I've been reading a lot of random interviews online for the past few weeks, when I'm bored and happen to find really interesting articles. The band, Filter, Random topics by comedy writers (but with sufficient nerdiness to be idiosyncratic and educational), and all kinds of others. I was reading an interview with a game developer on IGN when my brain started to bleed.
One of the methods of the most stereotypical, standard, amateurish article writing is to enlarge a paragraph that is eye-grabbing, and putting it in the middle of the article, I suppose to pique interest for people who like to skim.
But, what it does to someone like me, someone who reads every word when interested, is something different.
Like this.
What is horrible about it is that they always use a paragraph, and put it before where it originally is in the article (like the page above). So, you're reading, you read this eye-grabber paragraph, and then you keep reading on, thinking that it was, in essence, part of your reading. Then you come across the same paragraph a few more paragraphs down.
This is really bad because it displaces the reader. But, it also basically nullifies the effect of that paragraph, because reading it in the second context (its original context) somehow undermines any meaning in it.
It's like, when you see a phrase often, and then see it where someone is genuinely using the words, and they happen to fall in the same place. The statement itself becomes a symbol of expression, of some kind of abstract marketing, and my brain doesn't absorb it as it should.
It's just another small, subtle way in which Human commerciality undermines Human nature. It's a hard thing to explain properly, but there are so many examples like this, in many different ways, that turn anything worthwhile into something that has been made part of a 'product'.
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