About // Professional Editors & Writers // Writing // Copyediting // Proofreading // Ghostwriting // Persuasive Writing // Magazines // Technical & Educational Writing // Web & Blog Content // Rates // Examples
WEB & BLOG CONTENT
Advances in Technology Require Advanced Use of Language
Has the evolution of writing, from paper to pixels to pointing, killed your message?
ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY
Every web designer and content writer know that advances in technology have changed the way we produce and consume information. We say that a picture speaks a thousand words when we use images to aid the quick consumption of information.
But does this mean that we must return to writing comic book-like features or turn the web into a wall of pictograms and hieroglyphs? Surely not! Must language usage then adapt to keep up with technology? Yes definitely, but not how most advocate that it should.
BAD READING, BLAND WRITING
Less thinking is going into writing than it did decades ago, while on-screen reading has become scanning. Spell-and language checkers, auto-complete functions in search engines, and the compacted information required for on-screen reading, are making us lazy.
On websites that focus on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you will get statements such as “Forget Reading! Web Content Is Meant to Be Skimmed.” We understand we live in a do-everything-at-top-speed, catch-them while-you-can, instant-everything, and always-impatient world. But do we have to chunk language into junk food and tasteless keywords?
THE INFINITE PROPERTIES OF GOOD LANGUAGE
Verbal language that transports your mind into the minds of your stakeholders is the most powerful tool to spread your message. Language is supposed to set us apart from animals, not to create blind and brainless zombies that accept what they see (not read). WordCarver still believes that readers must assimilate and understand content if you want to persuade your clients to buy from you, or if you want to inform your stakeholders about your organisation. To achieve this, we must use language that entices, stimulates, humours, and enlightens. Such language is different to the normal jargon, metaphors, clichés, and daily usage. To open the ear and the mind of a society force-fed on sloppy slang, we need to “make language strange” as linguists call it.
This is where Star War’s character Yoda comes in. He uses language that wakes you up and forces you to listen to him. We are not advocating that we all start speaking or using his language, i.e., Yodish, but listen to this as you read it out aloud:
“This writer, recommend to others, you must.”
Can you see how it forces you to slow down and absorb the sentence and how “language made strange” can have super-effective results (depending on your readers)
Search engines are more likely to find and list you when your content is professionally written, excellent quality and refreshingly different. Keywords flood the cyber universe. All that you achieve by using the same keywords as others do is that search engines list you among millions of others. Now where is the challenge, or benefit, in that?
SO WHAT?
Everybody preaches that content is king, so why do we zombify our readers with key- and cryptic words meant for computers, and too many images? It is fine that computer programmes speak in binary code, but humans have a gift that is so exceptional that no binary-speaking machine can compete with it. I wrote this in 2022, yet today AI is giving a good go, but it just ain't human. Leave the key- and cryptic words in the background where the software can see and use it and use human language in the foreground.
Content writing is an art, which applies modern technology to communicate with the world that is outside the desktop, laptop, or touch screen. Content writing is not a tool to trick your readers or merely increase visitors to your site or blog. We want to challenge website and blog owners to use human language to communicate, not human haste, which adds more confusion to our culture.
If you do not have the time, talent, or inclination, you will find that content writers do. They will also have the creativity and energy to turn your content - and you - into a king.