When using blog excerpts in lieu of full entries, it’s imperative that your excerpts be well crafted so readers click through and read the full entry. To craft a good excerpt, you must first understand what an excerpt is and its purpose. An excerpt is a brief description of a longer article and is designed to tell a reader what information she will gain from reading the entire article.
You can use a paragraph (generally the first) from the article itself if it adequately describes the scope of the full article. But, for lengthy paragraphs or those lacking the necessary depth, a custom excerpt is essential. Writing excerpts isn’t an exact science, but there are things you can do to help make the process more painless.
- Write pithy descriptions. Consider, for a moment, the descriptions you see when you do a search at Google; two lines, 150 characters (including spaces), totaling about 25-30 words. That is all the room you get to compel a reader to your site and the same should be applied to excerpts.
- Use clear and direct language. Part of being pithy is using firm, direct, and clear words to describe your article. Save the embellishments, excess adjectives, and wordplay for the article itself.
- Write the excerpt last. Waiting until an article is finished allows you to read through it in its entirety and become better able to describe it.
Don’t be afraid to play around with your excerpts until you find a balance that is suitable for both you and your readers.
Nice tips. But I think this leads to a bigger point: you shouldn’t need to write a custom excerpt. If your blog writing style is up to par, then your intro paragraph or the first two sentences or so should do the trick.
Blogging is all about getting to the point — no long leads necessary.
# July 12th, 2006
Junger brings up a good point. Are excerpts really necessary?
# July 19th, 2006
In some cases, I believe excerpts are necessary especially for long entries.
Excerpts tell a reader whether something is going to be a ‘how-to’ an opinion piece, general news, commentary (or what have you) quickly so they can choose to continue reading or move on.
Of course, the necessity of excerpts will vary depending on the individual. So, in that event, it’s always best to go with your gut or ask your readers what they’d prefer.
~ Teli
# July 19th, 2006
How do others lead the reader from an excerpt to the full article?
I am putting [SUMMARY] at the beginning of my excerpts and at the end of each adding [click now on the headline to read the FULL ARTICLE]
Is there some better way to do that? Can I force Word Press to automatically add a [... read more] at the end of each excerpt?
Thanks,
Len
# July 20th, 2006
Hi Len,
It depends on where you’re leading the reader to the full article from, the main blog page or their feed reader?
In your case, it sounds like you want to display excerpts on the actual blog itself.
To do so you can manually create a break where you want the “read more” text to appear. To manually create a break, add
<!--more-->in the blog content where you want the break to occur.If you actually want the text you enter into the excerpt box to display, then you’ll need to modify the template to use
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>instead of<?php the_content(); ?>on the index.php file. And to add the “click here to read more” text, just below the excerpt code, you’d need to add<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">Continue reading <?php the_title(); ?></a>.Hope that helps and gives you some ideas.
~ Teli
# July 20th, 2006
Thanks, Teli. VERY helpful. I inserted that php code into archives.php and I now have what I wanted. Many thanks!
Len
(PS. How’s progress on OptiN ver 2?)
# July 20th, 2006
Hi Len,
I actually just saw this comment, so my apologies for the delayed response.
You’re welcome.
OptiNiche v2 was postponed while I worked on my themes through August. Now that the themes are complete, things are starting to settle down a bit for me so I can continue typing it up (most of it is still in long hand
).
~ Teli
# September 19th, 2006