Have you ever experienced the fatigue that results from being presented with a giant wall of text on the screen?
Sure, if you’re committed to learning about a topic in depth, you’ll read a whole long-form article, but if you are not committed, and just want to see the salient details, you’ll likely skip the verbiage and leave.
Key details
Most people just want the key details. This is why newspaper articles use a writing style called inverse pyramid. This style presents the key information first, and then goes into more detail further down in the article, when only the committed audience is still reading.
It takes practice to extract the key details from the information you want to present, because we are used to telling stories in a linear fashion. This is where AI can come in handy, but it does not always summarize a topic correctly, so human knowledge is still required to select the wheat from the chaff, and you still have to know the topic in depth to be able to write about it.
Sure AI is great to polish verbiage. I love that. But you can’t polish your knowledge!
Style and tone
Being able to write clearly and in a consistent style and tone is important, because it builds trust and confidence. Many companies have a house style guide for this reason. You may have noticed that some companies employ a more playful tone in their communications, while others are more serious. This is a key aspect of branding.
If you’re writing about a product and you want people to be able to decide whether to buy it based on the information provided, then writing clearly is vital.
Writing about products
A lot of sellers on Amazon Marketplace describe their products using “keyword stuffing” which is bad SEO, but also undermines confidence in the product, and makes for a poor user experience if the description of the product is full of the same words repeated over and over.
Instead, make sure all the most important information about the product is clearly displayed (e.g. name, colour, size, weight, material, price) and the less important details are included in the description or the technical specification. If your product has different size conventions in different countries (like shoes and clothing), you should also include a sizing conversion chart.
Why should your audience care?
If you’re writing about an event in the life of your company, or about an aspect of doing business, your article should follow the inverted pyramid convention. What is happening? Why is it significant? How does it affect your customers, suppliers, and employees? Why should people care about the topic? There is often a “hook” at the start of an article, but then “why you should care” will be expanded upon further down the article.
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