Font Size Counts in Cars and Content

 

More than two million Tesla vehicles are being recalled because of font size??  

It’s true. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, a recent safety compliance audit revealed that on a number of 2012-2023 models, the brake, park, and antilock brake warning lights have too small a font, making critical safety information simply too hard for drivers to read.

In any text, typography  helps users to  understand the organization and importance of content,  Ashish Kumar Tiwari explains in elearningindustry.com. The font is just one element we use in communicating information effectively so as to enhance the user experience, Tiwari adds. While the size of the font is important, spacing, line length, and alignment also play a part.

The goal, of course, in all printed or online material is to ensure that the content is easily readable and accessible to users, preventing eye strain and enabling effortless reading.  That involves using:

  • legible typefaces
  • appropriate font sizes
  • suitable spacing
  • hierarchy (bolded headings, for example, allow users to understand the organization of the content)

As a content marketer, I particularly appreciate the author’s emphasis on “ensuring sufficient color contrast between text and background”.

“Fonts play a crucial role in establishing an online brand’s visual identity,” Romain Juillet reminds business owners.  “In a highly competitive online market, the following cannot be repeated enough: first impressions really do matter.” Juillet explains the two main categories of font:

In serif fonts, the letters have extra strokes on the ends, are are considered to evoke a more formal, classic mood; sans serif fonts have no strokes, and are viewed as more casual and minimalist. (This Say It For You blog has always used the Arial sans serif font, which many consider ideal for digital content.)

Brands often use different fonts for different products. Coca-Cola, I learned years ago, chose different fonts for its Coca-Cola, Diet Coke and Coke Zero products. For us content writers for hire, the font we use should match the image projected on the client’s website. If the site is more traditional, we may want to use a more traditional serif font. If the client seems to project a more hip, modern look, the online content might be best presented in a sans serif font.

Serif or sans serif, Font size counts in cars and content marketing!

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Grounding Yourself in Purpose

 

“Some ideas just stick,” Laura Spence-Ash tells writers in Poets & Writers magazine. It’s important for writers to pay attention and find patterns and concepts that they themselves find pleasing, using those patterns to “find a way forward” in expressing ideas to their readers, the author explains.

“Sticky” ideas are important in content marketing, because they help the different elements – social media posts, blog posts, web pages and newsletters – “fit together” as components in an ongoing strategy. At Say It For You, we use the musical term leitmotifs. “The leitmotif is heard whenever the composer (of, say, an opera) wants the idea of a certain character, place, or concept to come across,” Chloe Rhodes explains in A Certain “Je Ne Sais Quoi.

In planning content marketing strategy for your business or professional practice, one important step, we explain to our clients, is to select four or five themes that are important to your point of view. As their marketing consultants, we will then make sure those themes appear and reappear in all their marketing communications.

Not to be confused with “keyword phrases”, themes express desirable outcomes resulting from successful use of a product, a service, or a methodology. For example, a residential air conditioning firm might use keywords such as “air conditioning”, “HVAC”, and “air conditioning repair”. The recurring themes, in contrast, might becomfort” and “a healthy home environment”.

When owners express doubt about their ability to keep generating new content, I often remind them of late CEO of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs. Biographer Walter Isaccson noted that Jobs owned more than a hundred black turtlenecks.  Not only was this convenient, but it conveyed Jobs’ signature style. For much the same reason, defining “sticky” concepts about your industry, your products, and your services, helps, not only in keeping content focused and targeted,  but keeping it going! 

“Grounding yourself in purpose” means focusing on the ideas and the phrases that you find “stick in your mind”, on principles so valuable to you that you feel compelled to share them with your audience.  Use those “sticky” word patterns and concepts to “find the way forward”, feeling compelled to share those ideas with readers.

 

 

 

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Watch Your Tone of Content Creation

“Sometimes we have no choice but to implement rules,” my speaker friend Todd Hunt admits, but we may have a choice as to how we present those rules. While one hotel at which Hunt stayed posted a notice reading “Breakfast buffet food not allowed beyond breakfast area”, another facility took a different approach, saying “We request our guests to have breakfast only in the lobby area to maintain the food safety standards on our property.”

“Tone of voice plays a crucial role in effective communication. It allows us to express emotions, convey meaning, establish rapport, and influence others’ perceptions,” everydayspeech.com explains. “One element of communication stands out — tone,” Tracy Brower, PhD, writing in Forbes, agrees, citing data from Grammarly and the Harris poll showing that working remotely increases the need to be a better communicator.

Tone and language are tricky to deal with when it comes to written communication, universalclass.com explains. A speaker’s body language, voice, intonations, eye contact, and general demeanor  offer essential clues about what the speaker is feeling; with print content, this instant give-and-take of nonverbal signals is not possible.”  Still, written messages can take a conversational, a cajoling, or an apologetic tone.

