With any type of writing, it’s important to keep your sentences as concise as possible. And it’s vital when writing eCommerce content.
When you’re writing product descriptions and category pages, you need to include as much information as possible in a relatively small space. With the average product description being about 300-350 words, and an average category page being even shorter, you don’t have much room to play with.
We’ve talked about fluff before, but today we’re going to talk about glue words and sticky sentences. While glue, or sticky words are important in most types of writing. Using too many can make a piece clunky and difficult to read.
What Are Sticky Sentences?
All sentences contain two types of words – working and glue words. A sticky sentence is one that contains a lot of glue words.
What Are Working Words?
Working words are those that carry meaning in sentences and convey important information to the reader. They can be nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs (although you should use adjectives and adverbs sparingly).
What Are Glue Words?
Glue words are the words that hold your sentences together and make them make sense. They don’t have a lot of meaning on their own, but are vital for connecting and giving meaning to the working words. Every sentence needs some glue words, but it’s important to not use too many.
Some of the most commonly used glue words are:
| in | of | is |
| on | to | this |
| the | there | from |
| was | will | with |
| for | be | have |
| that | what | an |
| said | get | by |
| a | go | it |
| if | like | asked |
What’s Wrong With Sticky Sentences?
We’ve already mentioned that sticky sentences can make a piece clunky and difficult to read, but they also significantly increase the word count. And with most of the content we write having word count limits, that often means we can’t include as much information as we could if we didn’t use sticky sentences.
If you work to avoid using too many glue words, you’ll find your writing is cleaner, you can include more relevant information and you’ll likely get fewer returns and higher scores.
So How Do You Identify and Fix Sticky Sentences?
It’s not easy to identify stick sentences in your own writing. But, there are a few things you can do. First, read your work out loud – If you find a sentence to be difficult to read or hard to understand, it may be sticky. Also, be aware of these common mistakes:
- Using too many conjunctions in a sentence – there should never be more than two
- Using too many words in a sentence – a good sentence length is between 16 and 20 words
- Overusing words that don’t have much meaning – watch for redundancy, repetitive words and words that are implied (for example, if you’re talking about a bed, you don’t have to say in the bedroom).
- Overusing adverbs – We’ve talked about adverbs before. But if you use too many, you can confuse the reader. Sometimes it’s better to just use a strong verb.
If you use a grammar checker like ProWritingAid (and you should), it will let you know if you have sticky sentences.
ProWritingAid considers sentences with more than 45% of glue words to be sticky.
Sticky Sentence Examples – And Fixes
Example 1: Sticky
I was able to speak to a number of people about the problem and use the information that I have in my files and managed to resolve the problem. (29 words).
Example 1: Clean
I fixed the problem using the available information and my contacts. (11 words).
Example 2: Sticky
There is a lake out in the middle of the forest called Monehan Lake where locals go to get away from the tourists who come and take over all of the village’s restaurants and shops in the summertime. (38 words)
Example 2: Clean
Escaping the summertime tourists, locals escape to Monehan Lake. (9 words)
Example 3: Sticky
As soon as I read The Stand in my class, I decided that I liked it more than Misery, which I read in class last year. (26 words)
Example 3: Clean
I preferred The Stand over Misery, (6 words)
As you can see from the example. When you avoid writing sticky sentences, you use a lot less words (Which means you can add more information), and the sentences are easier to read.