It's just plain going too far........

Last night I got a folder of PLR articles I am rewriting for someone. I clicked on a few of the articles and my blood ran cold.
It is the most unbelievable collection of semi-literate trash I have ever seen. If this guy weren't a close colleague of mine I would have sent it back and canceled on the assignment as it's going to be much more work than I expected. The content is almost void of any information, the syntax is so trashed that the sentences don't even make sense at many points, the wording is stuck-record repetitive. Who wrote this crap? How much did my colleague pay for this crap? What if someone had purchased this package thinking they could just post it on their site in the form in which they purchased it?

I am assuming this package of unadulterated verbal diarrhea was twenty bucks or less for the package. The problem here is that the person writing this package has no business at ANY price offering writing services because that person CAN'T WRITE. How often I am hearing, "You want how much? Hell, I can get that for two bucks."
Oh no you can't - you can get what I just opened up to repair, but you can't get what I produce for two bucks. Sorry.

Yes work can be outsourced and purchased cheaper from some sources than from others. Such outsourcing has been the downfall of many very fine writers in the US and other more spendy countries. We can't all be competitive at 2 bucks a pop.
From what I have seen, we shouldn't need to. 99% of non-native speakers of any language can't compete with the writers who are native speakers of that language - and that is ALL languages, not just a few. If you need an article in German, you don't want an Italian writer - you want one who has German as a native language. Only they will understand the more obscure semantic constructions of that language. Someone from another language may be able to string words together correctly, but they will miss many of the native semantic and constructional idiosyncrasies that will make the work sound natural to the native speaker. That, I repeat, is a truth for any language, and I do have the credentials to say that.
If you are outsourcing writing, you need to outsource to whom can make it work for you best - and that is not a non-native speaker of the language you want the piece read in no matter what price you are offered.

Outsourcing cheap writing has also opened up the market to many who couldn't write with someone else's pen. Everyone and anyone thinks they can write and will sell complete vapid, ill constructed, and useless crap now. The person who wrote what I just saw should be getting refund requests up the ying. They might even be considered a fraud by some. If you can afford to spring the 20 bucks and not have to get a refund if it's trash, you are just facilitating incompetence if you just ignore the "theft". If you can't really afford to waste 20, you are getting screwed and I hope you can get a refund when you demand one. You might not, surprisingly, be able to contact the trash distributor to get a refund once you see what you bought. A person that would charge for such excrement probably doesn't have the brains or morality to understand they should give you one. You are stuck with jibrish that will just ruin your site and reputation if you post it.

I guess my point in all of this ranting is that the cheap outsourcing market has allowed too many to sell in markets they are not qualified to be in at all. If enough of you who can't write continue to sell, you are going to crash the market you are polluting. You are going to either have to return funds or you will end up run out of the market you are posing in. You will eventually get your butt boycotted anyway - word of mouth spreads fast.

Too many people are also fooled believing that adequate, or even good, specialized material can be purchased for a song and are getting ripped. You are going to end up either chasing refunds or re-doing work that you didn't have the time or skill to do in the first place - or worse, as my client is doing now, paying to have it redone into usable form. Each time you buy material from unqualified trash dealers, you are putting those who could have actually done the work adequately out of business. It is not only you that the unqualified sellers are hurting. A higher price is sometimes a much wiser buy.

If you are buying writing from someone, ask to see samples of their material. If they are truly writers, they will either have articles on submissions sites, salespages, or blogs to show you. If they can't produce samples - don't buy from them. Even a beginner can whip up a few articles to post on blogs or submission sites to serve as samples...if they can write in the first place, that is. A qualified beginner knows to do that. Outsourcing is one issue; having the market flooded by idiots who charge for something they can't do just to get some quick cash is another.

I feel in a forum such as this one, it is everyone's duty to keep trash out of the market, to protect our own from scammers and keep our community free of them. We need to disallow the mental deficiencies of trash dealers from lowering the reputation of the forum. Report scams, post refund requests and complaints in the WSO or ad you found it in if the offer is trash - and always ask for samples, whether you found the offer in a WSO, classified ad, or via networking with others.

By protecting yourself, you can protect the rest of your community, including the careers of those who are actually skilled performers in their chosen field.