Three Simple Ways To Clean Up Your Content
How often have you found yourself reading content using all your mental focus? You get past the first paragraph and into the second and your suddenly realize, you have no idea what you just read means. You rewind and try again. You must not have been concentrating enough. But your second read through leaves you equally perplexed. You don’t get it. The content waters are murky.
When you are in the writer’s chair and you read through your own content, it all makes perfect sense — to you. But, what if your analytics tell you your content is falling flat? No one is reading it or if they start to, they abandon ship within seconds.
Here are three simple writing tips you can use to make your content clear and easy to read.
Use The Active Voice
So what is the active voice? How does it differ from the passive voice? We use the active voice when the subject of our sentence is the ‘actor’. We use the passive voice when the subject is the object of the action. The following sentence is an example of the active voice. The boy ate the cookie. And here is the alternative version using the passive voice. The cookie was eaten by the boy. Both sentences are grammatically correct. The first sentence is easier to ‘swallow’ — no pun intended.
I am going to pick on the following excerpt taken from a post published by www.thehill.com:
“The Financial Stability Oversight Council’s decision to release GE Capital from its designation as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI) was praised by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew for showing that there is an “off-ramp” after a firm has been designated and turned over to the Fed for the special regulation mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act.”1
The author wrote this sentence using the passive voice. “Decision” is the subject. It is the object of the action — “was praised”. Below, I convert it into the active voice.
Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, praised The Financial Stability Oversight Council for releasing GE Capital from its designation as a systemically important financial institution (SIFI). The Dodd-Frank act requires the Fed to regulate SIFI firms. Lew believes the GE Capital example shows there is an exit strategy for other firms burdened by the SIFI designation.
The active voice follows our instinctive interpretation of the English language. We speak using the active voice. Make sure you use it 90% of the time and make murky meaningful.
See if you can detect the other changes I made? They work well to demonstrate my next point.
Long Sentences Lose Your Reader
Read the first example again. This time, read it out loud. Unless you have bionic lungs, you cannot read it without gulping for air. You want your ideas to jump out at your readers. If write long sentences, they will get buried in the dirt of other words.
According to Readability — Score.com, “Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.” ProEdit’s Sarah Hocut tells us how to keep written content at an eighth grade reading level. “If you have a lot of compound or complex sentences, break them up into several shorter ones.”
What were those other changes I made? If you read my version of the rewritten sentence above, I break out one long sentence into three shorter ones. The excerpt example contains three complete thoughts: 1/ Lew praises the Council’s decision, 2/ Lew believes the decision gives hope to other firms and 3/ The Frank Dodd Act requires the Fed to regulate SIFIs. Combining those three separate thoughts into one sentence makes it more difficult to digest meaning. And when your readers are not gleaning meaning from your content, they disengage.
When you are writing, it is helpful to remember a rule we all learned in elementary school. A sentence is one complete thought. When you combine separate ideas into one sentence, do it with caution. Make sure to use conjunctions like “and” to separate different thoughts. Use long sentences sparingly or alternate them with shorter sentences. Make sure your readers can mentally ‘breathe’ as they read your content. We all like to breathe clean air.
Analogies Add Interest
If you are writing about complicated subjects, analogies can go a long way towards encouraging your readers to stick with your content. Business to business commerce is fueled by innovation. With innovation, come science, technology, finance and engineering. Those of us with liberal arts degrees may be intimidated by the terminology, jargon and acronyms used by experts in these fields.
You can capture the imagination of laypeople by using simple analogies they can relate to. In his blog post, “The Power of Analogies”, George Plopper explains how he used analogies to teach students about molecular biology. Cells were teeming cities and the proteins were busy workers who worked is specific locations within the cities. George says, “Analogies helped cut through jargon at multiple levels: Instead of discussing the impact of guanine nucleotide dephosphorylation on the activation state of a protein, we’d talk about how cutting the leg off a stool would impact one’s ability to sit on it.” I think George’s analogy cut through any confusion about what that “guanine thing” would do to a protein.
One more change I made to our example sentence above was to replace “off ramp” with “exit strategy”. Although “off ramp” is an analogy in and of itself, it is jargon like and the term muddied the already murky waters. “Exit strategy” is universally understood.
These three writing strategies are easy for anyone to incorporate into written content. You do not have to be an award winning journalist or an Ernest Hemmingway to capture your audience’s attention. You do have to know your subject matter and write about it in a simple, relatable and informative style. Writing for clarity and ease is the first step to producing quality content.
Producing clear and easy to read content is not enough. There is more to the content equation. You have to produce content that tells your reader you are an authority and an expert. You want to produce content that provides value, ideas and direction to your audience. Tune in next week for my blog post entitled, “Don’t Be Afraid To Give It Away”.
1http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/economy-budget/287724-ge-capital-and-the-coyotes-leg
2 https://readability-score.com
3 http://www.proedit.com/how-to-write-for-an-eighth-grade-reading-level/