger, Get Down Liberty writes incredibly long run-on sentences filled with clauses and personal asides in order to make her writing feel like a spoken rant and stream-of-consciousness as opposed to a professionally written article. The "rant-like" quality of her blog is what makes it feel so distinct and personal to its readers.
Clearly, Get Down Liberty is a fabulous writer whose individual voice comes through remarkably in her short but sweet posts which pack tons of personality and punch.
FEMINIST FILM/TV RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK: REPULSION
Check out Roman Polanski's horror classic, starring the great Catherine Deneuve, about a rape victim whose trauma and fear of men completely destroy her life and cause her to start going insane...
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