By Brad Hodges

WARNING! – THIS ARTICLE MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME WRITERS!

There. I did my politically correct precursor just in case you are easily offended by truthful journalism. That being said let us proceed.

As the Publisher of a major article directory I see article submissions on a daily basis, so I am well qualified to be able to point out and comment on the “ugly side” of article writing.

The Ugly Side

This ugly side includes, but is not limited to, such notorious and heinous practices as:

• Article spinning, which is an entire topic of its own and will be addressed in subsequent articles.

• Poor grammar and spelling.

• Incorrect formatting

• And this topic; lazy article writing practices.

Lazy Article Writing Practice #1 – Shortcut Word Drugs

The lazy article writer usually starts off naively with the less addictive shortcut “word drugs” like it’s, isn’t, I’m and so on.

But as the ease and convenience of taking shortcuts becomes evident to those less inclined to put professionalism before “slangism” it can rapidly elevate to a more serious word drug dependency and they soon find themselves resorting to the use of such hardcore word drugs like:

it’ll
you’d
that’s
you’ll
couldn’t
wouldn’t
shouldn’t
hasn’t
they’d
you’re
what’s
they’ve
they’re
they’ll

An Example

Here is an example of an actual paragraph woefully articulated by a hard core word drug junkie:

“There is, however, a downside to this. Debts accrue interest over time, so the faster you repay a loan, the less interest you’ll pay – and the slower you repay it, the more interest you’ll pay.”

Poor soul. While the article itself was a decent article the entire article was so full of word drug use that the reader could get “high” just reading it. Does it not sound so much more professional to rewrite the above paragraph like this:

“There is, however, a downside to this. Debts accrue interest over time, so the faster you repay a loan, the less interest you will pay – and the slower you repay it, the more interest you will pay.”

Ah…so much better read and readable and it only took seconds to change the guttural sounding “you’ll” to the smoother, more refined sound of “you will” don’t you agree?

As an article writer do you take short cuts that basically amount to nothing more than slang rather than take the time to compose your articles like a professional?

Benefits of Professional Article Writing

One of the primary purposes and functions of an article directory is to offer quality content to those seeking it for use in their blogs or websites. Of course there are legions of article directories that do not edit or even manage their article submissions and as a result offer nothing more than what amounts to pure “cyber junk” to content seekers that is quickly rejected and the content seeker sent fleeing for greener content pastures.

Quality article directories on the other hand not only edit and professionally manage their content but only approve and align themselves with quality, professional authors who can provide the high quality content that content seekers actively search for and which unfortunately is becoming harder to find.

By writing quality, professional articles free of lazy writer shortcuts, spelling errors, grammatical indiscretions and poorly researched topics, to name just a handful of unprofessional article practices, you, as a quality writer, will ensure, no almost guarantee, that your content will be picked up and syndicated across the Internet. And after all, isn’t that why you write articles in the first place? To have hundreds or thousands of quality content seekers distributing your hard work and thus all the lucrative information in your resource box leading to your own blog, website or business, to as many sources as possible? I think so.

So, endeavor to write the most professional articles you possibly can, not only for your own pride of great writing, but to make sure your content is picked up and used by as many individuals or organizations as possible.

Be sure to refer to the word drug list above often so you will not be guilty of using lazy shortcuts then stay tuned to more articles on avoiding lazy article writer sins and helping yourself become the true professional writer you know you can be. Notice that aside from the samples I use in this article that I did not use a single shortcut word drug?