These Lazy Writing Mistakes Could Turn Off Your Readers

These Lazy Writing Mistakes Could Turn Off Your Readers Heres a terrifying tale: readers are lookingactively seeking, even!for a reason to stop reading. Author Christopher Moore described it as  writers buying time from the reader on credit. What he means is that they dont owe you. You owe them. So you get them for the first sentence. They go to the second. Then the next paragraph. Then the next. But give them any reason, and they would love to stop reading and get their time back. They are merely lending it to you. Goodreads created a fascinating infographic on  the most commonly abandoned books, and why people never finish them. Some of the books are quite good and that makes you realize the truth in the idea that readers are just looking for an excuse to go. Are you giving them one? Lazy Writing Techniques That Bomb Lazy writing happens when we are more aware of what we need instead of what our reader needs. We make assumptions based on whats easiest for us when we write. And lazy writing is a super fast way to get readers to abandon that content you created. Writing when you should have stopped long ago. Is your reader screaming for you to hurry up and get to the point? I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Blaise Pascal Do you  write to hit word counts, to finish an assigned post on the editorial calendar? The road to blathering is paved with word counters. Brevity forces us to distill a message, and reduce it to its core. Word counts, post length ideology, meandering topics, shallow content, lack of researchall of these make it easier (and oddly, faster) to write lots of words. You can spend more time writing high above  the core of the topic and float on the  surface rather than drilling deep and extracting the point. Lots of words are the rafts that help us float at the surface. Lazy words  and phrases that  have no meaning. When a word or phrase has been used too much, it loses meaning.  You also have your own pet phrases that you use in place of more concise language. Do a basic internet search on overused phrases and you get a few results: A brief look at the first pages of results reveal more than half of them border on rants. This tells me that we cant all agree on which phrases are overused, but we can agree that overused phrases annoy us a heckuva lot. There are some words and phrases that, when I see them in a headline, cause me NOT to read the post. This is the danger of using the successful formulas of content marketers who have success: familiarity breeds contempt. When your headlines and copy sound like everything else out there, they are  easier to ignore.Its not just that these words make people want to write ranting blog posts about them. They can slow readers down.  Strunk Whites The Elements Of Style (a glorious book) attacks this problem with rule #17: Omit needless words. Needless words worth omitting are cliches, pet phrases, jargon, and  anything bordering on  pretentiousness. Why use leverage when you can just use use? William Zinsser, author of  On Writing Well (another glorious book!), was direct about cluttered language: Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. Wm. Zinsser Stephen King shared a few of his most hated phrases in his book On Writing, and they include phrases like many believe and at the end of the day. Unbounce has a collection of marketing words that you should definitely leave off of your landing pages. A lot of them are hyphenated, oddly. Writer Jeff Goins joins the fray by saying that weak words weaken your writing. Hes right, but the problem is that weak words are usually the first words that come to mind. Were talking lazy writing here, so these are the words that dont take much effort to locate. Among Goins list of weak words? things often stuff every never Many of these words are words that have to do with quantitysuch as the word many that I just used. Yikes. Great research can help rid your writing of these words, because research gives you specific quantities and facts; you have to back up your claims. When you dont know and dont feel like looking, you turn to many and some. Lazy words create those blog posts that and youve read them yourself by the time youre at the end of the blog post, you have a general sense of not having learned anything specific. Lazy:  many people prefer the color blue Not Lazy: 57% of men prefer the color blue Too much hype, not enough information. Ever found yourself, after reading the copy on a website, still wondering what do they do? In an age of beautiful website designs, Ive noticed it more than ever. Lots of big fullscreen header images and videos and I cant, for the life of me, figure out what the company even does. Its easy to get carried away in hype and lazy, overused phrases at the expense of actuallytelling people what you are trying to say. Why does this happen? Shallow research. Sometimes we chase after keywords and our research doesnt go deep enough. What that means is that everyone is chasing the same keywords and pretty soon all of the content being created starts to sound the same. For the content itself, not finding research with numbers and facts sends us to use those weak words like many and never. Common inspiration. Sometimes we all read the same blogs, and dont have enough outside input, like books or blogs outside of the standard repertoire. That means we perpetuate the same ideasand even the same words to communicate themas everyone else. Its where buzzwords are born. A cool new idea is a cool new idea until the 5,000th use, at which point its an inspiration to rants. Hijacking testimonial words.  Blogger Sally Ormond suggests we often use over-hyped words in our copy that would be better left to testimonials. Ever catch yourself saying youre the best, that your product is an absolute breakthrough? While it may be true, that kind of writing is lazy,  and it rings insincere. Think of the classic writing adage: show, not tell. Testimonial words tell. They dont show. Instead of saying We make the best wrench ever you might write copy that shows how your wrench can be used for just about every project. You might provide statistics or easily digestible facts that prove it. Big bragging testimonial words only have meaning when they come from another customer or an outsider, not from you. Testimonial words only have meaning when they dont come from you.The same approach doesnt work every time. One of the things I learned during my flying lessons is that landing a plane is an art unto itself, and that the techniques I used to  get a great landing one time wouldnt necessarily work the next. Depending on the crosswind, runway surfaces, runway lengths, and other factors, the way I approached the landing had to change. The same goes for your writing. We like systems, because they help us write faster and we all want to be able to write faster. We turn to them time after time when we hit on a system that works. But the system shouldnt be used the exact same way every time. Sometimes youre writing about a subject that has a crosswind and you need to land it differently. (Well talk about this more in a bit.) Your writing system may have worked for years, but now its putting readers to sleep.So what is THE lazy writing technique that is turning your readers away? Thoughtlessness. You run on default, turn to your writing system every time, dont dig deep, but just pound away at the keyboard. You let your writing habits reign in both the words you choose, and how you assemble them. Youre the preacher who never veers from the three-point sermon, the one-page thesaurus, the blog-o-matic machine. It gets search engines to come. It fills out your site. It gives you something to share on social media. But readers dont read.