Business Bloggers’ Wordsmithing Tip: Find Common Language

So much positive feedback came in from Say It For You readers about my wordsmithing tip series, I decided to add a second set of tips this week.  Needless to say, I encourage all my Indianapolis blog writer friends to submit their own tips to me as well.

“People in different companies and industries often don’t speak the same language,” observes one of my favorite wordsmiths, Milo O. Frank (How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less).

My own observation, based on working with different industries doing corporate blogging training, is that lack of clarity between writer and reader is worse with business-to-consumer corporate blog writing.  But even among suppliers, consultants, and retailers within a single industry, there’s no question that the clearer the words are to all the parties, the easier it becomes for transactions (obviously one of the end goals of SEO marketing blogs) to happen.

In his book, Frank offers a great example of a better way to get a complex point across to an audience through a metaphor:

Not-so-good version:
“Bypass refers to the use of telecommunications services…to circumvent the local telephone company network.  This will deteriorate revenues and increase costs to residential consumers.”

Much better version:
“Think of your local telephone company as the Main Street Bridge, which costs $100,000 a year to operate regardless of the amount of traffic.  A big company builds a new bridge just for trucks.  Now the cars have to pay more to cross the Main Street Bridge because there are no trucks to help carry the costs.  That is bypass.”

Freelance blog writers are reminded to paint a picture for their online readers. (In Frank’s example, it’s the image of the bridge that gets the point across.)

Business blogs are all about getting found, then getting the point across.  Words and pictures are your two tools in blogging for business!