Strong text rules: recommendations

The ability to write strong texts may not seem the most important part of life, especially if you are not doing this professionally - you do not work as a writer, copywriter, or marketer. But you still have to create it almost every day: in correspondence, letters, announcements.

The book of Maxim Ilyakhov and Lyudmila Sarycheva “Write, abbreviate. How to create a strong text "came out not so long ago and became a bestseller according to the Ozon website version. Writers from Edu Birdie can say that its book is really useful for beginners in writing. It contains specific examples of strong and weak texts, points out the difference between them and teachers to express thoughts briefly, clearly and convincingly.
Briefly - it means without further words, but not to the detriment of meaning. Clear - so that the idea was clear immediately. Convincingly - so that people listen to you. This is the essence of any message that we transmit to a person or group of people.

The authors in their work rely on the book of Nora Gal “The Word of the Living and the Dead”, which we recently wrote about, as well as on the work “Living as Life” by Korney Chukovsky. They also contrast the cult of the word with the information style. The cult of a word is when a person believes that meaning is not important, the main thing is to use special tricky words. The information style is a scalpel that helps to remove the excess, leaving only the essence.
Now let's talk about some of the deadly sins that most people have when dealing with text.

Graphomania
Graphomania is a striving for multi-writing, for writing works that claim to be published in literary publications. Such a person does not at all strive to penetrate into the topic about which he is writing, therefore his texts are superficial.
The text must solve at least one task of the reader. If such a work is written only for the sake of publication, it is useless.
Any person who wants to write a text that will be understood and listened to must first ask himself two questions: “What problem do I want to solve? How can I help the reader?

Stop words
Stop words are words and phrases that can be deleted without losing meaning. They only make the text voluminous without giving anything in return. Without them, the reader will be easier to understand what the author wanted to say.
Swollen text: "The quality of the smartphone, to put it mildly, did not even meet modest expectations." Clean it up: "The quality of the smartphone did not meet our expectations." In this form, the phrase does not lose in the sense, but it is easier to read. It happens that it is not enough to remove the stop words. Instead, add useful information.
Introductory

This is the simplest category: “Let's say you went for a run. Of course, you take with you something electronic, such as smartwatches and a telephone. It is no secret that this technique helps athletes. However, check. These words do not give any information, occupy space and spend the amount of attention and interest of the reader. Instead of understanding the meaning of the text in a few seconds, he has to wade through the jungle of verbal debris.

Such phrases as “not a secret” and “we all know” also belong to introductory phrases. If something is known, then there is no need to mention this. If it is not known, the author deceives the reader.
It was: "As you know, the seasons change due to the angle of the Earth's tilt to the Sun. Therefore, in order to get to summer in winter, it is enough to fly to the equator or to the southern hemisphere. ”
It became: "In the winter to get into the summer, fly to Latin America or Australia."
Another sin of the writer is the use of verbal numbering: first, second. In most cases, it is not needed and makes the text heavier. It is enough to divide your thoughts into paragraphs or put a number at the beginning of a line.