Glaciers for Dummies, the Rewrite

glacial till deposit

We try to keep on top of our links here a the Antisocial Network, which means that every couple of months one of the interns checks each one of them and flags those that have been deleted. Lately, the intern has noticed that Leaf Group's been sending in a rewrite team for some of its niches. That would be a good idea; if only they had found qualified people to do the rewrites... most, however, seem only slightly better than the "originals." That's definitely the case with Kevin Beck, who attempted to rewrite someone else's answer to the eternal question, "What Is Glacial Till?" for Sciencing.com.

The real answer's pretty simple: glacial till is the unsorted, unstratified mass of sediment, ranging in size from clay to boulders, transported and deposited by glaciers. Beck sort of got to that, although to avoid the stink of plagiarism he rearranged the answer and employed his thesaurus to define till as,

"...a catch-all term of sorts, referring to material that is not found in layers and that consists of various materials of various sizes."

Yeah, that's what we said: "unstratified [and] unsorted," although "catch-all" is a bit of a misnomer. Forced, however, to fit his answer into the old DMS framework – at least three sections plus an introduction, length of 300-500 words – Kevin had to go a little further afield. In doing so, the onetime physics student proved he had no idea what he was talking about; starting with his very first sentence: "Most children and adults know the essence of what a glacier is: a very large, often beautiful, and – especially in the case of the Titanic, famously sunk by colliding with a glacier in 1912 – potentially hazardous chunk of ice."

How some moronic content editor could allow this clueless freelancer to say that the Titanic struck a glacier is beyond us... it was a friggin' iceberg, you idiots! Didn't you see that movie? Others of his claims (some just reworded from the original by Rose Guastella) include such deliciously doofus notions as,

• "Glaciers are... are moving masses of ice... like frozen rivers, albeit very slowly flowing ones."
• "...the effect of the Earth on glaciers is limited in time and impact..." – Say what?!
• "Outwash is water-transported material found in layers, mostly sand and stones"
• "Till is ultimately re-arranged [sic] by rivers, leaving no organized patterns of stratification." – Uh, no, fluvial "re-arranging" stratifies and sorts the sediment, you idiot.
• "Till runs seamlessly into moraines, and in fact sometimes forms entire moraines." – We can't even figure out what that is supposed to mean!

Like Guastella before him, Beck fails to differentiate between alpine and continental glaciation; never even mentions that there are different flavors of glacier. Oops...

Beck's post, just as so much of the other material at Sciencing.com (including most of the rewrites we've seen), reads like a basket of factoids thrown into the literary equivalent of a blender and poured onto the page. Between Kevin and his content editor, the rewrite is every bit as bad as the original; perfectly suited for a Dumbass of the Day award, rewrite version.

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