Voice Post: Let's Queer Things Up! By Sam Dylan Finch

2014 was a big year for mental illness in the media. Respected actor Philip Seymour Hoffman suddenly passed away from a heroine overdose after struggling for decades with his addiction. Amanda Bynes, the famous Nickelodeon child star, started demonstrating inappropriate and erratic behavior, both on social media and in her daily life, leading to multiple arrests, altercations, and psychiatric intervention. And most shocking of all, beloved comedy actor Robin Williams committedsuicide after battling depression, paranoia, and early onset Parkinson's disease.  

                                                                                                                

Blogger Sam Dylan Finch caught my attention in the same way that he caught the attention of millions of other internet users – by posting an opinion piece called “Amanda Bynes, Robin Williams, and the Spectacle of Mental Illness” criticizing the way our society treats different celebrities who clearly are dealing with mental illness. The post pointed out the idea that it seems the general public is incapable of empathizing or treating celebrities with mental illnesses as human beings with flaws (just like the rest of us) unless aforementioned celebrities were to pass away.

Finch’s article went viral, partially due to the subject matter, but also because he was able to effectively deliver the message he was trying to get across with a unique and strong sense of voice. His blog “Let’s Queer Things Up” has sinced gained a strong following, with over 5 million views since August 2014.

It’s no coincidence that readers resonated with his message and continue to read his blog. In order to further understand the different techniques Finch used to effectively deliver his message, I will be breaking the way Finch constructed his messaging in two of his blog posts written with very different structure and flow. The first is a recent blog post from February 2015 titled “A Guide to Self-Care for People with Anxiety” and the second is the original article “Amanda Bynes, Robin Williams, and the Spectacle of Mental Illness”.

Finch's writing style has a very strong sense of rhythm that creates a voice that is very colloquial because he writes as if he is having a conversation directly with the reader. He utilizes repetitive sentence structure and phrasing as well as quite a large amount of usage of the "comma" to accomplish this. This is obvious across both pieces of work. 

"Visualize a place that makes you feel safe, and imagine something soothing that you could do in that space. Find something that makes your body feel less heavy — something that involves good smells, good tastes, good feelings."

In this section of his work from the first blog post, you can see that he repeats the same notion three times regarding the importance of thinking positively by using your imagination. In fact, he uses the word "something" three times. In these two sentences alone, there are five pauses in prose that creates a very visceral sense of voice. 

Another distinctive quality Finch has in his paragraph shape and flow is that across all his writing, there is no sign of the "traditional" paragraph structure. Rarely is there any indication that he is putting together cohesive sentences together to prove a point, which then plays into a larger message. Instead, he writes much more stream-of-consciousness style and his writing reads very much as if he were speaking out loud. In both blog posts, you will find that he has no more than one to three sentences per "paragraph" before there is a line break.  In the first article, you can see more structure to his paragraphs, but only because he puts a title or "header" before each of the self-care tips he then continues to explain. In the second article, the different points Finch is making is not separated into categories at all. The entire blog post is one full page of mini-paragraphs. On one hand, it's difficult for readers to really be able to put visualize his main ideas and observations, but on the other hand the separation of paragraphs actually makes it easier to read because there aren't any large chunks of text that make it intimidating for a reader to approach the topic. 

In this way Finch is able to draw in the reader and his writing style leads to almost a conversation between reader and writer, but after the conversation is over may lack an effective long-term impact on why their conversation was important.