In the case of the two hotel signs Todd Hunt saw, the second message had a more positive tone in that it explained “the why” (the reason guests were to keep all food within the breakfast area). In content marketing, calls to action (CTAs) often use imperative verbs to provoke readers to take positive action, from requesting further information to actually signing up for a newsletter, to actually making a purchase.  But online visitors who’ve found themselves at your blog want to know why they ought to keep reading and why they should follow your advice. Why the urgency about the specific solution you’ve proposed?  Why this price point?

Even couched in a polite, rather than bossy tone, it’s simply not enough for content creators to provide information to online searchers who’ve landed on our client’s corporate blog. The facts need to be “translated” into relational, emotional terms that compel reaction – and action – in readers.

For positive marketing results, pay close attention to the “tone” of your content!

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Content Creation By –and For — Humans

 

AI algorithms can produce thousands of words quickly without needing a human to do research or writing. What’s more, “most AI-generated content will be grammatically correct,” itseeze.com authors concede. AI tools are certainly cost-effective in terms of time-saving, but “there are also risks that you need to be aware of.” As a blog post content creator for so many years, I was interested in  itseeze.com’s list of specific disadvantages of using AI for blogging:

  • Inaccuracies (the more AI content generated in the public space, the more likely it is that inaccuracies will increase, as the algorithm searches its own content).
  • Plagiarism (by “stitching and combining” content, as well as “parroting’ existing content), AI tools can easily fall into plagiaris.
  • Devaluing of content (AI is capable of mimicking humans, but lacks personalization and the ability to generate new ideas).
  • Lacking in personalization (because AI relies on already existing content, it is not identifying the user’s intent and “common sense behavior”).

Wow! Talk about food for thought for us content marketers…Revisiting our own Say It For You mission statement, we note our devotion to creating content based on understanding  each client’s unique ways of doing business. Our policy of one-client-per-market is designed to avoid conflicts of interest, so that we can give our best work to each business or practice owner, based on coming to understand and then helping express their personal values and priorities.  What’s more, as per our Say It For You client agreement, all rights to the content we’ve created are assigned to the client.

As to the potential devaluing of content through using AI, in surveys, it was discovered that the main reasons people share online content is that they enjoy bringing value to others, but also as a way to define themselves to others, coschedule.com explains. In practical terms, that means adding value (not devaluing), helping business owners and practitioners express their own new and original ideas, and their “take’ on current happenings in the community they share with their target readers.

“Human writers play a crucial role in content creation. They bring creativity, emotions, and empathy that are difficult to replicate by machines. They also have the ability to understand nuances of language, context, and cultural subtexts that are often lost in machine-generated content,” aicontentfy.com  opines. “AI does not have emotions.”

At Say It For You, content creation will continue to be generated by human writers, meant for our very human readers!

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No-Nos — and OKs — for Content Writers

 

Earlier this week in my Say It For You blog, I showed how Mark Byrnes’ cautionary advice to financial advisors applies to creating content for blog posts, newsletters, and even emails. Today’s post represents my reaction to a list of common grammar rules Words Trivia thinks we content writers should actually break. 

The way the Words Trivia editors see things, overly strict grammar rules “leave writers constrained and limited in their expression”.  As a content writer and trainer, I agree – but only when it comes to some of those rules the editors claim are made-to-be-broken. I’d say “yes”, for example, to starting sentences with “and” or “but” to connect ideas and add flow, and “yes” to splitting the occasional infinitive.

  1. I most definitely concur with breaking the rule about maintaining consistent sentence structure and length throughout a piece. As the editors correctly point out, mixing short and long sentences can create a rhythm, emphasize certain ideas, and prevent monotony.
  2. Frankly, my feelings are mixed when it comes to embracing the “singular they“.  “They” may have been accepted in modern writing (going along with society’s respect for those who do not identify within the binary gender system).  However, rather than the highly awkward “Every nurse should take care of his/her own uniform and cover the expense him/herself”,  or “Every nurse should take care of their own uniforms…” (which still grates on my ear), I’d write simply, “Nurses should take care of their own uniforms, covering the expense themselves.” By being gender-neutral, we writers can avoid being either awkward or gender-insensitive. 
  3. In terms of using double negatives to emphasize contradiction, saying “I can’t get no satisfaction” may be fine for Rodney Dangerfield, but (sorry to disagree), not for marketing content writers.  Sure, as Forbes points out, humor is attention-grabbing and can serve to make business owners more relatable, but it can also cheapen ideas and even be offensive.

Yes, I know the online crowd likes to be informal, and yes, blog posts are supposed to be less formal and more personal in tone than traditional websites. But when content of any type appears in the name of your business (or in the case of our Say It For You writers, in the name of the business owned by one of our clients, the brand is being “put out there” for all to see.

My advice on content writing “no-nos” and “OKs” – Find the fine line between letting rules constrain your creativity and getting a grip on your grammar!

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