We all have a little swagger when we write. Before we’ve even saved the rough draft, we’re mentally accepting that Pulitzer. After all, we’re professionals who know what we’re doing.
Except sometimes old habits and natural tendencies can get in our way when we’re writing content for the web. For instance–maybe, just maybe–not everyone will think every line of our masterpiece is solid gold, baby!
Ouch.
When we realize that only our mothers want to read every word we’ve written and that the rest of the world just wants us to get to the point, we’ll take the advice of Digital Wave’s Lamar Goodenough, Director of User Research:
“We need to get [users’] attention by getting right to what they came for, and write for those who WON’T read every word.”
Lamar Goodenough, Digital Wave
Recently Lamar and Sales Director Sarah Ailes presented “Webkill: How Natural Writing Tendencies Can Murder a Perfectly Innocent Website” at the National Council for Marketing & Public Relations (NCMPR) annual conference. It was just a snippet from our longer “Writing for the Web” workshop. Their virtual presentation showed attendees how even the most experienced writers sometimes give in to bad habits, and–well–they killed it.
They illustrated a plan to write for the web that ditches the pitfalls that others have found to be problematic and turn off users, such as the tendency for organizations to go on and on about themselves like they’re on a bad blind date.
Overcoming human tendencies is something we deal with all the time. We want to help our clients’ writers benefit from the experience of our consultants, so they don’t have trouble with these same habits.
You can then start writing that acceptance speech. Just make sure someone other than your mom will want to hear the whole thing.
Interested in learning more about our full-length Writing for the Web Workshop? Contact us today!
