I Sell Onions on the Internet
I want someone to write some analysis of this particular... voice, or style of writing, being used here.<p>&quot;I&#x27;m a web guy. I’m not a farmer.&quot;<p>I already knew that, because in just a couple paragraphs, I was already recognizing the style of writing as... SEO, &quot;influencer&quot;, I don&#x27;t know what to call it?<p>It&#x27;s a personal first-person voice, which right off the start tries to establish that the author is a human being writing about their life -- but also that they are an expert in what they are going to tell you about, and <i>very successful</i> too.<p>The text includes many one or two sentence paragraphs, and has aggressively styled pull quotes and&#x2F;or callouts. Short sentences too. Not entirely complete sentences. Interspersed.<p>It makes sure to open up with some kind of very short story that is only tangentially related to the content but is folksy and cute. (Smuggled vidalia&#x27;s onto cruise ship).<p>The information is very cleverly structured to keep you reading, by dropping <i>just enough</i> of the actual info, page to page, to pique your attention and make you think there&#x27;s an interesting story here, but not enough that you can leave having actually learned anything before you&#x27;ve read a pretty big chunk. And is written artfully for this purpose, it works, and keeps you reading. Sometimes at the end you feel rewarded, other times you feel like it was a shaggy dog story. The best authors leave you happy, of course.<p>It&#x27;s got information to convey, but the goal is not to convey the information as effectively as possible, but to keep you reading as long as possible -- and, usually, to sell you something.<p>I don&#x27;t know if I have a value judgement on it exactly -- okay, I&#x27;ll admit it annoys me, perhaps because it <i>all sounds the same</i> while trying to convince you it&#x27;s a folksy authentic voice.  But either way, it&#x27;s a <i>thing</i>, a genre even, that I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;ve seen anyone comment on.<p>It&#x27;s: &quot;Content Marketing Voice&quot;.<p>(Also selling people onions on the internet is &quot;purpose over profit&quot;, really?  What the world needs now is frictionless access to vidalia onions shipped directly to your home?)