In our years of working with businesses and their Web sites, we’ve found that a lot of them suffer from one of two common writing maladies. Here, we offer our suggestions to overcome these obstacles in writing your content.

1. Don’t be incomprehensible!

It’s important to speak to your audience on their level. Using terminology that’s too technical will turn people off right away.

The goal of your content – be it blogs, email, social media, whatever – is to connect with your audience. The way to do that is through approachable, digestible, normal-person language.

There is establishing yourself as the expert, and then there is spouting a bunch of words that sound impressive but don’t mean anything to the layman. Picture the bespectacled geek from any number of TV shows and movies, who always saves the day through the strategic use of jargon. Sure the day is saved in the end, but no one really understands how or relates to the character at all.

For example, we could write volumes on the recursive beauty of The Loop, the power of working with action hooks, conditionals, MySQL, OOP, and on and on – but as you, our target audience, is mainly non-technical, it wouldn’t do us a bit of good.

2. Don’t be boring!

Remember that your audience is made up of people. People have a short attention span! You only have a few seconds to grab their attention, so make it count.

Avoid long paragraphs.

And long sentences too.

Try humor! A little goes a long way to making a connection with the audience. You want them to feel that there’s an actual person behind the article.

Today’s society is very much conversational. Try reading your post or email out loud. See how it sounds, and if it’s awkward fix it.

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Try writing your next post with one or both of these in mind, and see if you notice any difference!

P.S. The latest Google updates have famously altered the search algorithm to look for natural writing on Web sites, so following the above will help your search standings as well!

Image courtesy of Brady Withers