piątek, 19 sierpnia 2011

2 Keys to Good Content Generation

By Jeff Santoro


It's a whiz-bang entry for Wikipedia. It's an insightful treatise on better ways to saut squid with peanut butter. Or maybe it's one of those glaringly self-referential search marketing articles designed to inflate your website's PageRank across an increasingly intimidating phalanx of Internet search engines? Whatever it is, if you're going to write an article, why not take the time to write it well? There is an ocean of difference between 500 words and 500 words someone might actually care to read. In a Web 2.0 world that's positively buckling beneath the weight of billions of tedious, badly written, drivel-infused articles, stumbling across something readable, perhaps even edifying, presents nothing short of a eureka moment.

Here are 2 keys to help you write better, clearer, more engaging articles:

1. Your article's lynchpin is its lede (lead).

Use lede or lead. It's your choice. Lede is often used as an alternative to lead as it reduces ambiguity, e.g., My article's lead read "red lead paint licking may lead to lead poisoning." Your lede is the first line in the body of your article. Bad ledes are synonymous with home movies and persistent flatulence in that they send people running from the room.

Your lede should be compelling, something that seizes our eyeballs and makes us say "Wait a second, here's an article that might be worth ingesting." Moreover, your lede should give us a sense of where we're going. Being as concise as you can, dangle something provocative in front of us, something that makes us salivate to read sentence two.

Bad ledes abound. For example: "The suggestion that the typical Internet experience, with respect to not only quality but also substance, is declining owing to a glut of meaningless articles featuring truly lousy writing has been made by some people."

Leding the article this way would be an improvement: "Here lies the Net, killed by bad writing."

2. A good transition helps render a readable article.

Your lede is off the hook, and the subsequent two or three sentences lend it charm and gravitas. You're thinking you're home free. Time to put up your feet and wait for the money, accolades and aggressive advances from attractive members of whichever gender or genders your prefer. Not so fast there, cow person. Your article can't dance without a couple of shapely transitions.

Take, for example, the following: For your lede you wrote, "Reading an article with a strong lede is like savoring filet mignon, whereas reading a poor lede reminds me of sucking pured tripe through a straw." We, the reader, were right there with you. One time, owing to a series of spectacularly awful circumstances, we had to suck pured tripe through a straw, and we didn't care for it. So, we journeyed with you, all the way to the conclusion of paragraph 1.

But then, for example, in paragraph 2, you do this: "Take heed, sweet article writing isn't for everyone, including my cousin Darla who looks like a supermodel only with a great many fewer teeth."

However, you might try: "Whenever I read a bad lede, I'm reminded of my cousin Darla who resembles a supermodel but has only three teeth and is therefore restricted to a diet consisting solely of pured tripe, which she must suck through a straw."

Follow these 2 article writing approaches and help make the world a better place.




About the Author:



Brak komentarzy:

Prześlij komentarz