Many decades ago William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White told us to:

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.
The Elements of Style

And now we have the data to prove that they were right all along.

By analyzing my Facebook data set to study the relationship between parts-of-speech and Facebook sharing, I found that adjectives and adverbs don’t perform as well as regular, plain old nouns and verbs.

So re-read your Strunk & White and remember that when you’re writing for Facebook, use nouns and verbs.



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This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 12:33 pm and is filed under About Viral Social Marketing, Benefits, How to, Uncategorized, examples. You can leave a comment and follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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