I know, I keep talking about making descriptions descriptive. It seems to be something that many who sell their products online need reminding of.
A recent forum thread had the original poster asking for adjectives. She felt she needed some new ones as she was wearing out awesome, cool, beautiful, and a few others.
Oh, boy, where to start?
Instead of looking for adjectives to use to describe your items, pretend you are talking to someone who is new to speaking English and does not know the meaning of awesome, cool, beautiful, etc. Why is the item beautiful? Why is it cool? What’s cool mean anyway?
I talked in an earlier blog post Writing Product Descriptions about giving specific details about an item. For example, “white dove on a chain” would be much better described by “Hand-blown white glass dove with a gold-filled bail. The 18 inch chain is gold filled with a lobster claw clasp.”
Superlatives are not informative
Let’s look at this with an example or two. Which tells you more, finely-detailed or beautiful? How about awesome necklace or make a fashion statement with this necklace?
What you should do is rather than use a vague word like beautiful (would you be selling it if it were ugly?) or awesome (would you sell anything that was horrible?) is to convey a feeling or mood about your item; or better yet, describe it like you would to someone on the phone.
What’s in a name?
Do you really know what awesome means? Awesome means awe-inspiring, but it also can mean frightening, horrible, appalling, shocking, and awful.
Playing with words a bit, if your product description were “awesome necklace” – would someone find it shocking or horrible? I doubt you would get much business selling ‘appalling jewelry’.
I know it is so much easier to find an adjective than to actually describe something, but I know you can do it if you try.
For some more ideas on this topic, be sure to check out Avoiding Ambiguous Adjectives to learn more about keeping your descriptions clear.
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