web writing

There are 14 posts tagged web writing (this is page 3 of 3).

Proofreading is Boring

Proofreading is boring. If you’re a new writer I may as well give you the bad news now. It doesn’t get better with age. It’s boring even though I’ve been writing online for six years. It was boring when I began. Well, maybe not that first week when everything was new and wondrous.

Ugh! Why can’t we just get it right the first time? Is it some kind of brain blockage? Are our fingers not nimble enough? Do the words change so quickly that we can’t catch them fast enough? Is grammar really all it’s cracked up to be? I go with the nimble finger theory.

My fingers are complete klutzes. So often they aim for two keys at once. They miss the letter completely. Worst of all is when they think I mean ‘whole’ when I really meant to say ‘hole’. What’s wrong with fingers these days? I’d send them to school but I know they did that, I was right there with them, sort of watching over their shoulder. It didn’t seem to help. In fact, I remember crying over my fingers during a typing test in grade nine. We failed that course. It was the only one I didn’t pass that year. I blame my fingers.

There was that time when I had typed a whole essay for English class and my dratted fingers hit some strange key that deleted the whole thing. It wasn’t the delete key because that always gives you the chance to change your mind. I would have changed my mind, trust me! What can you do? We only get 10 fingers, no replacements, no warrantees. Basically, you’re stuck with the fingers you’ve got.

So, proofread. Proofread till it hurts. Yes, it’s boring but you look like a fool if you can’t type. You see, everyone assumes the fingers are innocent and it’s YOU who can’t handle grammar or spelling. Yes, there’s the rub. No one ever assumes your fingers are the saboteurs.

Cranking It Out

Here’s something I found among a list of jobs for writers:

We are looking for writers to work on the following project:

– Author many short (100-200) word articles on a variety of keywords (keyword list will be provided).

– Author site map for your work.

– Ensure the content achieves an 8-12% keyword density rating.

– Ability to crank out at least 50 such articles a week

Qualifications:

– Use Dreamweaver or Frontpage

– Know how to FTP content to a site

– Previous web writing experience (send URLs)

Compensation:

– Paid on a per article basis.

Is this the job for you? You can find it on Craigslist.org if you want to. It sounds like they want someone to write spam, to me. I guess I still have a bit too much pride in my writing to consider it something I’d “crank out”.

I’m not being stuffy, just thinking of the work and creativity and craft involved in creating a readable article and then comparing that to something you’d crank out 50 times a week.

Could you do it? Even if you would take the job, could you write 50 short articles about random topics each week? I guess if it really didn’t matter how interesting or unique they were, you could. Of course, you have to consider how dense the keywords are. That seems to be the only content that matters.

Kind of sad if web writing comes to this, cranking out keywords for search engines to latch onto.

The funny thing is that search engines don’t all use spiders any more. Some have real people who aren’t impressed with a lot of half assed articles full of keywords. Even if those sites get listed and show up at the top of the search that’s no guarantee of getting clicks. Not real clicks that stick around and actually look at the site. After all, getting clicks isn’t enough. If people come to the site, find nothing and leave. You’re not ahead of the game.

So, it’s paying work for some writer. Not me though. Not that I couldn’t use the money. I just don’t want to be known for cranking out articles when I could be creating something unique, with real value.