Good writing makes content easy to read. It must include attention to punctuation, grammar and style. With the amount of web writing and marketing writing that companies need these days, you can find many marketing writers playing fast and loose with the rules of punctuation and grammar. Don't buy it.
Look through the lists below. If you get a piece of content from your writer with many of these elements, send it back for another edit; it's not ready for your clients and prospects to see.
Too heavy on the marketing:
- Words all in capitals
- Many words "in quotes"
- Frequent incomplete sentences
- Excessively informal tone, using words like "kinda"
- Use of ellipses (...) and dashes ( -- ) every other sentence
- Capitalizing the first letter of some words because they look important (not because they're proper nouns)
Too light on the writing:
- Errors that spell check doesn't catch ("now" instead of "not" and "you" instead of "your," for example)
- Grammatical errors (my favorite is still your/you're, particularly because it was featured on the crime show "Castle" with the incorrect phrase "your out of time" scrawled on the murder victim's face)
- Inconsistent headline capitalization (some headlines have all the words beginning with caps, some have only the first word beginning with a capital letter)
- Inconsistent bullet point styling (periods after some points and not others in the same list)
- The period falling outside the quotation marks - in American English it always goes inside the quote
Great marketing copy paints a picture in the reader's mind. Copy that's too heavy on marketing and too light on writing hurts your credibility and makes them stop reading. Asking for a final edit in which these issues are corrected should be included in the price you paid for the content.
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