Entry tags:

art, huh?

Whyyyyyeeeeee...
Writing rant.

I was recently asked to write an article for a website, whose name shall remain anonymous. I had fun writing the article, and the person who accepted it told me that he was greatly impressed by it, and even offered me a job as a regular contributor, which I declined.

A few weeks later, I got another message from him with a link to a revised draft of my article attached. He said that only "minor edits" had been made to it, which he said was mostly due to my great skill as a writer. He wanted me to look at it to see if I wanted to make any last minute changes to it, and since I was feeling all happy and mushy after receiving such undeserved praise, I willingly took a look at it.

Good feelings gone.

To adequately sum up what reading the revised draft was like, let me compare a line from the first draft to one from the second. One of the original sentences in the article was worded thusly:

When the Internet became widely available, however, this all changed. With the advent of the World Wide Web came not only webpages dedicated to video games, but freeware capable of reading the games' resource files, exposing the backgrounds, animations, audio, text and code for all to see.

Sounds okay, doesn't it? No glaring grammatical errors, no unconventional uses of punctuation, no leet-speak. A fairly decent (if somewhat lengthy) sentence, if I do say so myself.

Here is the revised version of the same paragraph:

With the growing popularity of fan websites dedicated to video games, free software have been written and made available by dedicated fans that are capable of reading these games’ resource files, thus exposing background arts, animation loops, audio clips, text scribbles, and programming codes for all to see.

Read that again. "Free software have been written and made available by dedicated fans that are capable of reading these games' resource files." Software have been written!? Background arts?! Fans that are capable of reading games' resource files!?

And this was not the only instance of such a thing; the entire article was filled with edits like this. I'm praised profusely for my incredible writing ability and then shown a decorrected revision of my efforts? What did I do to deserve having my work mangled like this?! Whyyyyyyeeeeee!?

And as if that wasn't grating on my nerves enough, my bio had been edited to say that I "live in Unites States". I gently pointed out that it should be "lives in the United States", and was informed that several people have complained about the use of the "the", saying that the USA seems to be an exception among countries…because apparently places like THE Bahamas, THE Marshall Islands and THE Philippines don't exist. Dang it, world, WE'RE supposed to be the ones ignorant of other countries' names, not YOU!

_{Whyyyyyeeeeee...}

Oh, and new pictures today. This is the one that I'm the least ashamed of.