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Writing is a very personal form of expression. At SearchWarp, we encourage our writers to exercise their personal expressions in their writing as doing so will often make a piece more interesting for the end reader.
A large part of our job at SearchWarp is to gain as much exposure for our writer's articles as possible, and sometimes our writers personal expression conflicts with what would gain them the most exposure.
For example: What would be the end-result if SearchWarp allowed writers to submit their articles completely in UPPER CASE? These few articles would undoubtedly gain more attention because upper case would make the articles stand out more. The problem is that articles written in upper case are generally associated with SPAM and other low-quality content. As other writers would join in and submit their articles in upper case to compete, the overall perception of quality articles on SearchWarp would be lowered, harming the reputation of all authors on SearchWarp.
Another example which has less to do with perception and more to do with promotion is when a writer wants to submit an article with a short, clever title which in itself would indicate nothing about the meat of the article. Our editors often refer to the title "It Happened Again" which was the title of a great article submitted to SearchWarp several years ago. The problem is that with the title "It Happened Again" no one would ever have a chance of knowing what the article was about by seeing the title listed on a related article on SearchWarp or in the search listings on the major search engines.
We encouraged the author of "It Happened Again" to reconsider her title, and she declined. After 6 months, essentially no one had read her article.
A third example is when a writer insists on adding the title and byline at the beginning of their articles. Aside from the obvious issue that this causes, having the title and byline displayed twice at the top of the article, this interferes with some of the ways which we parse the text of an article for promotion. Sometimes we use the first paragraph of an article as a lead-in to the article. If the first paragraph is a repeat of the title, this makes for an ineffective lead-in. Add to this the fact that we are always working on new features to add to SearchWarp, and if the articles are consistent in their formatting, it makes it much easier to adapt the articles to the new features.
Nearly every day at SearchWarp we receive an email from someone who is offended that we've changed their title to proper case or removed the repeated title from their article. We certainly don't want to offend, but for reasons stated above sometimes this is just necessary.
We do our best to balance the interests of personal expression & the good to the whole of SearchWarp, it's article integrity, and author promotion.
Bruce Horst
CEO IcoLogic, Inc. / SearchWarp.com
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