Cut the Fluff

Fluff is content that's intended primarily to impress or persuade, rather than inform.  It includes:

• Unsupported claims:  "We're the leader in this market," with nothing to back that up.
• Hype:  "We're the best"
• Padding
• Complex sentence structures
• Fancy vocabulary

Fluff attempts to impose the perspective of the Web site owner upon the audience - perhaps the most fundamental mistake that an organization's Web site can make.

From your online audience's perspective, fluff gets in the way of real information - and even more importantly, it inspires skepticism and undermines credibility.  Unless you want to waste all the time, effort, and resources that went into creating your site, you've go to cut the fluff.

Refer to the wording tip sheet adapted from Nancy J. Campbell's book, Writing Effective Policies and Procedures.

Amy Gaharan is a content consultant and freelance editor and writer. She is the editor and founder of CONTENTIOUS, the monthly Web-zine for writers, editors, and others who create content for online media. She also is co-host of the Online-Writing discussion list, and writes the monthly "e-Publishing" column for Writer's Digest magazine (with Steve Outing).

Return to top