The Three am Rant
- Blog posts and articles with names like “The Top 5/10/20 Best/Worst” of anything.
- Blog posts and articles that inform you that “You have been doing this wrong for your whole life”
- Articles that make you click through endlessly to read a story that could have been told in less than 500 words
- Articles that make some claim about a celebrity/royal which turn out to be nothing new and usually tied to some advertising campaign
- Poor proofreading eg. “7yo saves chocking mum”. What was she doing, eating too much chocolate?
Number 1 annoys me because frankly there is far too much of it. It’s even recommended by blogging tutorials as a way to format a post. I was asked to do it when I wrote a guest post for Ruby Lane but it’s really not my style. Once in a while, I write a list but these things are subjective anyway. My 50 most beautiful classic movie stars won’t be yours.
Number 2 annoys me because I don’t like being told that everything I ever did is wrong. I won’t read those because they just make me mad at the twenty-somethings who write them.
Numbers 3&4 are clickbait and I try to avoid them but sometimes I get sucked in by a nice photo or actually wanting to read about the subject but I don’t want to spend fifteen minutes over it, and no, I never click on the accompanying ads.
Number 5 annoys me because I notice spelling errors and it’s becoming more common than ever. Spell check is not enough on its own but sometimes it seems as if nobody cares about correct spelling any more.
Everyone talks about “content” and being “an influencer” it seems that too many people just write any old thing to make money.
Yes, the internet is full of rubbish. Thank goodness for the journalists and bloggers who still provide material worth reading.
Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View 
Nothing more annoying than being pretty sure the story is just clickbait, but just intrigued enough to click, and then Dph! Clickbait…sigh….
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Yep.
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I think the “10 Best Bla Bla Bla” posts can be fun in moderation. But it became such a widespread trend that they’re now indeed extremely annoying. From a blogger perspective, they ironically work… maybe you remember my “40 cat quotes…” post… it was one of my most popular posts, went viral on wp.com, featured me and so on. It’s ironic because it was one of my “Low-effort posts” because I did nothing except collecting and paste copying quotes I liked.
I am not against publishing something like this once in a while but that happened maybe once every two years lol. Nowadays, you find blogs and magazines in all niches that are full of these low-effort posts and nothing else. Completely unoriginal. I think they do it, because it somehow works… the whole “10 best…” or “10 worst..” posts make people curious, it’s kinda like click-bait. But I still agree, the amount of these posts, it turned into an annoyance. And you’re right.. these lists are subjective anyway, I don’t even know why people, including readers, like them so much.
Agreed with all your other points. But 5 is difficult for me as a non-native writer, but I try my best.
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Dennis, your English is better than most American natives. You are FINE.
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I agree, you write English like a native now. You have learned a tremendous amount since you started blogging.
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Oh 🙂 That is nice to hear. Thank you Marilyn. Spell checking often still shows me errors, like 5-10 per 500 words, but I realized it’s not that bad because it’s a way to find my weaknesses and then I don’t do the same mistakes again. But there also have been many cases where I thought the spell checker must be wrong.
In the end, learning by doing seems to work. But as a non-native, you can’t be sure until someone says you’re doing fine. Thank you!
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Thank you too Vanda. That’s a big compliment. So, we can say, blogging is quite effective to practice languages even if the first years might be funny. When I check out my oldest posts, I definitely see the difference, but as I told Marilyn, you still can’t be sure if you’re already doing it close to perfection.
As a teenager, I had a friend from Eritrea. His parents did send him to us, the kids playing football on the lawn. He didn’t speak a word German but he took our ball and passed it back to us and we realized he wanted to play with us.
So, we did let him join us and he became a friend. Two or three years later he spoke perfect German, and he never believed me if I told him so. He always asked “Am I doing still doing mistakes?” and I always replied “Seriously? Absolutely not!”. He put himself into a situation where he would be confronted with German every day.
I met him a couple of weeks ago while driving the bus, and we talked about the old days. It was awesome and we shared mobile phone numbers and want to meet a few times a year again.
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I think children often do pick up languages more easily than adults.
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We all do a list post once in a while and as hobby bloggers sharing our favourite or least favourite things is something you do amongst friends. I have done at least one other this year. But amongst the blog for cash crowd it has become very widespread. Some are fun to look at but many are done as click bait. I wrote my own post in an ironic way because I was feeling a bit fed up with them.
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That’s true and it’s not the only clickbait strategy. Closely related to your point 4 and 3 I also often see larger magazines write headlines that make you think “Ok, this seems to be new, I want to learn more about it” and there is nothing new, it’s just speculation or non-sense.
Ironically, after all those years of using the internet, you developed skills to get through articles via fast lane. Often the headline is hyperbole enough to realize that it’s not worth reading the whole article. Other times you just skip through the article, taking words from each paragraph to realize the author won’t get to the point. It’s funny how our brain is doing this… let’s take gaming magazines for example… Often I skip the first 3-4 paragraphs because I learned it’s unlikely that the message is hidden there. I go right to the middle, or directly to the end to find what I need to know. It’s like my brain learned where it’s most likely to find the information in a 500-1000 words article.
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Ditto, my friend. The 20 somethings that are always telling us what we should be writing annoy the crap out of me. They haven’t seen a movie made before 2000, they can’t spell, and I seriously doubt they can think. They certainly don’t read. We have morons as political leaders. The problem is that an awful lot of the countries we live in are also full of morons. That’s how we GOT here.
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I knew you would get it Marilyn.
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