A Few Thoughts on Personal Expression
Posted: Thursday, November 30, 2006
by SearchWarp
SearchWarp
Writing is a very personal form of expression. At SearchWarp, we encourage our writers to exercise their personal expressions in their writing as doing so will often make a piece more interesting for the end reader.
A large part of our job at SearchWarp is to gain as much exposure for our writer's articles as possible, and sometimes our writers personal expression conflicts with what would gain them the most exposure.
Another example which has less to do with perception and more to do with promotion is when a writer wants to submit an article with a short, clever title which in itself would indicate nothing about the meat of the article. Our editors often refer to the title "It Happened Again" which was the title of a great article submitted to SearchWarp several years ago. The problem is that with the title "It Happened Again" no one would ever have a chance of knowing what the article was about by seeing the title listed on a related article on SearchWarp or in the search listings on the major search engines.
We encouraged the author of "It Happened Again" to reconsider her title, and she declined. After 6 months, essentially no one had read her article.
A third example is when a writer insists on adding the title and byline at the beginning of their articles. Aside from the obvious issue that this causes, having the title and byline displayed twice at the top of the article, this interferes with some of the ways which we parse the text of an article for promotion. Sometimes we use the first paragraph of an article as a lead-in to the article. If the first paragraph is a repeat of the title, this makes for an ineffective lead-in. Add to this the fact that we are always working on new features to add to SearchWarp, and if the articles are consistent in their formatting, it makes it much easier to adapt the articles to the new features.
Nearly every day at SearchWarp we receive an email from someone who is offended that we've changed their title to proper case or removed the repeated title from their article. We certainly don't want to offend, but for reasons stated above sometimes this is just necessary.
We do our best to balance the interests of personal expression & the good to the whole of SearchWarp, it's article integrity, and author promotion.
Bruce Horst
CEO IcoLogic, Inc. / SearchWarp.com
This Article has been viewed 716 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
Top-level comments on this article: (3 total)This article was definitely helpful. I deeply appreciate SearchWarp. Believe me, I have taken time away to test many other resources. SearchWarp is the best for personal, family writing. (...I know there are other competing resources. Take Helium, for instance. It just happens that Helium stresses me out and I personally do not like their format, so that is why I am here. I use Active Rain for my more business oriented blogs except for the times that a business experience will be helpful to a readership at large and can do well without posting business links). I also appreciate the maximum links allowed, and the fact that you have guidelines against affiliate links. I guess I just appreciate you guys! I can relax here, your format is straightforward and easy to use.
Sorry I am just now getting around to reading this article. It has helped me to understand some of the changes that had been made to our article submissions. Thanks for the help. SEG
This was extremely helpful in understanding the whole idea of what to write. I think maybe it should be required reading for every author here. Thanks Michael
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