In case you missed it (and there is a good chance you did), a blog called Accredited Online Colleges ran a little article called 9 Signs Self-Publishing is Out of Control. I am firmly of the belief that everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, even when that opinion is stupid and completely wrong.
This article begins with these well-balanced lines: “To paraphrase the immortal words of Truman Capote, there’s a difference between writing and typing. And, to put it gently, we can say with a good amount of confidence that most self-published books were typed, not written. Because communicating with letters assembled into words is a skill most learn by the age of 5, and because written communication has become so ubiquitous in American life, everyone now thinks he’s a writer.”
Why, with such impervious reasoning as that, one might also wonder if anyone with a computer now thinks he’s a blogger. I won’t quote anything further from the article (the link is there if you’d like to have a look). Neither will I conduct a line-by-line vivisection of the deeply flawed reasoning put forth in the article, tempting as that may be.
I do find it fairly dripping with irony. Here the anonymous author takes exception to the technology that has allowed the Philistines to call themselves authors. Presumably, the author is all right with the same technology when put to the purpose of creating accredited online colleges. Yet, the preponderance of the author’s arguments can be applied equally against accredited online colleges. All of this begs the question: Are accredited online colleges out of control? (McNally, did you notice I capitalized after the colon there?) The sad answer to this question is an unqualified yes.