Along with the drastic speed of development in network technology, there come various ways of communication.
The weblog, shortened as blog, has soared in popularity worldwide in recent years.
Blogging is becoming a dominant phenomenon in modern life and it has drawn increasingly attention from the researchers as they realize the significance of looking into the new media.
In the past five years, bloggers have garnered headlines in journalism and politics.
However, aside from those well publicized cases by a small group of A-list bloggers, people have only an incomplete understanding of the entire blogging circle.
They know little about what average bloggers do and what language they use on their blogs on a daily basis.
This study investigates the stylistic features of the language used in personal English blogs.
It intends to explore whether the average bloggers use the average language in their posts and to discover the subsistent differences.
Findings show that blog language does have some distinct features of internet communication, to be specific, the preference of contracted forms and the second person pronoun on the lexical level; the abundance of exclamations on the syntactical level; the relatively shorter paragraphs and the extensive use of cohesive devices on the textual level; and other miscellaneous characteristics like the use of hyperlinks and emoticons.
In doing this research, a 30,000-word-sized corpus of average personal blogs was established.
Certain software was also used to help analyzing the data so as to achieve a more scientific result.
Thus, this paper is providing an opportunity to probe into this prevalent cultural force and analyze it in a more quantitative way.