One of my favorite writing apps is Grammarly; I don’t rely on it 100 percent and would never recommend that for any app, but it often catches misspellings, grammatical errors, and incorrect word usage. And as much as I love technology that makes us better communicators, the idiosyncrasies and quirks of an individual’s language is what makes it unique. It’s one reason I think the fear of artificial intelligence taking over all business writing is overblown.

Humans are unique individuals, and great writers use dynamic language in a way that a program can’t duplicate. And dynamic language matters.

If you’re a Grammarly user you know that each week you are sent an update with your level of accuracy, percentage of dynamic words used, and other statistics that may be important to your writing. I have a friendly competition with a colleague of mine and one silly point of pride for me is that, although he is a great writer, he never beats me at dynamic language. I don’t intentionally try to use dynamic language, but my MA in English Literature and obsession with reading and writing over my lifetime has made my word usage more dynamic than his.

Why Language Matters

As your probably know, content has taken over the web. The phrase “Content is King” is actually not accurate. There is a lot of bad, boring content out there. The reality is that the Content Creator is King (sadly those aren’t my words; they’re stolen from Anthony Iannarino). And if we drill down even further I think it’s obvious that the creator of stellar content is really king.

When you write, you compete with the millions of bloggers and sites blasting content out onto the web. Marketing Profs contends that 2 million blog posts are published each day. Whatever the actual number, there is a lot of competition out there. One thing that will differentiate your work and get people to open and read your post is your language. You can have the biggest social sharing network in the world, but in the end, tweets won’t get your post read. Two things matter –  your title and your content.

Your title really matters; without a dynamic title that causes the reader to assume there is something worthwhile in your post, it is dead in the water. Once they open it, your content has to have value, and your writing must compel them to read to the end. It is my firm assertation that dynamic language helps you do that.

Too many apps and editors disrespect their readers by thinking that big, unique words make writing difficult to comprehend. I disagree. Of course, no one wants to read an academic piece when what they’re looking for is something succinct and useful, but I would bet that your readers are not elementary school students. Descriptive, impassioned language is a good thing; it sets you apart from the legions of melba toast writers out there churning out content for content’s sake.

Have opinions (back them up of course.) Be emphatic in your beliefs (people like decisiveness.) Have a personality, and let it shine through your writing.

Everyone writes for a different audience, and you know yours better than I do. There are certainly different voices that appeal to different demographics and audiences. One thing that appeals to no one is dumbed down, run of the mill, humdrum language. How’s that for descriptive?

 

Photo credit: Mom, I Hope they have libraries in Heaven via photopin (license).