Friday, April 1, 2011

The Difference Between Good and Bad Writing

I recently read about a website called DifferenceBetween.net that promotes itself as the place to go to learn about the "difference between similar terms and objects." I love the concept and I had a feeling that the site would cover some language basics such as the difference between metaphors and synonyms, and indeed it does. There is even a link at the top of the main page to articles specifically about language and grammar.

...And then the disappointment set in.

I read a few of the articles and I could not believe how poorly they were written, and how many factual inaccuracies and typos there were.


"Vowels are five letters and the spoken sounds associated with each of it."

In addition to this poorly constructed sentence, nowhere in this article does it mention that there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between letters and sounds.

I should be clear that I did not read more than eight or nine articles when I checked out the site and not all of the articles were equally as disappointing. Many of them did have some general, helpful information. I also like the format that has each article ending with a numbered summary.

I realize, too, that because I am critiquing the writing of others, there are bound to be some tylos and grammagical erroars in my sriting. After all, it is Muphry's Law.


3 comments:

mandarinis said...

"Vowels are five letters and the spoken sounds associated with each of it."

I spent a WHOLE YEAR studying phonetics in college to figure out the difference between a vowel and a consonant.
It wasn't until we had our very last lesson of the year, after studying every sound separately and a whole bunch of rules, that we were able to come up with some sort of conclusion, including vowels, consonants and even semivowels, and this definition isn't even close to it.
It hurts reading that! Hehe

Do not visit DifferenceBetween.com u.u

Thomas L. McDonald said...

Maybe it's some kind of parody that's so subtle as to be completely imperceptible.

Or (more likely) it's just a site that pays for web content by the pound and views the words as wasted space between advertisements.

Joe said...

I can see that there are 5 difference between sites, all look like spam sites. Their main intention is to generate money as Google loves keywords in the domain names.

Differencebetween.net
Differencebetween.com
Differencebetween.co.uk
Differencebetweenvs.com
Differencebetweenand.com

Not sure how many more will emerge next year? I've spent some time(wasted time) to look at the articles in differencebetween.com, they are really bad, full of grammar mistakes, bad English. I think Differencebetween.net is better than others.

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