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Old 07-19-2012, 09:45 AM   #30
ApK
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Join Date: Feb 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw View Post
I agree that the sentence you refer to (starting "But what if someone got the book from a library or borrowed it from a friend?") does not follow as any sort of conclusion from the immediately preceding paragraph - as the "But" would have you expect. So yes, that is a definite fault.

However there is the paragraph "If removing reviews does have to do with Amazon verified purchases ..." just a short distance above, in the same section of the post, so the context was present and (I thought) easily understood. It just needed an editor to tidy it up a bit, though I'm not sure how common place it is to get blog posts professionally edited. I know that I did not go to extremes editing this post, so there could be some (hopefully minor) faults.
Yes, quite. However, there are two factors that make a blog post like that very different than a post here, and make the minor error significant in context.

1. It's professional writer (a "Master Wordsmith", in fact) writing about writing professionally. To be taken seriously, that should be held to a higher standard than a bunch of folk conversationally chatting on a forum.
I expect my son to get a better haircut from a barber than if he let's his little sister try it at home....(don't ask....)

2. The message of the article seems to be "Is Amazon doing something evil here? Question Authority, people!"

Even if the reference to the Verified Purchase issue was coherently placed, it's utterly irrelevant, and raises no concern worth questioning.
Amazon never said that was the reason, there's no reason to suspect that was the reason (not even an indication that the supposedly removed reviews WEREN'T by Verified Purchasers, so why waste electrons writing about arguments against that being the reason? It's a red herring at best, FUD-mongering at worst, and a sign of less than compelling reasoning in any case.

Combine the two, and I stand by my original (and hardly earth-shattering) opinion: I'm suspicious of that author's claims.
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