Jakobs is a joke

As I waded through Jakobs “The Evolution of Web-Site Genres,” I couldn’t help but think that she needs writing lessons and counseling on her racist tones. I will propose two quick sentences of her writing for review. The first seems blatantly confusing and ungrammatical. This is how Jakobs puts it, “These modifications can here be only briefly examined using the example of an online insurance site” (Jakobs 363). Ironically, this terrible sounding sentence is also a segway into her racial undertones.


Now I may be completely off-base here but I would like to also offer as evidence sentence two. “An example may suffice. Germans are said to avoid risks; in contrast to Americans, they seek to counter risk-filled situations in life by taking insurance policies” (364). Jakobs’ “example” only sufficed in discrediting her point to me. I will not pull this card very often, but, as you noticed, this blog’s title also includes ridicule; although the main theme of the blog is to analyze and study theory, sometimes it is important to criticize texts. After all, we can’t go around believing everything we hear. I would like to investigate how a few ill constructed sentences and questionably slanted views can discredit a source. I will admit that I didn’t find anything particularly interesting in the beginning of this text. Eventually I started to pick up on the subtle sentence faults. Here is another sentence that stood out to me, “web-site users expect typically solutions and orient their behavior and value judgments to familiar patterns” (366). I believe the word she wished to use was typical. Either this person’s work was translated from a different language or Jakobs has a terrible editor. I submit this example of ridicule to the discourse community of writers. How can we possible take this theory text seriously, when it distracts and makes condescending remarks? I believe it is fair to say that Americans also have insurance. Do Germans take less risk than Americans? Not in the late 1930s to the early 1940s.


The real problem with Jakobs’ claims is that they are not cited. In fact another passage appears that seems to be pure conjecture, “this would explain why Chinese portals seem to be designed according to the maxim ‘as much as possible all at once’ and hence appear to Western eyes as cluttered and confused” (365). Jakobs did get one thing right, I am confused; however, it is not from the “Chinese portal” but from her rash generalization of “Westerners” without any research or cited material to back up her argument. I hope at this point everyone else is as turned off to her style as I am. The question that keeps reoccurring is: if Jakobs is willing to make unsubstantiated claims in parts of her text, how are we supposed to take her argument seriously? Since Jakobs graciously offered the Germans as an example, I will do the same by offering a video that represents my frustrations with her grammar using Hitler. I would also like to show how painful it was to read Jakobs’ text by showing an equally painful event—an ungrammatical break-up.