Voice Post
The story of a medium.com blogger The eSports Writer (addressed as Writer later) is well presented by one of his posts titled Battling Severe Depression (and P.S: It sucks), Feb 26, 2018. The kind of voice he established through texts is very personal, filled with implicit emotions and passions about eSports, which is not common for a diagnosed severe depression patient.
https://medium.com/@FionnOnFire/battling-severe-depression-and-p-s-it-sucks-e29d3513359f
Instead of depicting the foggy life under depression with metaphors and analogies, Writer chose to provide the readers with more genuine experience. In the following example, “It’s a pain to get up. It’s a pain to the shower. It’s a pain to do anything.” Writer applied a parallelism short-sentence structure that well demonstrates despair and suffering of a depressed man; the voice, here, is conversational, struggling and no sense of humor at all.
Writer imagines other people’s potential reaction with bold letters, “… ‘Why the hell is this guy so sad? His job is WRITING ABOUT PEOPLE PLAYING VIDEO GAMES! HE WORKS FOR ESPN! SCREW THIS GUY!’ …” It is reasonable for a depressed voice to express and emphasize strong emotions with the format rather than to convey through words and phrases. When it comes to sadness and hopelessness, Writer uses curse words like “suck” and other ones with an image like “drowning” to create the contrast between seemingly outside happiness and inner painful depression.
However, there is another contrast of life before and after Writer find a purpose, a hobby and occupation of writing that motivates him. “I’ll just keep moving forward.” Writer ended the second to last paragraph with this sentence and the last sentence is just another exact same sentence; it is not in strong words, nor does it implement any figure of speech, but the simple repentance represents the depressed struggling voice trying to inspire readers in living a positive life. Overall Writer did not employ formal or academic vocabulary and alternatively wrote in direct feelings and personal stories to create an ill while forward-looking persona.
https://medium.com/@FionnOnFire/the-world-awaits-f65a88b8e965
Another The eSports Writer post worth analyzing is The World Awaits, written in Sep 23, 2016. In this post, he recollected the on-stage experience during 2016 League of Legends World Championship. With a little introduction, the second paragraph is a short sentence reads, “I want to vomit.” It is very informal and oral though very straightforward in expressing the strong anxiety experienced. Writer also incorporated “sea of people” to graphically describe the crowded audience.
“Eventually, the screams turn into white noise, and the people in front of me contort into four black walls.” This is one of the most interesting metaphor-like methods in the post. It is the meditation process that Writer went through after coach and other stuff comforted him; the overwhelming sight and pressure gradually turned into metal support. The voice of this blog post is quite different from the last one, as Writer tried his best to construct a depression deep experience room in the first post and welcome readers into the exciting arena of World Championship in the latter one.
From these two posts, the voice and persona built by The eSports Writer is very personal, with an emphasis on sharing feelings, and a preference of explicit recording of events and experiences over metaphors and imaginary configurations. Some curse words and inappropriate grammar structures could readily be found in Writer posts, yet together with easy-to-relate scenarios and short sentences with strong languages.
