"The goal of a regular text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something" Good articl

"The goal of a regular text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something" Good article, on the whole. But I disagree, slightly, with this point. At the risk of being cute, I'd say that the goal of all text is to get people to do something. Writing is persuasion. The particular end may change, but the means should always fit some end. Writing devoid of purpose is bound to be powerless. It's rambling. It's filler. It's extraneous. Before writing anything, whatsoever, consider why you're writing it. Consider whom you're writing it for. Consider what you'd like that person to do, or think, after having read your copy. You need to be engineering an outcome. If not, you're basically gambling that your reader will stumble into something accidentally. Instead, leave nothing to accident. It doesn't matter if you're writing a cookbook, web copy, a letter to a friend, an email, or a science fiction novella. You're trying to get your reader from a point A to a point B, and the first step in doing so is taking careful stock of what A and B are.