I have summarized 9 writing styles for 100,000+ soft articles for you!

No matter how the content of a soft article changes, it is still an article at its core, and some writing styles of articles are also common to soft articles.

For example, the main body of a soft article can be a story-telling text or a news-style text. When writing, the form of the soft article chosen will vary depending on the material, needs, and ideas.

I am also exploring and thinking about when and what kind of soft-text writing format a company or a product should use to achieve promotion goals more efficiently?

Actually, I still don’t have a very good answer until now. Maybe I haven’t reached that level yet. This article sorts out the commonly used forms of writing soft articles in daily work, and shares them with everyone for discussion. In fact, the purpose is to stimulate discussion, and I hope to learn more knowledge about soft articles from everyone.

1. News Style

News-style soft articles refer to the writing of the main text by imitating the tone of news media. For example, major company events and public welfare undertakings can be created in the form of news-style text.

The main feature of news-style soft articles is that they can be disseminated secondary to others. That is, after a company's soft articles are released, they are more likely to be reprinted on other platforms. This is the characteristic of news-style soft articles.

News-style soft articles have many characteristics. It is precisely because of these characteristics that news-style soft articles have always been popular, as shown in the figure:

News-style soft articles are a relatively common writing method, mainly used to report corporate news, dynamic information, and outstanding figures.

Generally speaking, news-style soft articles are an accurate, timely and common form of writing, which requires reporting on people and things around you. The original intention of enterprises in writing news-style soft articles is "since they have done it, they must say it, and they must say it out so that many people know about it."

For general enterprises, news-style soft articles can take root in the grassroots, come from the grassroots, and serve the grassroots. Nowadays, both small and medium-sized enterprises and individual organizations have begun to have publicity awareness like large enterprises, and have gradually discovered the importance of publicity.

Therefore, companies began to publicize their dynamics, news, and people to the public in a timely manner, so as to gain a certain amount of attention and increase their visibility.

2. Storytelling

Story-telling soft articles are easily accepted by the public. A good story-telling soft article can easily leave a deep impression on readers and bring the brand closer to users. A vivid story can easily make readers feel involved and make them yearn for the plot and characters in the story.

If a company can write a good story-telling soft article, it will be easy to find potential users and improve the credibility of the corporate brand.

For article editors, how to create a story-telling soft article? The first thing you need to determine is the features of the product, extract the product's keywords, and then put the product keywords into the story clues, throughout the entire text, so that readers will be impressed after reading it.

At the same time, story-based soft writing should preferably meet the following two points, as shown in the figure:

When a company wants to insert soft advertising articles for a certain product on a public platform, it can create a story based on the company's goals and cleverly integrate the product into the story when it makes sense.

3. Suspense

The so-called suspenseful soft article is often referred to as "keeping the reader in suspense". Creating suspense is a commonly used writing technique. By setting suspense, it can stimulate readers' rich imagination and interest in reading, thereby achieving the purpose of writing.

The suspenseful layout of soft articles is to set up mysteries when the plot of the main text or the fate of the characters reaches a critical point, and not to answer them in time, but to slowly unravel them in the development of the subsequent plot. Or when describing a strange phenomenon, do not rush to tell the cause of the phenomenon. This method can make readers feel eagerly expectant.

In other words, suspenseful soft articles set up suspense and then embed it into the plot development, allowing readers to guess and pay attention to it. After attracting the audience's attention, the answer is announced. There are usually three ways to create suspense, as shown in the following figure:

When writing suspenseful soft articles, one must know the limits. The questions and answers must conform to common sense and should not appear fake at first glance.

I think the master of suspense creation is CCTV's "Approaching Science" column. You may want to watch it when you have time. You will find that many plots in it set up suspense very well and are very attractive to watch. For example:

• There was one episode where a guy discovered he could suck blood from his own skin, which led to two episodes of the show (ending with bleeding gums);
• In one episode, someone used a test pen to discover that there was electricity in the walls of his own home, which resulted in two episodes of the show (in the end the test pen broke).

In our daily soft-article writing, we can absorb some routines from "Science Approaches", and apply some of the copywriting used for special sessions, suspense-creating lines, interrogative sentences, etc. into our writing.

Screenshot of the video "Approaching Science"

4. Reverse thinking

Reverse thinking soft articles dare to "think in the opposite direction", allowing writing thinking to develop in the opposite direction, exploring in depth from the opposite side of the problem, establishing new ideas, and creating a new image.

People's habitual thinking is to find a solution to a problem according to the normal development direction of things. However, sometimes changing the direction of thinking may make things easier to solve. There are three ways to refer to when writing reverse thinking soft articles:

5. “Herd Effect”

"Herd effect", "grabbing" and "following the trend" are some of the characteristics of people's purchase of products nowadays.

People like to follow the trend. They will go wherever there are crowds of people. They will tend to rush to buy hot-selling items. If many people say something is good, people will be more likely to believe that it is good. This herd mentality can be used in the creation of soft articles.

This type of soft article seems to be the most commonly used.

When writing "herd effect" style soft articles, create soft articles about hot-selling scenarios to attract consumers' attention. Use soft articles to write real scenes and warm atmospheres to create the feeling that the product is selling well or even out of stock, so that consumers will have the urge and urgency to buy in the craze.

