Honestly, the Yoast SEO Plugin is really quite extraordinary. The Stop Light color coding of both the Metadata and readability quality make writing good content a breeze. But, there’s always a “but.”
I’ve long held that the best copy is written in E-Prime. E-Prime is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb “to be”, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. A device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.
Long ago in another lifetime I wrote a CMS editor that included an E-Prime tool in the form of a spell-checker. It would highlight the various forms of ‘”to be” as E-Prime violations and thus cue the author to revise the copy. It was crude but it did help improve my writing style.
And now years later, I’m trying to bang out two blog posts a week and I am missing the hints that I need to stay on track with E-Prime.
Let’s fix that.
I now have an idea for this week’s developer challenge: Writing a Yoast Plugin extension that provides the E-Prime feedback within Yoast’s UI. I think it should add a peer section to the ‘Readability’ and ‘SEO Analysis’ tabs. A simple ‘E-Prime’ layer that conforms to the Smiley face convention and accordions to show the sentences that have violations.
I have no idea if it’s possible, but I’m racing off to look into it this afternoon. Hopefully Yoast has some clearly structured code that I can crib from…
Wish Me Luck!
Example: This post has ten E-Prime violations. I’ve fallen back into the bad habit of conversational writing.
