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Written content fuels search engine authority, website traffic, lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. If you get the words right, you can sway a reader to become a customer. Here’s what you need to know about writing strengths and weaknesses.
Writing: Talent or Skill?
Some people have natural abilities regarding writing. It seems easy for the ideas and information to flow fluidly. Even experienced writers have to practice, continue their education, read and network with other writers. There’s not a point where you’re done evolving as a writer.
Other people struggle more with the idea of taking thoughts and organizing them in the written word. It’s a struggle to find the right words to convey the main subject with supporting statements.
If this is you, don’t worry; you can continue to practice and learn until the words flow more naturally.
You can also learn how to identify your writing weaknesses and turn them into writing strengths by editing your work in detail before publishing.
Be True to Your Voice
Weakness: Many people write differently than they speak. They use complicated vocabulary with ill-fitting thesaurus suggestions and stuff their sentences with unnecessary words like therefore, thus, hence, and other unnatural transitions.
These words can make writing feel cold, stiff, and impersonal. These kinds of writings may also have technical jargon, making them hard to process. Write in layman’s terms.
Strength: Solid writing reflects the authentic voice of the author or the brand. Consider physical branding – the logos, colors, and packaging that people recognize.
When a writer is true to their voice, their articles and blog posts become recognizable, building trust with the audience and search engines.
Know Your Readers
Weakness: A blog or article written solely from your perspective and motive without considering who reads it will not perform well.
An article written with the target audience of 50-year-olds would not be executed in the same tone of voice as an article written for people in their twenties.
Strength: Good writing is accomplished, in part, with a clear customer persona or profile in mind. The author knows the demographics of their audience, such as age, gender, income level, education, interests, hobbies, and more.
To readers, this makes the content feel more natural and relatable.
Clarity of Topic
Weakness: Some pieces of writing don’t seem to have one main idea. Instead, thoughts are scattered and jump from one subject to another without cohesion.
This is often the case when you feel the urgency to publish something, but you haven’t got a clear goal in mind. Readers have a difficult time following disjointed thinking and will lose interest quickly.
Strength: A compelling piece of writing has one main idea and several supporting topics. This is often accomplished by creating an outline before the writing begins. An article is easy to read when it’s organized and follows a logical order.
Keywords
Weakness: The only way your content can be found on the web is by using keywords and keyword phrases. If you’re not sure what keywords your audience is searching for, you won’t be able to attract their attention. An entire blog post or article (including the title!) should be composed around a keyword strategy.
Another weakness regarding keywords is the tendency to keyword stuff. Keyword stuffing is when you use your chosen keyword repeatedly throughout the writing.
Strength: Keyword strategies fortify the foundations of your writing. Keywords should align with your subject. You’d also use related terms referred to as LSI or latent semantic indexing.
Substance and Fluff
Weakness: Good writing has to drill down below surface levels of a topic. The words you choose have to make sense and should be meaty. The length of an article won’t matter if your words are shallow.
Strength: Statistics, quotes, infographics, and other substantial information will educate your reader about your subject, prompting them to read further, register as a lead, or become a client or customer.
Sentence Length and Structure
Weakness: Some writers fall prey to run-on sentences, fragmented sentences, or sentences that have the same number of words in them time after time, which can make reading feel monotonous and boring. A run-on sentence is a sentence that can be broken down into two or three. A fragmented sentence is an incomplete thought.
Strength: Experienced writers vary sentence lengths. They write some sentences with three words – others with eight or nine. The more mixed up the lengths are, the more interesting the writing will seem.
Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation
Weakness: An article that has spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors is unprofessional. Viewers won’t read past the first paragraph. It’s too easy to use word processing software like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages as well as programs like Grammarly.com.
Strength: A well-written article is clean and free of errors. Before publishing, the author has taken the time to edit and proofread their work to make it as professional as possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can become a better writer by practicing daily. Use writing prompts or random quotes to get the ideas and keyboard moving. Give yourself time to warm up before you get into writing your blog post or article. Read everything you can about the craft of writing. Attend webinars.
After using word processing tools:
Let your writing sit for a day or two.
Look at it again after it’s rested so you can see it from a fresh perspective.
Edit every single line one at a time.
Look for words that spell-checkers might miss, such as there, their, they’re, or your and you’re.
Read your writing out loud to discover which areas trip you up.
The best place to get ideas to write about is from the questions your clients or customers most frequently ask. Each question can be an article. What do people most often ask about your product or service?
Timed freewriting is a great way to overcome writer’s block. Set a timer and just start typing about anything. Write about what you had for breakfast, your plans for next week, how you felt when your co-worker passed you up for a promotion?
There are plenty of ways to network with other like-minded writers, particularly Facebook Groups and LinkedIn. You can also check your local library or community events pages to find local writing groups that you can attend in person. Another great way to engage with other writers is to read, comment on, like, and share their content.
Conclusion
You don’t have to be a born writer with inherent talent to produce well-written, properly structured, compelling content. With a bit of research and practice, you can turn any writing weakness into a writing strength.
Be true to your voice without trying to force unnatural vocabulary. Know your audience so you can write to them in a fitting way. Know what you want to write about and structure that around a keyword strategy. Don’t over-stuff your content with fluff. Instead, support your information with facts and statistics. Be aware of the structure and length of your sentences and be sure to run your work through word processing software.
Written content fuels search engine authority, website traffic, lead generation, nurturing, and conversion. If you get the words right, you can sway a reader to become a customer. Here’s what you need to know about writing strengths and weaknesses.
Lori Ballen is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. She’s a digital marketing specialist, speaker, and marketing coach and loves to share her “Ballen Method” to generate website traffic and leads online. Lori’s specialties are SEO content writing (ranking on the search engines), social media strategies, and affiliate marketing. Need a website? Contact Lori’s brothers Jeff and Paul Helvin at Ballen Brands.
