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General Writing Guidelines : Guidelines

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General Writing Guidelines

1. Vary Sentence Length

A long sentence has 10 or more words like this one. A short sentence has less, like this.
Do not place three long sentences next to each other. Don’t place three short sentences next to each other either. Vary your sentence length. Choosing sentences of different lengths will create rhythm and flow into your writing.

Notice how the paragraph flowed.

2. Generalizations, Exaggerations, and Adverbs

• Don’t be general. Don’t talk about “everyone” or “everywhere”.
• Avoid exaggerations. Drop words like “unprecedented”, “absolute”, and “always”.
• Avoid adverbs. It’s safer to avoid words ending in “–ly” when possible. These words weaken your writing. Choose a stronger verb or …show more content…

7. Readability
Most Americans read at an 8th grade level. It may be sad but it is also a reality. You want to write to a general audience. Don’t use long and complicated words. Use short words with less than 8 syllables. You can use Hemmingway App to determine the readability of your piece. It is a website that you can paste your text into and it will tell you what reading level your content is at. It will also tell you how complicated your sentences are and provide an adverb count.

8. Eliminate Fluff (see more under density below)
You want strong writing. Don’t water it down with unnecessary words. Keep it to the point at all times.

Technical Guidelines

1. Crisp Content
Your text needs to be strong and be concise. You want to ensure readability but you don’t want to fluff up your writing with words that you don’t need. Keep your writing strong, engaging, and fluff-free.

2. Key Phrases
Include key phases within the first 200 characters of any subheading.

3. Keyword Density
Imagine a web page consists of 100 words (for argument’s sake). Now, imagine that the keyword “organic tahini” appears 2 times on that web page. That means that the keyword appears 2% of the time. That percentage is the keyword density.

A part of search engine optimization is keyword density. It determines if a web page is relevant to a keyword or phrase.

We require a 2% keyword density, similar to this imaginary 100-word webpage.

You can Google a formula for finding

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