Quantity versus quality

The dawn of the internet has brought with it the ultimate in quickies, fast hits, fast sales, fast porn, fast cash, fast reads, fast friends, you get the picture. With a click, you get to search for your current research, the latest movies, the next toy you’re buying, which artist or actor is banging whom, and with a little patience and know-how, someone’s social security number, their home address (if they are stupid enough to leave such information online), and their favorite stuff, it’s a stalker’s kit on a silver platter. That being said, the internet is all about speed, the more, the merrier, blah blah, yadda yadda.

 

In work, this translates into putting in more stuff than the brain can actually handle online, so that more surfers or readers will read your stuff online, be it marketing stuff, blog angst, or even social media detritus, like what people in friendster and myspace write in their accounts as blogs and pass off as “readable”. Moreover, the biggest effect this phenomena has resulted in is the flood of information you get to see on the internet. Google a word and there’s a good chance you’d get around 5 to 10 pages about it, with only the first two pages having any relevant information that you actually need, the others just being a load of SEO droppings.

 

You can search for a topic and find a multitude of articles written on the subject, and when you actually get down to downloading and reading some, you find out that all the articles you got are just bundles of cleverly (or sometimes not even) re-phrased articles vaguely dwelling on the topic you need. Look through eight or ten of the articles you downloaded and check them for content, chances are they will only have some items that have been interchanged or slightly re-worded, with no new information actually existing between them. Poor writing? Maybe. Crappy research? Good guess, but there’s a good chance the main reason for this is a burgeoning time frame to crank up as much as articles or written material the writer could, just so the all-too important deadline could be met. The result? A lot of written material with little or no real original or unique content, all of which have been SEOed the hell out of, and published on all the right submission sites. Where’s the quality? Gone with the wind, if you ask me.

 

In all the rush to meet that ever present deadline, hassled and frazzled writers everywhere are forced to come up with ridiculously copious amounts of written material, resulting in reduced (and sometimes even poor) quality in the actual results. Where’s the quality? Where’s the beef? Where’s the ooomph? Sacrificed, all in the name of meeting that deadly deadline. Does meeting the deadline justify the sacrifice of good quality for acceptable quantity? You’d be surprised at the reply of some people to this question.

 

Here’s the clincher: some people now expect writers (and sometimes even artists and designers) to come up with good sized quantity with good quality. As if bleeding writers everywhere wasn’t bad enough, huh? I’m not saying this is not achievable, my own work is testament to that, but not everyone is always at the top of their game. We all have bad moments, bad days, heck, I know someone who’s had a bad decade. Sadly, in an industry where writing is needed on a daily basis, such vestiges of humanity are not acceptable, not to the person paying for the writer’s paycheck, that is. What to do? Buckle up, suck it up, and take it on the chin.

 

Incidentally, to people out there who hire writers and bleed them dry of their writing abilities, take a moment to take into consideration that the writer you hired is human, and humans have pain thresholds, suffer fatigue, and need to goof off occasionally. Seriously, take a moment to actually read what they wrote, see if it still has quality, and then make your judgment call if whether the deadline does indeed justify the ridiculous amount of written material you demand.