Writing articles for publication on the Internet is, at the time I write this, every Internet marketer's favourite way to get free publicity for his website. If you are an Internet marketer and haven't heard the buzz that's going around about writing articles, where have you been? No, forget I asked, there can't be a single Internet marketer hasn't heard that writing articles is an essential part of website promotion.

Suddenly everyone wants to be writing articles. Hundreds of wannabe authors are writing articles and flooding the article directories with items they have specially written for publicity purposes. Many Internet marketers are writing articles to a high standard but there are plenty of others who are churning out poorly written articles or ones that are no more than thinly disguised advertisements for their affiliate programme. I recently saw an article that claimed to be original but where the "author" had taken someone else's article and added a paragraph or two before putting his own copyright on it. It got published with the result that there are additional links back to his website and that's all he cares about. Prosecution for copyright infringement is unlikely as this article will quickly get lost in the growing crowd.

All sorts of liberties are being taken in the name of writing articles, but does it matter? I am sorry to say the answer is no: as far as writing articles is concerned, anything goes. If you are writing articles to advertise your website, you can get away with poor spelling, bad grammar and boring subject matter. You can get away with plagiarism and even with cheating by having a robot writing articles for you. About the only thing you are not allowed to do when writing articles is use obscenities or incite people to violence. The torture of the English language is, however, widely condoned.

This situation makes me sad because I love reading and I just can't help writing. I am not alone in writing articles because of an inner compulsion. If you have read John Colanzi's article, My Magnificent Obsession, where he says, "It didn