Words Matter
Design your content like you design your products
To transform the mysterious art of content into a repeatable and measurable process, we created this checklist of characteristics common to exceptional stories. Use it to guide you (and your team) as you write, edit, and review blog posts, Tweets, and video scripts.
1. Express a point of view
Your content should express a unique point of view and provide a sightline into your topic from your distinct vantage point. Bring to your message a specific take on the problem or solution that belongs only to you. Express ideas that resonate as Different, not merely better. No one goes to the storyteller to learn what they already know, instead bring an approach that opens the reader’s eyes to new revelations on how the world works.
2. Get to work
Entice, persuade, or help — your content must perform specific work to further your cause. Narrow your focus to increase your effectiveness. Ask yourself what traits you wish to encourage and what actions you hope to enkindle. Design your words to do work.
3. Prompt a useful action
Know what your audience needs and design your content to help them achieve it. Prompt a useful action that generates an instant benefit. Help your reader to put your ideas into practice.
4. Measure what matters
Plan what you hope to achieve with each effort and map out how you will codify, instrument, and report on your performance. Every piece of content should come paired with a measurement plan, but not every piece of content will share the same goal. Sometimes you might shoot for extensive reach, other times you’ll aim to encourage a specific action by a narrow audience. Careful measurement matters — get it wrong and you’ll suffer false institutional knowledge from specious data and ill-conceived experiments.
5. Take the right form
Adapt your content to match the mechanisms of human behavior inherent in each medium. Get real about what works and design your content to complement the strengths of each format. Explore every channel and pick the right fit.
6. #Shareworthy
Construct Tweet-length section headers to make it easy for people to copy and share your core ideas. Leave no positive social interaction unanswered and treat every negative social interaction with care.
7. Skim and dive
Don’t force your reader to digest every word from beginning to end. Design your piece for multiple entry points through a process called skim and dive — where the reader first skims through your key ideas and then dives into the areas that matter to her most. Achieve this through layout, markup, and the narrative structure of your work.
8. Show, don’t tell
Pick the most effective path to comprehension. Your options include text, data visualizations, photos, video, and illustrations. Strive to demonstrate rather than to describe your insight.
9. Work the lede
Seduce your audience with a lede that stuns. Cut lazy first sentences. Skip trite metaphors. Recompose weak starts. Make the most of your first impression. After you think you’ve finished your piece, go back and demand more from your lede — it should entice, lay out the stakes, and point towards the finish line.
10. Seek expert sources
Protect yourself from false claims through careful research. Find and cite the best available sources (both internal and external). Give other people credit whenever you can. You’ll appear confident, informed, and intelligent when you acknowledge the foundational work of others. People abhor glory hogs (even accidental ones).
11. Transform your audience
Any attempt to seduce your audience with facts & stats or features and options opens the door for someone else to beat you with a better number. Strive to be different, not merely better. No one will care about your features until they believe you hold the key to their own progress. How do you do it? Transform your audience through an intellectual epiphany, an emotional call-to-arms, or a gut-drop of urgency. To win, you must persuade with emotion and justify with logic. Your reader must see your idea as the path to her or his own success. They must have the revelation that your idea will help them transform into the person they hope to become.
12. No vague descriptors
Investigate the root cause of notable traits and describe them with specific care. Offer memorable details that augur essential characteristics. Tell for a reason. Example: The founder had a moon-shaped callus on her right thumb, earned from her near constant connection to her iPhone.
13. Omit adverbs
Adverbs poison otherwise reasonable copy. Sublimate your text with a precise verb and your need to embellish it will evaporate.
14. Deep Impact
Do not use impact as a verb; use impact as a noun. Never use that unholy impostor of a word, impactfulness.
DO — Since 1992, every fashion subculture has felt the impact of grunge.
DON’T — The app impacted mobile use.
DON’T — I admired the impactfulness of the app.
15. Not massively great
Avoid trite superlatives such as great and awesome; instead, pick adjectives that provide specific, extra information that reflects your point of view and demonstrates why we should care. Please reserve massive for items that contain much mass (like an elephant or Mt. Rushmore). Also, note that masterful means forceful, not masterly. Use fewer for items you can count and less for items you can’t. Example — fewer accidents, less misery. And most important, never write most importantly — we don’t need to add the -ly to get the job done. Pssst — If such details of usage delight you, seek more happiness from my favorite source, The New Yorker’s Comma Queen, found on X @MaryNorrisTNY
16. Eliminate to be and -ing
My best secret? Eliminate am, is, are, were, was, and -ing. Your sentences will gain purpose and strength as you claim your subjects, objects, and predicates with equal enthusiasm. Notice this entire text was written with no am, is, are, were, was, be, or -ing outside of this paragraph.
17. Rare words
Karen Wickre, who ran all of content at Google and Twitter, offers helpful guidance on the use of rare words. She suggests that we optimize for clarity, even if it means that every once in a while your reader may have to reach for a dictionary or right-click on a word to learn the exact definition. But don’t sneak your hand into the cookie jar too many times — more than two rare words per piece will engender scorn instead of delight. Don’t humiliate or exhaust your reader just for sport; love them, and help them grow.
18. Make every word tell
Craft direct, laconic, and effective text — where each word has a job to do and does it well. The sentence “Make every word tell” embodies the message it sends. Find it, and more in Strunk and White’s slim book on text, The Elements of Style.
