Why Do People Lie? And Why Do Other People Believe Them?

I was just reading a thread advertising a content writing service. As so many services claim, all the writers were professionals from the US. The reviews were very favorable raving about how great the articles were.

A sample was included on the site. I just read it. I clearly read something different than the owner of the service or the recent purchasers. I didn't even have to look beyond the title to know something wasn't quite right.

I tried to read the thing but honestly I could only get about half way through. Within individual sentences, tense and pronouns changed. Now admittedly, I do this all the time when chatting or posting. But this was not chatting and posting. This was an article for sale. The errors should have been caught in editting.

There were so many of these kinds of errors that the writer could not have even been aware of them. Even an average writer would not make this many errors.

One of the reasons I couldn't read the whole article was because it was ridiculous. If you are a parent and you have ever had your kid come home from school and school you on the nature of the world, you would immediately see the pompousness of the article. I can only assume they were going for an authority article. Shoot and miss.

And articles are supposed to be broken up into bites, not walls of text. Attempts to break up the text with subtitles was less effective because one time everything was capitalized and the next only a few words were capitalized.

As for flow, imagine everything you know on a particular topic. Now mash that all onto paper with no regard for logical sequence and you will have this article. If the sentences were individually written better, I would swear they were lifted and pasted together.

Finally, there were just enough awkward uses of common phrases to know without a doubt this writer's first language was not English. If being a professional writer is defined by being paid well I guess I can't argue with that claim. This kind of writing, however, is worthless at any price.

What are people thinking? Why would they rave about this? I'd like to think they were shills but I don't think they were. Will the internet ever be worth reading or is it destined to become a bunch of gobbledigook?