I have always known that my writing style might not be very pleasant for everybody to read and to be honest it has never been something that I have worried too much about, people either like it or they don’t, isn’t that the line of a decent writer after all? That is what I have always been told anyway.

I was asked to write an article for a popular website recently (who I will not mention) and I excitedly accepted and got to work on it straight away, despite the fact that they refused to give me a topic to write about I still took the challenge and emailed them a number of ideas and they picked one that they wanted me to cover.

I finished the article and did my normal spell check and grammar check and then submitted it to the editor and waited for his response. His declined the article on the grounds that I had used the English language in an awkward way.

I had written “on a regular basis” instead of “regularly” and he claimed that this would confuse and irritate his readers. I thought he was joking at first, how could you reject an article for such a flimsy reason? I had even asked several writers who have a much better grasp of English than I do and they all branded the editor “pedantic”.

I had also used commas when full stops should have been used.

I made the changes and sent it back, the editor said it was now fine and they would publish the article. I then emailed him and informed him that I had now rejected their website as I didn’t like the font type that the articles were published in.

I then submitted the article to a smaller article directory site. The article is about generating traffic to your website and although I will be missing out on a nice fee (and future work from them) I felt like I had won a moral war with them as long as you don’t try and think about it too much.

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