An unforgiving crowd

> The author of any bad piece of writing has to be prepared to face a barrage of criticism and brickbats from readers

BORAK-BORAK

AS A WRITER, I’ve to read a lot – to get better insights and perspectives, as well as inspiration. Writing is a constant learning process. There are always new things to learn, like how some people can put their thoughts together so well. Or argue so eloquently about the most contentious points.

I like articles laced with humour. That’s what I also try to do with this column.

Sometimes I visit sites where people post about their experiences, which include dealing with all kinds of relationships, etc.

I’ve been following one site based in Britain for a very long time, where the readers spell out their displeasure whenever someone posts a badlywritten experience.

These readers don’t mince their words. They would remark that the story was good, but the spelling or punctuation weren’t up to the mark.

Some would even outright ask why the spell-check feature wasn’t employed to make the story more readable.

Others take a sarcastic route: “Perhaps the full stop and capital letters keys are broken?”

This was in the case of a writer who had written 20 lines without a full stop!

Another language purist commented: “Spelling and punctuation really matter. Otherwise, it’s difficult to make any sense of the story.”

A formalist or fusspot even put out this line: “Spelling is rather important, because someone’s unusual spelling took the edge off the tale for me!”

Sometimes, a story would be so far-fetched that some readers couldn’t resist writing a caustic comment, like this: “… and then you woke up and realised that it was all a dream!”

Or “… you then fell out of bed!”, or “… the alarm clock rang suddenly!” And “Looks like your mind has gone as well”.

On the other hand, well- written accounts would often elicit comments like: “How I wish to be in your shoes”, or “I wish it were me and not Mr X in the story”, or “You remind me of what happened 20 years ago”.

The most outrageous comments came recently, when a would-be contributor merely wrote “Test” and mistakenly posted it to the website.

Since the website had an auto-grab feature, it was immediately displayed.

One jester simply replied: “Hurry up.”

Another teased: “Gripping title and storyline. The provocative title also lent to this solid and outstanding content. Can’t wait for the results.”

Still another wrote: “Too long”, while another party posted: “The storyline is utterly gripping here. Is there more?”

More wisecracks followed: “The character development is awesome”; “Really enjoyed this story. Is there a part two?”; and “Can’t wait for the next instalment”.

“Hang on a minute, I’m still reading the first part. Fascinating,” one quipped.

A humorist summed it all up: “I don’t know about the rest of you. But I find it ironic that this opus has got more comments than the rest of the stories on this site. All because of one misplaced word.”

I’m not so sure that the would-be writer would ever finish his story, since so many had assailed him when he had just penned one word.

I won’t call all these comments cyber-bullying, rather that the readers are unforgiving of any faux pax.

Or maybe they were trying to humour the would-be contributor?

While a non-native English speaker may be forgiven for a few mistakes, I found that some of the native writers on the site in question have themselves made silly errors, such as writing ‘kneeled’ instead of ‘knelt’ as the past tense of ‘kneel’, or ‘peal’ instead of ‘peel’, as in ‘peeling off the skin of an apple’.

Still, most readers of the site would usually give a thumbs up if the experiences were wellwritten.

They would usually enquire if more stories were in the pipeline. And wait with bated breath for the appealing sequels.

after making his mark in the twisty maze of mainstream journalism, has finally decided to enjoy what he does best – observing the unusual and recounting the gleeful. He can be contacted at lifestyle.borak@ gmail.com. availability of the twilight variant, a P20 lite, and a P20 Porsche Design in Malaysia, Huawei said it would depend on customers’ demand.

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