William Chong

I’m normally very careful in keeping my posts on this site away from work-related affairs. I work with hundreds of confidential documents and with commercially-sensitive information, so it’s generall unwise to blab about my office-time writing endeavours.

However I think it should be OK for me to tell everyone a bit about my current project. Our company’s basically been hired to fix up another agency’s bad work, some of which I’d like to share – for laughs, for serious criticism, and for a general sense of bewilderment.

Bear in mind the copy should be written for a medically-literate audience, and should normally be in a formal, scientific tone.

On the topic of diets:

“People do not have too [sic] eat as much on an organic diet as it contains more (e.g. nutrients) and tastes better.

There are zillions of diets available … Unfortunately, no successful programmeme [sic] for primary prevention has yet been established. …”

On drug adduction:

The brouhaha surrounding addiction is probably anecdotal. As the drug is a CNS stimulant like caffeine, ephedrine and amphetamine then there is the potential for people to become addicted or dependent on that feeling…

On weight loss programmes:

Calorie or point counting and weight loss programmemes [sic] (e.g. Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig) work because they are successful in restricting the calorie intake by providing tools, meals, weekly visits and support in reaching weight loss goals.

These were just a few of the many painful-to-read examples we found. I was also disappointed to also find that of the content that wasn’t purely rank opinion, poor spelling and wild conjecture, there were entire sections that were not-so-subtly plagiarised from published journal articles.

For example, the following paragraph was puzzling because it didn’t seem to be written with the audience (pharmaceutical reps) in mind…

Prevention is the first choice. It has to be our first commitment, particularly to our children and adolescents. Unfortunately, no successful programmeme for primary prevention has yet been established. We have a pervasive culture, reinforced by powerful commercial forces, that promotes eating and physical inactivity. To challenge this established culture will take strong political will and a multidisciplinary approach.

… until I discovered it was word-for-word from the first page of this article.

You could conceivably turn a blind eye to that sort of thing for primary-secondary school essays, but for paid agency work? It was worse than Noelle McCarthy, that’s for sure.

The moral of the story – don’t pay anyone to give you half-baked, plagiarised writing. You might just have to hire someone else to fix it!