Digital Marketing

How can you create great content without being too wordy?

Many people sit down to write and all of a sudden seem to think they need to add additional words. You may have found yourself doing that at some point as well – using words that you know aren’t natural to you and just adding something to your writing.

The truth is, the best writing (especially online writing) is writing that makes the reader feel like you are speaking directly to them. To do this, you cannot use irrelevant words, but you cannot omit what is important either.

Create a job title

Starting with a title is a great way to narrow down what you’re going to say to your readers. You can always refine it later. Crafting a headline involves understanding the reason for your message.

Make a scheme

Once you’ve written your job title, it’s time to make an outline. Just write a few bullet points about the topics you want to tell your audience.

Avoid redundant words

Common redundancies like “absolutely perfect” and “true facts” can add or subtract from the meaning of your words. Most of the time you want to avoid unnecessary redundancies like “last and last” because it adds nothing to the meaning of your words. There may be an argument for certain types of irreverent writing to include these redundancies, but for concise writing, avoid them as much as possible and edit for meaning.

Combine sentences

You were probably taught in school to write short, direct sentences. But sometimes it is appropriate to combine sentences to get a more concise copy. Combining short sentences helps you avoid boring your audience. When you can easily combine two sentences, without creating a consecutive sentence, you should. It will improve the understanding of the copy and improve the flow.

What what what

Sometimes these words are necessary, but when you are editing your work, pay particular attention to when they are used, who and what. Test the sentence without these words to see if the meaning changes or if the emphasis of the words changes.

Use active voice

It is very easy to use the passive voice when writing. However, most of the time it is more appropriate to use the active voice. A key to knowing when the passive voice creeps in are the words, “is, is, was and by“If you notice those words while editing, try organizing your sentence by changing the passive voice to the active voice.

See nominalizations

When an action word becomes a noun, it becomes nominalization. (eg, “illustration” vs. “illustrated”). These should be avoided. They have a negative effect on your copy by making the reading monotonous and easy to misinterpret. Instead, focus on making sentences active and using nouns as nouns and action words as action words.

Edit with care

No one can write a good copy in a single draft. In fact, you may need multiple drafts to perfect your copy. Take the time to perfect each sentence for each type of copy you write. Start with a free-flowing copy, leave it for a while, then come back to it and make it better.

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