Abhirupa Purkayastha – Simplifying Life

Content writers often confuse creativity with complexity. In an effort to make their copies stand apart from the rest, website writers tend to use lots of jargons, buzz words and complex sentences ( which sometimes do not make any sense). Here’s a quick rundown of mistakes that writers must stay away from.

1. Avoid headlines that appear to be clever but  are basically confusing and incomprehensible. Take this headline for example.

I’ve taken this particular headline from the services page of a web application development company. It’s non-informative and doesn’t give a bit of hint about the company’s services. Instead of a confusing headline a straightforward headline saying We offer web application development, web design and web marketing services would have done better.

2. Don’t write for insiders who know your processes. What is Cognizant 2.0? I wonder whether anyone not acquainted with Cognizant processes could comprehend it!! A general- interest page where you write about your services should not have  cliffhanger sentences. Nowhere in this section it’s been mentioned what Cognizant 2.0 is all about.  Yes, you can click  to get a detailed information but remember there’s one thing common with all the web users, and that is, lack of patience.

3. Edit before you hit the Publish button. This is a basic rule but sometimes writers tend to ignore it and the consequences are somewhat like:

It’s taken from National Museum’s official site.

4. Don’t misuse acronyms. The first time you use an acronym spell it out with the short form placed within parenthesis immediately after. Once you’ve mentioned what the acronym stands for  there’s no point in spelling it out again in the article.

The worldwide leader in networking for the Internet, Wednesday introduced high-speed Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network modules for the Cisco 3600 modular access platform.

These new OC-3 modules give service providers and enterprise customers a cost-effective solution for extending multiservice capabilities to branch-office locations through Asynchronous Transfer Mode.( Here the writer should have used the acronym ATM).