"Rewrite Software": The End Of The English Language

Yet, the ultimate barbarian at the gate is in the form of web hucksters who for the low low low price of a couple of hundred dollars will sell you software that rewrites anything.

There is a booming market in rewriting these days. Since Google can find an identical phrase anywhere on the web, web site owners and publishers who lack the creativity and originality to actually come up with their own content have opened up website cloning factories where severely underpaid writers toil away in their little corner of cyberspace, mostly in the Third World, and crank out endless copies.

Let's use the famous panagram as an example:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

The sleepy dog was jumped over by the fast brown fox.

The dog was resting and the brown fox quickly jumped over him.

The brown fox took advantage of the dog's laziness and jumped over him in a flash.

Chestnut-furred vulpini have been observed to leap over languorous canines.

I think you get the message by now. Each one of those sentences is Google-unique, but the problem is that they state the same fact, over and over and over again. No originality, no creativity, no muse. Just a world full of writers doing nothing with their lives but trying to beat a freakin' search engine algorithm.

I've already discussed in my Hub on the writing slave market how pitiful the wages are for much of this work. It is literally a 21st century slave market. However, not all of the damage is done to the quick brown writers jumping through hoops of the lazy webmasters. The damage to the essence of creative writing is incalculable.

There was a recent case of a bookstore burning its entire inventory since the owner couldn't give his 20,000 books away. The written word is being replaced by the electronic medium. As long as this new medium presents its endless parade of facts and figures couched in proper English, I have no personal problem with that. Progress is progress, and I'd much rather read War & Peace on my flatscreen monitor than hoist the weighty volume up with my hands in bed so that it falls on my face when I fall asleep.

Progress took an extreme left turn when "rewriting software" was introduced. There are many variations and the example shown in the screenshots here is only just one of the group.

These infernal programs allow the user to copy and paste any text from any source and after a few mouse clicks, voila! A completely new paragraph that states the same facts as the original, but different enough that the feared Google search engine algorithms will not discover the criminal plagiarism that beats inside the black heart of this satanically-cloned text.

So what do we have? The ultimate rape of the original text. Shakespeare reinterpreted by C++. Hemingway rewritten by a 65nm silicone circuit.

The real problem is that we must realize that an entire generation is learning and practicing the English language online, in a world where an article on the gnarliest snowboard superpipe in Colorado will outdraw the combined works of a thousand contemporary writers of fine literature. The web has become the carrier of language. Fortunately the language of choice world-wide has been the English language. Unfortunately, it is being butchered as it goes.

All English-speaking lovers of our illustrious literary heritage must struggle against the disemboweling of our language. Computers must not be allowed to besmirch the English language with their cold and soulless algorithms. Google be damned.

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