Is Content Writing Dead?

Relax it is not.

But we are dangerously close to what might be a new lapse in the level of content we are expected to deliver.

Not level. Length. Not length. But words. Too few words. Some words. No words… ahh! Perfection!

A very dear friend of mine is an excellent User Experience Designer. Another very dear friend of mine is an excellent Content Writer. Let’s play a game where we guess, for a given successful collateral and banner, who is praised more? Now replace the collateral with a doc, a presentation, a PDF, a video… anything… the answers just stay the same today. The UX guy just walks proudly patted from a presentation which was praised for its design (Even if the presentation happened to be about Content Writing. True Story.)

Some of us revel in the visceral undertones of content, when they are crafted so, and the train of thoughts it generates. It starts off like inertia on a brief mesh of thoughts, goes to a brisk progression of sorts that quickly give away to jolts, jerks and finishes heroically on crackers and thunderbolts. And while this magic is all ready to happen, imagine that one intelligent comment, ‘why have you not used Helvetica?’

Intelligent content writers know that this discipline is more than just right clicking away into the usually useless listless list of thesaurus options. It is weaving a story with words. No, not the story that is written. But the one that is unwritten. The one that really resonates with our sensibilities and values. But for this Treasure Island to visit, one needs to have the little amount of patience needed to read (read is spelt R,E,A,D, not L,O,O,K,A,T,B,A,D,G,R,A,P,H,I,C,S,A,N,D,G,R,O,A,N).

Then again, the times are changing. This is the age of user experience and design and well that’s great! In fact, to drop a little gun here, yours truly is contemplating venturing into some Interaction Design in some months. User Experience is a noble field where people’s pain is taken away and replaced with glee on using a product and service. That all is great.

But some of the laziness has been brought in due to negligible pain involved in media consumption today. This laziness has rooted up similar expectations for written content consumption too. Don’t believe me? When is the last time you read a book? Yes a real book, not the last PDF you reviewed. And really read it, and not just skim through it gleaning the gist (read: zilch). Some of you, yes! And there is nothing wrong about going through a book quickly when time is of the essence. But when you really think about it, the laziness has become so ubiquitous that it is a part of us now. We try and skim content looking for that little infographic or headline. This is how it happens: somewhere inside that intelligent mind of us, sits a big fat entity munching away on visually appealing diagrams and fast social media feeds. He is lazy and he won’t move a mental muscle even if the best of content comes his way. This is bad. This is alarming. No ‘minimalism is great’ at play here. Pure, naked laziness.

It is this sense of alarm that has been pricking me (with a harpoon) for a good many days. The lazy-content-consumption problem has pulled in content-creation as its offspring. Apart from interested bloggers out there, not many professionals are choosing to write about what they know, think or believe. Not many professionals are choosing to content-write because they themselves are lazy content consumers. Can we even begin to estimate the amount of information we are missing out on, because of people shying away from a highly learnable discipline? This alarming trend has also spawned a collateral-design style that I christen as ‘fart-art’. A fart-art is a graphic that is extremely gorgeous and extremely useless. It doesn’t invoke any thoughts in the mind of the content-consumer except for a pleasing sensation, that doesn’t succor the content’s intent in any way. Fart-art graphics have little or no content. They generally start out as a content-driven graphic that is slowly chipped away of its content when yawns after yawns are invoked with successive reviewing. (‘Why is that nice quote over there<yawn>?’ ‘This fact is extremely relevant, let’s remove it<yawn> and put a little rainbow there’)

The idea I am writing to protect does not mean, text-loading our presentations or visually assaulting the audience with endless projected text paragraphs. There are some visual mediums which must include more visual content than textual and that’s great! My contention is removing meaningful stuff from places, or not reading it just because there is not a fancy piece of graphic meadowing up the screen. I mean how pathetic is that? How many graphics were there in some of the biggest bestsellers out there? Yet, people strove to read them and those people lived a world, through those books, that the lazy-readers will always miss out on.

Let this be a call not just to revive the dying discipline but also to raise the bar in the volume and beauty (a different kind of beauty that is) of content that we read and create.

In words of mine and theirs, my dear, are some diamonds that sparkle clear,

Can you hear the song they can’t and read the magic you can?

Or are you going to cry and cry dear, helping the fat lazy man?