Okay, first off, fucking lol, he plagiarized his resume. Come the fuck on, this is bordering on satire at this point.
Yes, he is a shit writer, that much is clear.
But when people say writing is easy, they mean effort more than skill. Like, if you've been doing it for years, writing a review of a game you're passionate about shouldn't really take more than a couple hours. Transcribing and re-writing a youtube video is not going to be much of a shortcut, nor does it really solve the problem of needing to know how to string a sentence together -- as you've pointed out here.
To me, it feels like there's two possibilities -- Filip either has no confidence in his ability to form an original thought, or he's just never thought to learn to do this any other way.
See, I still wouldn't say it's
easy. I enjoy writing, I love doing it. I love video games. I make
really long ResetEra threads. They aren't easy to make. They're enjoyable, and I am sure that they would be enjoyable for someone who loves writing, is good at it, and writes about games (that they also presumably enjoy). Enjoyable doesn't mean easy, it just means you're, well, enjoying what you are doing.
That's a great point too and another reason why what he did and how he acts about it is especially shitty.
Absolutely. I know how much I personally pride and take ownership of my writing. I've been plagiarized before by some person with an underhanded sense of morals. Plagiarism is the lowest of the lows.
It is disheartening, even infuriating, to hear those errors. Note the emphasis on hearing. Everyone makes grammatical mistakes in writing, but usually one of the first pieces of advice that a writing tutor or editor imparts is to read your writing aloud. Speaking catches a lot of syntactical and grammatical flubs, and the fact that he could, presumably, read a script aloud and not edit it further is astonishing, either in its mendacity, laziness, or combination of the two.
That's the amazing thing, isn't it?
He didn't catch his own errors as he read them out loud. That to me is what speaks the most about his writing capacity.
Writing good prose is way harder than it looks, and is often overlooked in this day and age.
The problem is that a lot of people only have college essays as their only experience with formal writing, and a lot of people BS those assignments by throwing thoughts from their head onto paper, with more effort made towards meeting a length limit than towards making their writing something that people would actually want to read. The former is fairly easy, but the latter takes a lot of effort.
It's easy to pour thoughts from your head onto paper without caring about things like whether your points are well said, whether you're arranging information in a way that's easy to pick up, whether you're saying anything extraneous or wordy, and whether your writing is mechanically bulletproof. A lot of people do this and think that's the end of any writing task. But for a writer, that's only the first step. That's equivalent to a first draft, where you put your thoughts on paper before you actually mold a coherent article out of it. That molding is a good 75% or more of any writing task, but most people don't do it at all, so they assume writers don't do it either.
Absolutely. The bare minimum for a college essay is "meet the word limit", and most don't bother going beyond that. As you point out, few are aware that actual writing requires far more than that.
You have been posting some really great comments here that echoes my thoughts exactly and for that I commend you. I am pretty disgusted with this situation myself. When I read a game review I am not expecting world class writing but original thoughts that may or may not help me in making a decision to play a game. The fact that this dude not only couldn't be arsed to come up with his own style and words, but continues to deny that he did these things despite full on evidence it appalling.
I find sometimes that it's hard to articulate my thoughts correctly and I oftentimes write full comments in these threads only to scratch the whole thing cause I don't feel it's the right message I was trying convey.
Thank you. It's just something that was starting to bug me, as someone who writes a lot. I actually
do find it enjoyable, but I forgot how much I take it for granted that I can do it when I started working with people who can't write, and I was coaching them on the basics. Which is why the posts here, which are generally well considerate of things like this, were rubbing me the wrong way.
Oh, I don't mean to denigrate the difficulty of putting words together. I've tutored and taught for years (my semester start-up meeting is next week), and many of my current clientele have severe issues with basic mechanics (i.e, local or low-order concerns). I'm deeply sympathetic to my students, as many are coming from either impoverishment or otherwise lacking education or are approaching English as a foreign language. There's a certain sense of pride when a student starts correcting their own grammar after a few meetings that is unrivaled by other pursuits.
That said, I expect someone who is hired by a professional organization based around writing to have at least the rudimentary knowledge of competent structure, flow, and organization, those global or higher-order concerns. Proper attribution of sources and research goes alone with that. I agree with your earlier observation that good writing is lacking in a lot of highly educated fields. I'd estimate four out of five STEM majors I meet, including graduates, lack major components of proper writing, and I've even been appalled at fellow graduate students in the humanities.
I definitely agree with you on all of that. The basic hope would be that someone who works at IGN could write well, it is now clear Filip can't even write, let alone write well. As you also point out, people in sophisticated academic fields have struggles with writing. It's definitely not as easy as it seems haha.
Your story about your students definitely warmed my heart! You're awesome for teaching them how to properly express themselves.