A few OJR readers verbally jumped me last week for my first Inigo Montoya feature. So I’d like to take a moment of your day to explain why I think nit-picking about language remains important.
First, allow me to admit that I’m a dreadful candidate for the office of language cop. If it weren’t for gym, grammar would have been my least favorite subject in school. If your readers can figure out what you meant to say, you done wrote good enough, in my view.
But getting your readers to understand what you’re trying to say is just part of your job as a writer online. You’ve got to lure new readers with your words, too. Your current readers can help, by retweeting, liking, sharing and blogging your articles. But, for many of us, the bulk of our new readers arrive via search engines.
Search engine optimization [SEO] rewards obsessive attention to language – English as well as hypertext markup. Writing for my own website, without a copy desk to save my reputation, has forced me to think more carefully about the words I use. That’s why I started looking up the definition of at least one word I thought I knew in each article I post.
This new habit is changing the way I write. I’d like to think that it is helping me use adjectives more precisely, but at first it just made me afraid of them. Discovering how little I knew about the alternate meanings of words such as “incredible” disturbed me.
So what did I do? I stopped using so many of them. Rather than take the time to look up all those adjectives and adverbs, I just cut some of them out. Those I kept, I meant.
Sure, the language can expand to accommodate slang and idiomatic meanings for many words. But do you need to burden your writing with them?
Search engines reward articles with a high percentage of relevant keywords. Stripping extra words from your work leaves you with a higher percentage of those keywords in your remaining copy. If you want to use an adjective in your work, then make it carry some weight. If a word doesn’t work on multiple levels, it’s not doing enough work for you. Pick another one, or do without it.
I’ve become a huge fan of hard-coding my own HTML templates, because I can strip the extraneous tags that weigh down a webpage and rob it of SEO appeal. Reporters should do the same with their language.
No, you don’t have to. If people get what you’re trying to say, that’s good enough. But in a highly competitive online publishing market, shouldn’t try to do better, to lure an ever-larger audience to your work?
You want to learn how to write for SEO? This is how you start.
So I invite you to try my trick: Look up at least one word in every article you write. See what you discover. Make your words carry multiple meanings. And learn to leave out a few, too.
That said now, here’s my Inigo Montoya word of the week: Terrific.
Sure, it means “extraordinarily great.” But let’s look at a few other words in that definition: “intense,” “wonderful” and the ones found in the third meaning – “causing terror.”
“Terrific” has become one of my go-to words for describing outstanding roller coaster drops, or other elements on amusement park thrill rides. I love how the reference to terror gives this adjective a darker flavor. Why dilute the potential power of this word by using it in a context devoid of those qualities, when one of perhaps another dozen adjectives could stand in its place?
Make your words carry multiple meanings. Reward your readers who know them. Educate those who don’t. Use a word only when you mean that word.
An intense experience that causes wonder, even terror. Yeah, that’s terrific.
About Robert Niles
