I read three articles from the Slate website: “Organic Panic” by Christopher Beam, “This American Composer” by Jan Swafford, and “The Recipe Detectives” by Sara Dickerman. In all three articles, the style seemed like a casual, less-formal journalism. The writers have a sense of humor and throw in some clever lines here and there (i.e. “She even appeared on Sesame Street to champion the benefits of healthy eating. (Main criticism: no Snuffleupagus”)).

The first article is written much like a newspaper article, however, the font is at a readable size and there is white space in between each paragraph. The other two articles were divided up by audio clips and subtitles, making them a bit easier to read. The writing style for all was fairly easy to get through—the vocabulary is kept pretty basic and the sentences are generally short and simple (other than Swafford’s second paragraph, which contains two sentences with 7 commas, 2 dashes, and 2 semicolons).

Of the three, I think Dickerman’s was the hardest to read closely. The article is about cookbook authors, and the article contains a lot of culinary jargon—something I am not at all familiar with. There are also a lot of names, a lot of titles, and a lot of places that are mentioned throughout the short article, making it difficult to stay focused and read closely.

The first and third article did not really spark an emotional response, but the second article did. I think it has little to do with the writing style, however, and more to do with the fact that it is about an American composer, Charles Ives. Being a music major, that is something I am naturally interested in. Other than the interest in content, the writing style is just too bland to spark any real emotional response.

I always prefer to have a hard copy of web prose in front of me to read, but if I had to, I wouldn’t have much trouble reading these articles from the screen. The really distracting thing was not the writing style, but the unending list of adds within the articles and on the side toolbar. It’s a little obnoxious.