It happened. I flipped. I cracked.
I needed an outlet.

As a writer one needs to learn to distinguish good from bad. Hopefully one can also distinguish the plain mediocre from the outright dreadful too.

You know, you've written a short article and are reading through it. Sometimes it sounds great, more often it is just plain OK, and sometimes it is just a little piece of information that will earn a crumb but won't earn any literary awards. All of that seems par for the course.

But at the weekend I was reading article after article that were plainly and unmistakably complete and utter rubbish. I don't so much mind the blatant adverts, after all this is the realm of the advertorial, and I just take it as noise. I don't mind biased opinions and propaganda. But I do wonder about writing that shows no signs of research, no knowledge by the author and whose only purpose seems to be the wasting of time by both reader and writer. Particularly wasteful when the titles show such promise.

In this particular case the offending (or offensive) writers were on eHow. Why is the site so popular? I don't seem to have read anything insightful on it. The "How to..." format also limits what one can write about. I only happened to go to eHow because I'd forgotten to read one of my own articles about why the site is a waste of time for writers who are not American. Perhaps, given its level of traffic it can be used as a free article directory to gain readers elsewhere - must admit to not having tried that as an exercise.

It wasn't the really puerile and somewhat puzzling articles, such as "How to decorate your wooden spoon after losing" or "How to drive a car in a paddy field" that got to me, but rather those that promised information and advice but offered none. One could say that's the art of title writing, but then they should write an article on "How to write a good title".

Anyway, it finally dawned on me that I just couldn't walk away without penning a satirical response. It is my artificial sweetener as I swallowed one bitter pill after another. That British urge to 'take the Mickey' lurched to the fore and waved a great big red rag.

And so was born Worthless Advice.

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