I suppose a peril of moving in primarily IT literate circles is that you forget how many illiterates there are out there: not necessarily in terms of grammar and the ability to construct coherent sentences (though to be honest, there is quite a close correlation) but just in terms of etiquette.<\/p>\n
Fr’instance, a post two days ago on\u00a0Terry Wogan and various domestic issues<\/a>\u00a0drew the following well-targeted comment, all entirely sic including the unclosed opening inverted commas:<\/p>\n “Hi:<\/p>\n Two things<\/p>\n 1) I’d like your permission to (re)print your article on \u2018Torchwood’for our website<\/p>\n 2) I was hoping we could use your \u2018scribing’ talent for our website.<\/p>\n The Best Shows Youre Not Watching (dot) com [all one word] What’s in it for you? [I redact the URL because I’ve already given the name of their site and have no intention of making life too easy.]<\/p>\n Intriguing, because while I could swear I’ve mentioned Torchwood more than once, a search on the blog only uncovers\u00a0one article<\/a>, written nearly three years ago when the series began. Anyway. To save you looking it up, I devastatingly replied:<\/p>\n First, convince me you really are after my scribing talent as a result of a personal evaluation of my ability as evidenced on this blog, and that this isn’t an automatic spam generated by a bot searching on the word “Torchwood”.<\/p>\n Why might I suspect the latter case?<\/p>\n 1. The only article I’ve written on Torchwood is nearly 3 years old.<\/p>\n 2. There’s a clearly visible link in the left hand column saying “contact Ben”, and yet you drop a comment into a totally unrelated post. The nicest word that comes to mind is “lazy”.<\/p>\n How you go about this convincing of me I leave up to you, but the clue is in point 2 above.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s not just web spammers but any kind of direct marketing: the key word is\u00a0clue, people. If you want people to take you seriously, show you have one. Honestly. Do you really, really think that this kind of so-obviously mass-produced, badly worded twaddle is going to convince us of anything, other than the fact that you so clearly haven’t gone through our site in a search for exactly the right ‘scribing’ talent to suit your needs? Put another way: is it really an advert for your site that it’s going to be ‘scribed’ by the kind of people who either write or respond to this kind of thing?<\/p>\n I thought I would test my theory that the commenter may not be 100% inspired by my personal brilliance. A quick search on key phrases of the comment shows:<\/p>\n And there are others, but I got bored.<\/p>\n Good grief, this is the kind of thing people were doing back when the web was young in the mid-nineties. I may even have done it myself, though I hope I didn’t. Is a whole new generation that doesn’t remember the mid-nineties now making the same mistake?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I suppose a peril of moving in primarily IT literate circles is that you forget how many illiterates there are out there: not necessarily in terms of grammar and the ability to construct coherent sentences (though to be honest, there … Continue reading
\n\u2018Torchwood’one of our featured shows. We’re hoping to round up a few people who can occasionally contribute perspective (via an article\/blog) on the shows \u2013 maybe a recent episode, future direction, plot shortcomings etc.<\/p>\n
\nPrimarily a larger audience back channeled to your blog. We don’t pay but the site has a lot of promise and we’re pretty excited about getting it off the ground. Let me know what you think.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n