Why This Author Takes the Cake

Why This Author Takes The Cake

From the second the reader opens this webpage, Jen, the author of the text, has them in stichtes. Although she has ads on her blog, the reader doesn’t feel as though she is trying to convince them of anything, doesn’t force a product down their throats, nor does she even try to promote much of anything. She doesn’t need to. She’s like the popular kid that doesn’t have to try to make friends; she’s so funny that people just want to be her friend, or in this case, read her blog or maybe even attend one of her “cake tours”. Her motive is simply to share funny insights and photos with her readers, whom you can tell she values by the many, sometimes daily, blog posts she puts up. She accomplishes this by using aspects of irony, sarcasm, and an overall genuine, real sense of humor.

It is evident that Jen is fulfilling her motive. She has numerous photos from beloved readers all over the country, participating in her “cake tours”. Also, if you look under the “press” tab on her blog, you can see the many awards she has won, “Funniest Blog” being one of them.

Another reason the author is so successful at satisfying her audience is because of her awareness of kairos, or what is going on at the present time. As you read her blog you get the feel that you are reading a journal-- something completely up-to-date and even “hip”. The reader is always aware of what time period this author is writing in because of the way she writes.

Jen finds success among her readers by using different types of tools and appeals. She also appeals to the reader by practicing plenty of pathos, exercising ethos, and making the reader laugh with logical ideas gone awry.

The author combines pathos and ethos by asking her readers rhetorical questions, such as “Admit it: that's what you were thinking, wasn't it?” In this example she is using pathos because she is appealing to the emotions by being humorous, and ethos because she is sort of saying “I told you so” and by so doing building credibility for herself. This tool is working by making the audience think about what she is writing, and perhaps when they read it they’ll have a reaction like “Ah yes, that is what I was thinking.”

This text is dripping with irony. That’s what makes it so funny! For example, there is a picture of a cake that looks straight up tacky. It gets this tacky look because the decorator never “changed tips”-- when they were decorating it with icing they used the same tip to squeeze the icing out of the bag with, thus producing a “cake wreck”. So, under this picture the author writes, “Changing tips is for sissies”. Obviously the decorator should’ve changed tips-- Jen pokes fun at this cake by inserting this line. The reader sees the picture then reads the text, understands the joke, then get a good laugh out of it.

The author’s use of connotations is a tool that makes the reader laugh in some instances. She includes a picture of a cake that is obviously for a baby shower. The cake is the torso of a pregnant woman, with two small feet under the fleshy “stomach” part of the cake. So the author writes, “Ok, this is going to be toe-tally corny, but I'm doing it solely for the laughs..I get the impression you'd have to be a real heel to belly up to this baby shower cake. Eh?” Jen is using logos here because it gives the reader a little taste of what they are about to see. Even without seeing the picture of this cake, readers can kind of make a picture in their minds of what is coming up.

Like any gifted writer, Jen is good with imagery. One of my favorite instances where she uses imagery is under a picture of a cake that looks like a soccer ball. The cake reads “Good job hott shots!”, and the author is joking about spelling names wrong on cakes. Under this picture she writes, “Present this at the after-game dinner and just watch all those mopey, dejected faces turn into bright red, angry ones in no time at all!”. I laugh as I picture that hypothetical situation that she paints in my mind. For the audience, this kind of “wraps up” the author’s point. After looking at the cake then reading this, they are more likely to agree with the author.

Although I’m not into cooking, and can’t decorate a cake to save my life, I still quite enjoy spending time on this website. I find it very interesting to look at the pictures of all these different cakes. Although the whole point of this site is for tacky-looking, “wrecked cakes”, there are also some cakes that look extremely appealing and pleasing to the eye. This is another reason why I believe the author is so successful in appealing to her audience-- she doesn’t appeal to only one group. She appeals to people who like to laugh at the hilarious cakes, but anyone who takes cakes a little more seriously will enjoy this blog as well.

Like I said before, I like to look at the pictures on this website. One tool Jen uses to make the pictures so appealing is contrast. Rather, she posts pictures of cakes that have good contrast. A good example of contrast is the cake with a gigantic eye on it (the picture is of a cake gone wrong because the maker read directions incorrectly). The cake is purple, except for the white part of the eye. This creates a lot of contrast in the picture. This picture is appealing to the audience because the reader sees the cake right at first. The white part of the eye is in contrast to the rest of the cake, and that contrast brings the reader to see the focal point, or the eye on the cake.

Jen relies a lot on pictures of cakes that say funny things. These pictures would be completely worthless if her audience couldn’t tell what the cake said. Thus, alignment a key role in many of her pictures. For example, there is a cake that reads, “Congratulations WCI graduate in cursive”. The reader can instantly see what the cake says because it is all alined correctly. None of the humor is lost because the reader doesn’t need to “work” at just trying to figure out what the cake says. The audience appreciates this because it is a classic example of why they even have this blog.

The author also uses icons to get her point across to her readers. If people weren’t able to recognize these icons, some of Jen’s jokes would be useless. She uses icons to her advantage, like when she makes fun of the cake that is supposed to look like the Texas Longhorn logo. One of the things I noticed and appreciated when I read this text was the author’s use of fonts. I have almost no background in blogs, and I’m sure many of Jen’s readers don’t either. However, it was easy for me to navigate her blog because I knew right where everything was supposed to be, what was where, etc. It was so simple for me because she uses a different color of font, a bigger font, and a different background color to differentiate between each blog post. This technique makes the author look more credible, and people enjoy reading her work more. The different use of fonts makes this work easier and more appealing to read.

In conclusion, it’s easy to see why Jen has55 attracted so much attention to her blog. She has a natural, genuine sense of humor. Although she never comes out and says it, the reader knows that the author realizes that these are challenging, uncertain times for most of her readers. This is portrayed in her care-free, low-worry writing. She doesn’t bring up pressing issues that we hear enough about on the news, she is simply here to talk cake and joke with her admiring readers. It’s easy to tell that the author doesn’t need to work very hard at all to write something hilarious that will produce her desired results, those desired results being happy, “well-fed” readers.