This type of soft article is most widely used in the real estate industry. We often see some real estate soft articles saying that the properties in a certain place are sold out in an instant after they are opened for sale. These are "herd effect" type soft articles. You can search online to see that there are a lot of them.

6. Mystery

The mystery-style soft article format refers to the layout of the text by setting up mysteries without answering them at the beginning or key points when describing a complete story, so as to stimulate readers' interest in reading.

The core of the mystery-style soft article layout is to raise a question, and it is necessary to extract one or two mysterious selling points of the product, and ask and answer questions around the proposed selling points. It should be noted that when answering a question, you cannot finish answering it all at once. You should slowly reveal the secret according to the progress so that the reader will feel eager and expect the answer will be revealed at the appropriate time.

So how can we write a soft article that is half telling and half leaving, and still arouse the readers' interest in reading? You can refer to the following methods:

7. Hierarchical

The advantages of layered soft articles are rigorous logic, tight thinking, and arranging the content step by step in a certain order, giving people a smooth feeling of being completed in one go.

However, the disadvantage of cascading soft articles is also obvious, that is, the theme is not introduced quickly enough. If the beginning cannot attract readers, the subsequent content will lose its meaning of existence. The layout of hierarchical soft articles focuses on the presentation of hierarchical relationships. When writing, the hierarchical relationship is mainly shown in the figure:

The hierarchical structure is suitable for argumentative articles. The argumentative structure that goes deeper and deeper and advances step by step can increase the persuasiveness of this type of soft article. When using the hierarchical structure, attention should be paid to the logical relationship between the contents and the order should not be reversed at will. The hierarchical layout is very effective in explaining certain problems.

For example, soft articles about the development of new technologies, interpretation of policies, opportunities in new industries, etc. can be written in this soft article format.

8. Inverted

The layout of inverted soft articles is equivalent to a technique commonly used in narrative writing, namely "emphasis and depression".

Its core concept is to make use of the characteristics of "if you want to praise it, you must first suppress it, and if you want to suppress it, you must first praise it", to make it twists and turns, avoid straightforward narration, make the soft article have an attractive artistic charm, and also highlight the characteristics of things or the changes in the development of characters' thoughts and emotions.

The advantage of this form is that it can eliminate bland and ordinary writing and prevent readers from knowing the ending after reading the beginning. By using a writing style that first criticizes and then praises, a different soft-text environment can be created, which appears tortuous and vivid, can leave a strong impression on readers, enhance the appeal of the article, and thus retain readers.

For example, here’s a comparison of the effects of a plain and flashback ad:

1. Plain

My family is not well off, so I went home for the Sunday and had to go back to school. My sister was putting vegetables into my bottle while she was secretly eating the diced meat in the vegetables. I blamed her for being greedy.

The younger sister said, "Sister, when you are not at home, we only eat small dishes. When you come home, mom always buys meat and fish for you to nourish your body. You eat and bring them to school. It would be great if you were at home every day."

2. Flashback

On the weekend, the neighbors came from afar to greet my daughter who came home, calling her "my darling" all the time, but my mother just smiled at me. I felt very uncomfortable, and I was even more furious when my sister secretly ate the diced meat in the vegetables when she was serving them to me.

But my sister made me feel ashamed: "Sister, when you are not at home, we only eat small dishes. When you come home, mom always buys meat and fish for you to nourish your body. You eat it and bring it to school. It would be great if you were at home every day."

If you think about it carefully, the same thing will be different if the narrative style is changed, right?

9. Fragment combination

This form of soft article specifically refers to selecting several typical and vivid characters, events, scenery and other fragments to form an article based on the needs of the theme to be expressed. The theme is the soul of the article and the ideological red thread that connects all the content.

Therefore, the selected fragments must be subject to the theme.

The layout of this form of soft article is generally: general - specific - general layout. The main part is generally composed of 3-4 segments. The beginning and each segment and the ending echo each other, and each is independent but related to each other. Generally, there are three ways to write such soft articles:

1. Time

With time as the main line, narrate the main events in each time period, and leave other content as artistic "blank" to the reader's imagination. For example, you can write about life experiences or events around time periods such as "five years old - ten years old + fifteen years old", "childhood - adolescence - youth", etc.

2. Parallelism

In the article, events, characters, etc. are listed in parallel, for example, "Car - Nissan - Honda - Audi - Volkswagen - Mercedes-Benz - Ending", echoing the beginning and the end, and the importance of the fragments in the middle are equal.

3. Positive and negative comparison

The structural form of demonstrating a point of view is through comparative analysis of the positive and negative situations. By using contrast throughout the article, the logic is explained more clearly. By using positive and negative comparative arguments locally, the material is more convincing.

When using positive and negative comparison soft articles, please note that:

1. There should be a primary and secondary order for the positive and negative arguments. If the article is based on the positive side, the main body should be based on the positive argument, supplemented by the negative argument, and vice versa.
2. Select materials around the central argument and identify points of contrast.

10. Conclusion

Methodology is a good thing. It can help people know how to solve a problem. But sometimes, methodology can also bring shackles to people's thinking, making it easy for them to be trapped by old thinking when solving problems.

In fact, the same is true for soft article writing. The form of soft article writing is not static, but always changing. I am still exploring it and hope that some friends with ideas can give me some suggestions.

Author: Village Chief Liang

Source: Village Head Teacher Liang