Landforms and Erosion for Dummies

Water's relationship with landforms

It's not that difficult these days to write "research papers" at the fifth-grade level; at the eighth-grade level, in fact. After all, fifth- and eighth-graders do it all the time. We mean, all you need to do is google your topic and reword the first article you find on page two (page one makes it too easy for the teacher to catch you). Of course, if you have no idea what you're talking about, you might want to actually read the article you're rewording. That's how we caught eHowian Andrea Sigust, who contributed "How Does Erosion Affect Landforms?" at Sciencing.com.

It doesn't really take much work to find the necessary information at some physical geology for fifth-graders website, which is pretty much what Sigust did. She started by defining the terminology:

"Erosion is the process of land, soil or rock being gradually worn away... Landforms are natural features on the earth’s surface that have distinct origin and shape..."

...both of which statements are pretty much straight from Dictionary.com. It's when she started explaining the processes and features that Andrea went off-track. Take, for instance, this bold statement:

"Landforms that are created by erosion are called fluvial erosion landforms."

Sigust left out an important concept there: the word "fluvial" refers to streams, meaning that only landforms created by flowing water are called "fluvial erosion landforms," Such are the dangers of rewording something you don't understand. Andrea then went on to "explain" that,

"As water and wind pass across land, they take away grains of soil and wear down rock. Years of this process reduces the size of hills and mountains, and it cuts through ground to create valleys, canyons and ditches."

What Andrea and most fifth-graders don't understand is the importance of ice in erosion: not just as glaciers, but as a force that breaks hard rocks into smaller pieces. Yet nowhere in her 200-plus words of "information" does the word "ice" appear. Instead, she veers off into some blather that ends with the claim that, "The EPA uses a grading system that measures and evaluates the evolution of land sloping." About which we ask our Dumbass of the Day, "So what?" Sigust didn't answer the question. She just danced around it for a few dozen words and then tailed off into some claptrap about monitoring slope degradation. Yup: gotta be eHow!

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