Autobiography Response

“A Short Autobiography of Dan Mahoney” although one of the least creative pieces kept my interest the longest, to his benefit his life has been pretty incredible. Mahoney writes as if in front of me verbally telling me the ins and outs of his life. Honest and humble he does not hold back the mistakes and misfortunes he brought upon himself and ran into along the way. Mahoney writes of being a police officer, a body guard to a celebrity, an author and a husband all remarkable things that people strive their entire lives to achieve and he did it all in one lifetime. Mahoney’s nonchalant attitude toward these accomplishments intrigued me as a reader, and wished he would delve deeper. I do have to admit that Mr. Mahoney’s lackluster attitude left me wondering if he was indeed telling the full truth, after some googling and amazon.coming I believe him. Mahoney’s straight forward presentation, no graphics, no funky formatting and no spontaneous fonts was acceptable. Without such an interesting life and easy writing style I doubt this would be acceptable. It was easy and quick to read without distraction, unlike Sverre Stolen’s “This is Me, a very short autobiography” that turned out not to be all that short.

Stolen placed his autobiography on thin broken rectangles making it difficult and confusing to read, I was unsure if I were to continue reading or if the next rectangle was a different component of his site. The dark blue and stark tan layered atop each other made my eyes hurt and made me itch to be done reading. For proclaiming it a short autobiography it seemed lengthy. After checking the word count at 625 words I considered holding in my complaint about its length, but decided against it. I blame the strange rectangle chapters on the unrealistic assumption of length. It makes the original scan of what you are about to read seem overwhelming and never ending. Not exactly the message you may want relayed, I know I thought twice about reading it only motivated because it was an assignment. The thumbnail sized pictures made it personal however, the pictures were not links to larger sizes and left me disappointed. Content was interesting, but, I did not relate to Stolen’s abrupt writing style.

After reading several web based autobiographies page layout is just as evident as writing style and content. Layout, pictures, music and video aid in the writers story telling. Monica Suzanne B. Castro’s plain white background and broken English in times new roman font was not the most exciting to read but her short clip giving the peace sign let you into her life in a way that her text could not. Personalization of these autobiographies creates a closer relationship to your reader, the ultimate goal otherwise, you would not be writing about yourself and posting it on the internet.