Welcome to my very first article! Yay! 🎉
This article is a parody of Yiming's random writings. If you have not read them yet, you should go and read them at the links The 7 Stages of Taking a Cold Shower and 5 Stages of Finding out I Can't Be the CCA Chair. Please come back after reading though, because this article is objectively better. I promise.
Anyway, I wanted to document the process of how the articles on our website are created. No, they are not generated by ChatGPT. We actually spend our free time writing the articles. I can prove this to you by contradiction. Assume that the articles were generated by ChatGPT, the quality of the articles would be very good. Clearly, our articles are not generated by ChatGPT. That aside, below are the stages of writing an areticle.
Stage 1: Thinking of a good idea
It is incredibly difficult to think of a good idea that appeals to our readers. After all, who knows what kind of articles our readers will enjoy reading? We would never know until our readers read our articles, and decide that Areticle is the worst blog they have ever read in their lives. Hopefully not.
When it comes to idea generation, we each have some pretty interesting and unique ways. For example, Owen likes to ask his new found friend, ChatGPT, for ideas. He will repeat the same question for an entire afternoon, expecting a variety of answers, only to realise that all the ideas suck. Then, he will insult ChatGPT for its inability to come up with creative ideas. Oh, did I mention that ChatGPT is also Owen's one and only friend? Maybe there is a reason why.
For me, I like to use the PACC framework that my English teachers have taught me. It stands for purpose, audience, context and culture, which are four things we should keep in mind when writing. It also works for ideas, because the framework lets me to filter out bad ideas based on each criterion. Except there is one problem. My teachers have never taught me what to do if the audience is literally nobody.
After thinking of the idea, we will float the idea to some friends and ask them what they think of it. This helps us to determine whether the article is worth writing. If people like the idea, we will certainly write the article. If people don't like the idea, we will certainly still write the article (who cares about what they think).
Stage 2: Writing and publishing the article
With a good idea in mind, we can finally begin writing. We continuously generate ideas, such as how to title our article, and how to make the content engaging. This is usually quite fun because we get to write whatever we want and whatever that comes to mind like this super duper long sentence that for some reason does not have any punctuation except for the lonely full stop.
Writing is the magical stage of bringing life to the idea, or otherwise. There are two common pitfalls when it comes to writing a good article. The first is when the idea sucks, because some people just have dumb ideas (like Elon Musk). The second is when the writer has a lack of ability, and they are unable to develop their idea into something interesting enough. You can find prime examples of articles fallen into both pitfalls in the second paragraph of this article.
When we are done writing, we will format the articles properly and prepare them for publication. You may notice that we always have nice graphics on our Instagram page to complement each article, most of the time being stickmen or creatures. This is a result of us summoning our professional artist VS to draw the graphics. Why does he draw stickmen? Idk, I haven't thought of a joke yet.
Stage 3: Depression and questioning life
While Javier always very happily writes about mantises and Greek gods, most of the time that is not the case for other writers. It is very unfortunate that writing for Areticle comes with a lot of emotions. This all starts with writing, during which we have to incessantly frown upon the fact that we are spending our precious time writing something that nobody will ever read. It seems that however well we write, the article will probably just end up being a few more kilobytes of garbage generated on the internet.
We tried many ways to improve the state of our blog. We are writing marginally better articles, adding nice graphics by hiring artists to draw (for free), and even publishing more articles every week. We pray that our stickmen will tell more people to read our articles. But nothing works, and we begin to suffer from depression.
Occasionally, we will go into Google Analytics to check how we are doing. Google Analytics is a software that tracks visits to our website. The most interesting part is a line graph that shows how many people viewed our website against time. When there is a line graph, we are always tempted to do some extrapolation. How many users will view our website every day by the end of this year? Lol, it turns out to be negative.
We question life. Why are we even writing our articles? We get others to question life. Why are they even reading our articles? We question whether there is any point in continuing to publish articles. Maybe we should stop writing. Maybe this should be my last article.
Stage 4: Closing the vicious cycle
After each stage of negative thoughts, self-doubt, depression, and questioning life, our morale becomes continuously lower. It seems only reasonable that Areticle is to be shut down immediately. Yet, articles continue to be published regularly, and we are going nowhere. You may be curious, what motivates us to continue writing despite all of these happening?
It is time for me to share with you the incredible technique that we use to close the vicious cycle. This advanced technique is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists. It is entirely backed by science, especially in the biology field. The next time your team suffers from such problems, feel free to use this technique too, and it will keep all your projects going smoothly.
The technique is called negative feedback loop. The below is what it looks like in practice, extracted from an ordinary conversation between our writers. I have modified it slightly for clarity but it is to the same effect.
Yiming: @VS Can we talk about ur coasts areticle,,,
Yiming: It sucks,,,,,,,
Conclusion (a.k.a. marketing)
Writing an areticle is not an easy task. We have to think of good ideas, spend many brain cells to write the articles, and bear the pain from depression afterwards. Just think of all my suffering to bring you joy as you are reading this article. So if you enjoyed reading this article, please share it with all your friends. It will help relieve my pain, especially when I see a line graph the next time.
Disclaimer: This article is written largely for comedic effect. Areticle will be going nowhere, and we will continue to bring you great articles.
