h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You read this?
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If you haven't, you should. Jodan will make you think.

The Guide I dream of is pretty simple really. The Edited Guide would admit quality writing of every kind. Although there would still be Peer Review, everyone would recognise that the writing is the important thing. Criticism would be offered with humility. The Guidelines would be treated as guidelines.

I'm some way further out than dear old Jodes on a lot of this. For instance, I can't see why people think the Edited Guide (at least the one we've created) is h2g2's central project. It can't be. None of the site's best Entries are in it, or even could be in it. The fact thing is nonsense too. Who exactly is relying on h2g2 for accuracy? What kind of disaster will befall us if somebody makes things up?

It should be fun, this place. There shouldn't be any whining, self-pitying underachievers. There shouldn't be pedants and there shouldn't be bullies. We don't really want people like that telling us how to write, know what I mean?

Can I write? Sure. Going back more than six years now, I've contributed a great deal to hootoo, probably around a hundred pieces of high quality, maybe twenty or thirty that stand comparison with anything on the site. I don't see any reason to be modest. I'm one of the best writers hootoo has seen.

Not that there are many bad writers around here. Few people can write badly without a lot of practice. Getting the grammar and spelling all wrong is fairly easy, of course, but if that's all you do, then your efforts will never be truly execrable.

The only really effective way to write complete rubbish is to forget why anyone might want to read it. A minority of people can do this spontaneously, by virtue of their psychological abnormalities. More usually, though, contempt for the reader has to be learned. One proven method is to pretend that all the writing is being carried out for some kind of rule-bound mythical encyclopedia.

If the pedants carry such tendencies too far, of course, there'd be a real risk that the encyclopedia would be driven to extinction by their dead-handed criticism. But at least they'd come away from it all with transferrable skills. They might even discover fulfilment as traffic wardens.

Can I criticise? That too. But I don't do it as well as I write, of course. Nobody does. Criticism and editorship are sub-categories of writing, inherently parasitic, limited in creativity, implicitly negative. Nice work for the would-be traffic wardens though.

Jodan invites us to put something challenging into PR. I think I might review a few Entries that really ought to be in the Edited Guide, but for the pedants.

See you around. And don't worry: I don't think you're one of them. Unless I've already told you so, of course.