Could the web be the death of written english?
March 24th, 2014
It will come as no surprise to any well-read net surfer that the world-wide-web is chock full of incredibly badly written pages. Now while there is nothing wrong with opening up the opportunity to publish to pretty much anyone, anyone who is writing for a public audience should make the effort to ensure their work is readable, intelligible and understandable.
Conspiracy sites are some of the worst (and they wonder why we don’t believe!), but even more unbearable are the personal blogs of people who think full length articles can be written like text messages. Sometimes you come across a site that was clearly written by someone for whom english is a second language, or who obviously just utilised google translate on a bad day. Other times the site is clearly by a native english speaker who just can’t seem to string a complete, intelligible sentence together.
Just a little extra effort, and these terrible “click out of there quickly” websites could have been so much better.
Here are just a few classic examples of websites that would otherwise be reasonably good value if it wasn’t for the atrocious writing:
www.supertravelpackages.com/top-3-mistakes-in-paris/
www.themakeupgallery.info/fantasy/mutants/xmystiquem.htm
tehgeektive.com/2012/02/25/how-cool-is-it-to-break-the-sound-barrier-that-cool/
topinfopost.com/2014/01/16/latest-invention-triton-oxygen-respirator-extracts-air-underwater/
pixelbell.com/90-absolutely-free-responsive-html5-css3-website-templates/
designinspirationmagazine.com/web/html5-audio-player/1529/
technet.weblineindia.com/web/change-the-pitch-of-audio-using-java-sound-api/
An interesting video, but the sub-titles and other text on the video are woeful:
www.frequency.com/video/must-watch-hit-run-driver-in-southall/10821188/