Information style or how to make the text "strong"

In our company, the rules are as follows: if you find something interesting, share it with an employee! Designer Alexei did just that. After joint viewing and general delight, we decided to write this article.

This information is for those who want to learn how to write texts for websites correctly and turn heavy texts into interesting and reader-friendly ones. The ease of writing the text leads to increased interest among the audience. To make it more clear, let's move on to examples - get rid of "stop words" in texts that interfere with perception.

So what are stop words ? These are words that don't mean anything, or are misused, or can always be turned into an easier language construct. These words give you the opportunity to understand that something is wrong in this text. Let's talk more about groups of such words.

So, let's select several groups of "stop words"

Such a construction disarms the sentence, takes away the predicate from it, which leads to a loss of dynamics and strength in the text. To make it clearer, here are 2 examples.

Text 1: The item will be delivered within two working days. Delivery is carried out by courier.

Text 2: The courier will deliver the goods within two business days.

In the first text, "goods" does not perform an action - "goods" is in the passive voice, and therefore, getting rid of the passive voice in the second text, we get dynamics and action. So once you have a sentence with a passive voice, look for the subject and verb - make a powerful sentence.

They are divided into three subgroups: amplifiers , vague concepts and quality adjectives .

Amplifiers - the name speaks for itself, words that add strength to your sentence.

Example: "our company is the absolute leader", or "we are the absolute leader".

This text is bad because it raises doubts about the "absoluteness" of leadership. Try not to use amplifiers unless you can prove its validity, as people will think you are cheating them.

Blurred concepts - “our company is one of the market leaders”, or “we are in the top ten”. If a company says it's in the top ten, it's likely to be in ninth or tenth place.

Qualitative adjectives - denote such a sign (quality) of an object that can be in this object to a greater or lesser extent.

Examples that you can not argue with : white, black.

Examples that can be argued with: high, expensive, high-quality, strong.

These adjectives seem to tell us about the quality, but on the other hand they do not tell us anything.

"High House" - what is it? "Inexpensive product" - how inexpensive is it?

Readers will trust you more if you are more precise in your statements. Replace quality adjectives with specific facts and figures.

During the writing of the text, we most often mention what is happening now. If you need the reader to plunge into the past, it is enough to say - “yesterday”, “last week”, “in such and such a year”. If we are talking about the future, there is no need to invent, you can simply say “tomorrow”, “in a month”, “in a year”, etc.

A common mistake when creating texts is writing such words as “now”, “at present”, “in our days” at the beginning of a sentence. But the point here is that the reader is already in the "now" state. Therefore, by getting rid of such parasites of time, you do not lose anything. Here, for example:

“it is very difficult for a young specialist to find a job these days”;

or like this:

"Finding a job after college is hard."

This is how you can easily remove parasitic words from the text. However, if your text often sends the reader into the past or the future, then words like "now", "in our time" are certainly needed. This is an example of the fact that it is not always necessary to exclude "stop words" from the text.

This is a group of words expressing the speaker's attitude to the content of his statement - words like "can", "should", "need". Modal verbs and combinations with them can easily be turned into one verb that will simplify your sentence. Let's look at an example:

"You must register to leave comments";

or like this:

"Register to speak."

These are nouns that are formed from the stem of a verb by adding a suffix. Consider this example:

“Our company sells products. We do installation and repair.

There are verbal nouns here - "implementation", "installation", "repair". It seems that the company itself is afraid to admit what it does. But if we say: “our company sells, installs and repairs” - this is another matter.

1. Passive voice
2. Definitions
3. Parasites of time
4. Modality
5. Verbal nouns

Informational style requires certainty and precision in everything. Well, if you use fuzzy language, then you have no advantage over other "same" articles.

Of course, this is only part of the methods of working with advertising texts - for a more detailed understanding, we suggest you watch a video with the participation of a very talented person, the author of the course "Information Style and Text Editing" Maxim Ilyakhov. And we are confident that you will be able to learn a lot of new useful information and learn the rules of writing "strong copy" that will help make your articles interesting and attractive to readers.