Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The Trouble with Blogging English

I never was engrossed reading blogs or content from the Internet until I began blogging. I remember I would only enter an Internet Cafe if there was something that I want to know about. To save time I only print the information and read them at home.
Some of these information that I researched were from highly reputable sites; so there is no need to doubt about their reliability. Among those are short stories from Philippine Literature and screenplays from Hollywood movies. I began writing at those times and I thought these works can be a big help to improve my writing, and that I could get any other sources apart from books and newspapers I read at home.
Since I landed a job at an SEO company as a content writer I began reading all bits of information in countless and countless of websites. Wikipedia, ezinearticles, articlebase, etc... I was literally overwhelmed because of too much information feeding my brain. I wasn’t into it because I had used to internalize every piece of Literature I read. Reading too much in a very short time and writing about them weakens my intellectual digestion.
And what worse is that what I was reading were bunch of craps (not all of them but most). I can spot grammatical errors, wrong spellings and awkward sentences without intentionally trying to proofread the content. There were even misuse of words and absurd sentence construction. Content are sometimes vague and irresolute. How can I write something coming from craps that I’ve read? How can I possibly write 3,500 words a day from unreliable sources?
Since then, I was stuck into reading bulks of content so that I can write topics I was required to. Lucky if I came upon a site which content are friendly to my eyes; if not, then it would take me much more time just to find a decent content to read and so I can start to write. To earn money, I don’t have time reading books anymore or buying a good book from a bookstore. I was somehow persuaded to continue what I was doing. I thought that I was demoted to a medium that I wasn’t supposed to engage in. I was demoted from writing fiction to writing content for websites.
And when I began blogging I became more and more hooked with the trend. Since I need to earn, there’s no any other way to generate income from writing but through writing content. I tend to forget what I’ve learned about the true essence of writing.
The trouble is, instead of improving my writing skills, it forces me to write some sort of a diary without anything to worry about grammar mistakes and sentence construction. I have had problems about what kind of voice to use for what topics and for which field of thought.
The trouble is, just to earn money, you don't have to worry about writing a bad essay or article because all you need to do is to express yourself. And that kind of attitude is unique for search engines. You just have to write about what you feel and think, or write about a certain topic with bunch of keywords and then you’re a sell-out in search engines.
The trouble is I notice there are so many blogs that are poorly written and there are content that are--though technically written—as if the writer is on a hurry. There are also content that have lots and lots of unnecessary words and phrases just to finish a 500-word article. They use words such as “for medicinal purposes” instead of “for medicine,” “most oftentimes than not” rather than “most often,” “the question as to whether,” in exchange to “whether.”
The trouble about content writing is that there is too much business going on and people tend to forget about the real quality of a written work. Readers will have no time reading your work unless he or she is a Literature aficionado or knows what a good Literature is. Readers on the Net would only spend seconds reading your article and then would go into another world of texts and images. If you want to know about breast enhancement or herbal medicines you just have to hop into a site which is number one in the search results list and read the content with no choice.
This is the trouble with writing English on the Net. It somehow breaks the true dogma of writing. If a writer or a blogger wants to gain viewers, he/she has to write a topic that is a sell-out to the people, or keywords that are mostly searched on the Net. Well, perhaps if a writer doesn’t care about increasing revenues, he/she can write a good work and that can only be read in newspapers and magazines. Or he might as well forget about posting it on the Net because it’ll only be read by a few unless he begins to manipulate his/her work and engage in silly subterfuges.
With the exemption of big sites as those of CNN, BBC, ABSCBN, INQ7, and other highly regarded media companies and websites that are popular outside the net, there are millions of websites that are not advisable for readers. I wonder why there are no grammar police or a body of editors that disapprove contents that have no value.
What I can only advise to you is to choose wisely before reading a blog or a site. One good suggestion is to list down the sites that you think are of good use to you and that you can learn something from it, not just information or knowledge but insight, values and wisdom.

2 comments:

  1. But I suppose blogging is not about being grammatically correct because its purpose and origin is traced to "make an online journal." And when you're just writing a journal, you don't necessarily have to be grammatically correct all the time.
    I disapprove of grammar cops for blogs because blogging is supposed to be fun. That is why I got tired of blogging because there are so many "blog cops" out there who nitpick other blogs from content to grammar to traffic to theme to everything.
    If you want to write because you want to keep the essence of good writing, the best outlet is of course, writing for professional companies or establishments who will use your content for disseminating information to their market.
    If you assert this as something of a "rule" for bloggers---bloggers will not like this, because we contend that blogging is supposed to be fun, to be an "outlet" of our characteristics and personality, and as a something that should be "stress reliever" ----in similar ways what "keeping a journal" should be.
    Of course, I'm not discounting the fact that good grammar counts because if it's really poorly worded and organized, nobody can understand the meaning and thought of the post. That's why I told you before , you should also have good grammar. But that is not the "core" of blogging. If that is the case , people just have to stick to encyclopedias instead.

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  2. @Bingkee: Yes, I'm now learning to this kind of medium.

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