LOL! Wanderer, old buddy, your whining is just old hat to someone with sixteen years experience reading similar complaints of "bullying" on the Net by people who have not the mental and/or emotional wherewithal to take the kitchen's heat. You can't take the heat? Get your ass out of the kitchen. No one likes a whiner. Every adult knows that whiners are at best intellectual babies. People have your number, man. Get with it.
As for writing style, yours is atrocious. I've read your posts for quite some time and have almost always thought, "What a moron! This guy actually thinks in soundbytes!" I have not commented until now. Sorry to inform you, soundbyte thinking might fly in the strange world of advertising, but it doesn't fly in the real worlds of science and engineering. And the real worlds of science and engineering are what I've always tried to concentrate on. Granted, my posts might not qualify for an article in Nature or Science, but then, my posts are oriented toward a rather narrow audience of intelligent JWs and ex-JWs who have an assumed background that I don't have to explain in excruciating detail to readers who likely have no idea of the destructive cult mindset of Jehovah's Witnesses.
In the world of advertising, it almost goes without saying that sticking to facts is irrelevant. Exaggeration, and skating against the margin of reality, is the name of the game, and most everyone understands this. So when one wants to explain real facts, and how these facts play together, advertising methods ought to be discarded in favor of simply telling the truth.
My writing style is not oriented toward anything but setting forth the facts in as clear a manner as I know how. This often involves painful detail in terms of enunciating facts -- facts that advertisers consider boring for their targets. Obviously, someone with a better style might well do this better. But your idiotic demand is that I dumb down my writing to the level that someone such as yourself might absorb in a few soundbytes, replete with a lack of detail so sorry that even I could not say, upon reading the material 20 years hence, what facts I had in mind. Sorry, no can do. Your problem, not mine.
You're a marketer and advertiser, supposedly. I'm an engineer, in fact, and have to make real things work. Marketing and advertising often entail bullshit as a goal. Engineering entails the opposite -- always. You can't bullshit reality. Reality has a way of ignoring marketing and advertising goals.
Now let's get down to brass tacks about what you and I and others said in another post ( http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/134114/1.ashx ). You said to Sue:
: Another point, regarding this subject is that the writer ASKED for my suggestion or advice.
Only an idiot, or someone thoroughly dishonest, would claim that my challenge was merely asking for advice. Here, let's see what was actually said in the relevant post:
:>: The wanderer said:
:>: : I think if you could cut down on the information regarding your subject material the article would get a better response.
Essentially, this is a call to dumb down the information to the level of soundbytes, so that people on the level of "The Wanderer" might conjure up enough concentration to absorb it. But this is clearly not enough for people who need to know all the facts.
:>: Perhaps, but I try to write for an audience a bit above the level of Austrian Emperor Joseph II, who upon hearing one of Mozart's operas famously observed, "Too many notes, my dear Mozart". To which Mozart replied (at least, in the play Amadeus), "Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?"
:>: So there, Wanderer, if you have trouble dealing with too much information, I suggest you quit reading here and proceed to something a bit more up your alley, or offer helpful suggestions as to just what words ought to be cut out and just what words ought to be put in place..
With the above context in place, let's see once again how The Wanderer distorts, in his comments to Sue, what was written:
: the writer ASKED for my suggestion or advice.
No, dummy, I challenged you to put your money where your mouth is. I challenged you to do a simple rewrite of my post in such a way that it retained all of the relevant facts contained in the post, while still setting forth the relevant conclusions. You failed to meet my challenge.
I still set forth my challenge: You go right ahead and rewrite my post in an intelligent way that retains all that I want to communicate, and then after you do that, let's let readers and I judge how well you do. Difficult? Probably. But with your Internet-derived skills in writing and advertising, this should be trivial.
: Here is part of the quote:
: "...offer helpful suggestions as to just what words ought to be cut out and just what words ought to be put in place.." - Alan F
Readers will note how clumsily The Wanderer has quoted me out of context.
: In turn, I suggested a book Writing for the Web: A Practial Guide by Cynthia L. Jeney
Indeed you did, and judging by your atrocious writing style, I decline to look at your suggestions.
Your comments in further posts are stupidly contentless. If that's the way you run your business, then I pity your clients.
Hillary_Step summarizes your almost unbelievable ineptitude thus:
: As I read it, and I am sure that AlanF will correct me if I am wrong, what he was actually saying was 'put up or shut up', a measured reaction given your original patronizing post. I suspect that he knew that you were incapable of doing either, as your posts since have evidenced.
Voila!
AlanF
