Friday, March 6, 2015

Dummy Freelancer Spins Tectonic Travesty

Fault types
Where do you find the confluence of ignorance and greed? As far as I can tell, it's writing for money at content farms such as HubPages.com, where "Hassam" plies his trade. A quick overview of Hassam's content at the Hub suggests that he's quite happy to churn out crap about any subject he runs across, usually by simply rewording content he found elsewhere. For a perfect example of what is wrong with Hassam's method contributes to the stupidification of the internet, we need only visit a little ditty he slapped – or, more likely, spun – together a few years ago, an article called "Earthquake Fault Lines."

If you can fight your way through Hassam's crapalicious first paragraph, you find yourself even more confused by the jumbled grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of paragraph two:
"These tectonic plates budge like that for the reason that the plates are fraction of the Earth's outer layer, that take the weight off your feet on top of the Earth's mantle which is semi-molten. Since the mantle is not as firm as the crust, the plates 'drift' as to converse, or lose your balance/glide."
As the kids are inclined to say these days, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!" 

While most of the information Hassam presented is loosely based on facts (though not all of it: it's quite clear that he had no idea what a ramp-flat-ramp section of a thrust fault is), the wording was so mangled as to render it useless to anyone who doesn't already know the topic well. 

That's a major shortcoming of the internet's freelance writing corps: instead of informing, too often they confuse or outright misinform. Hassam's content is a classic example, and for this article, which represents a net subtraction from the world's store of knowledge, Hassam is today's Dumbass of the Day. Unfortunately, he won't be the last...     
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SI - TECTONICS

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