How not to write for the web

I have a Google Alert for "writing for the web," and it's turned up a depressing number of trivial tips ("Keep it simple"). 

But this evening Google has brought me this item from a site called Writing Tips: Web Writing – A Succedaneum to the Usual Terms of Living. It's clearly an attempt at irony, but irony works poorly in webwriting. Excerpt, followed by comments:

An efficient way to lend support to the inflow of cash in your quotidian life can be attributed to the concepts of web writing. Millions of websites are available at your fingertips to provide a large data base of information, these websites require the urgency of being updated regularly and hence members of the admin hire employees to create some unique content for their websites. Traffic generated by the unique contents enhances the sale and business of the websites, allowing the execution of a wide profit margin and a moderate interface to display your writing efficiencies and increase the popularity in your professional field. 

Adequate focus and devotion to the activity of writing is of crucial importance. Great pieces of contents are generated if the work is performed in solitude and if it bars the involvement of deviation. It is mandatory to analyze the prospect of writing and determine its usefulness whether they are merely the articles or some kind of promotional contents. Highlighting the usage of appropriate keywords should elevate the status of your articles and attain proclivitous importance among diverse category of readers. In the new genre of web oriented globe, content writing and blogs have made a grandiloquent progress. A proper coalescence of skill, commitment, punctuality and authenticity could enable you to achieve great mundane pleasures in the environment of writing.

I'm grateful to have had to learn a word I'll never use again: "succedaneum" means a substitute medicine. 

The post commits a striking number of errors in such a short passage, from run-on sentences and subject-verb disagreement to passive voice to the use of exotic words like "quotidian" (it means "daily"). 

The passage is wordy. But if this was a conscious effort to show how wordiness fails, it defeats itself: Facing such solid blocks of text on screen, any sensible reader would simply stop reading and go elsewhere.

Other posts on the site are a bit better written, but far too brief and superficial to be of use. How to write articles, for example, says little or nothing about the structure of an article, and urges readers to write in their own style but about subjects readers are interested in.

So if this post and its site are some kind of prank, they fail. If they're the serious advice of the site's author, they fail horribly.

Comments

[Michael McGinnis]

Maybe this is the product of content spinner software, where a robot steals someone else's page and automatically replaces key words using a dictionary. Though I have seen this style of writing from human beings, usually non-native speakers of English.

[debrabroughton.com]

I just can't take a website with the url writingwebwriters seriously, but if you look at the about us section it seems that they do.

Still it's not as bad as some truly hideous sites I've come across offering web design.

I tend to agree with the previous comment - once or twice my content has been scraped and rendered just as illegible by clever(?) use of software.

[blogme]

Me too. I think this is a great example of how words can be used to say absolutely nothing!