Sarah Kells: Outside Reading Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay: The Joy Of Photoshopping" by Oyl Miller.
Sunday, Oct 10
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2010/8/17miller.html
This essay my Oyl Miller seems to be a simple paper about how much he enjoys photoshopping pictures of Chuck Norris, and how he likes adding different pieces to his face for no apparent reason.  Reading deeper into this paper shows a different idea altogether: that changing a picture is much like a person's personality.  Although some things can be added to it, it can never truly  be changed from what it started as and it is futile to attempt to change it.
The paper is kicked off with the introduction of "Hello friends," and the tone becomes even more informal with the first person format ("I've already prepared the canvas") and rhetorical questions added: "Let's see, what kind of Photoshop image...?"  The informal tone makes the paper seem almost careless and lighthearted, and as I read it I was constantly thinking that the author appears to almost be making an inside joke that the reader is not aware of.
Diction in this essay is very immature, as Miller uses phrases such as "happy little -----" (which he uses three times) and words like "silly," "totally," and "magic."  He actually uses the word "little" nine times.  As a matter of fact, this entire essay seemed insultingly condescending to me as I read it.  When Miller said "Isn't that majestic, kids?" and "Now I'm just getting silly," I was hesitant to believe that this kind of word choice would be used in an actual published essay.
The grammar throughout this entire essay is also very condescending.  This is seen when he says he picked out a "real deep, dark, tentacley green," and with all of the sentence fragments he uses, for example when he says "There we go.  Happy little lasers."
The final paragraph switches the tone to a more mature, serious feel where he compares the picture to a personality.  This becomes evident through the diction and word order, such as when he says "Keep some reality in your fantasy," and "There are no right answers."  The diction is still very deficient, though, and the final sentence ends with "...feel like turning those happy little pixels into next."
Although the goal of this paper was clearly to be humorous and amusing, I was bored  by the informal tone used in it, and slightly insulted by the low level of diction throughout the paper.  This essay would not work well on an AP English test because one of the main goals of the AP English paper is to tell how advanced the vocabulary of the writer is, and this paper did not display a high level of vocabulary at all.