Description advice: Length and tone
Your pal is giving you great power to wield when they ask you to describe them on but with great power comes great responsibility (thanks for the quote, Spiderman). You can make a real difference to your friends success on MSF, but to do so you'll need to write a really good description.
In this next installment of description writing tips (you can see last week's advice here), we're going to look at length and tone. Writing a profile of the correct length can be a tricky line to tread; if it's too long it's possible that the reader might get bored and reach for the back button, if it's too short they may feel they've learnt nothing about their potential date and move on without contacting them. As a general rule of thumb we would say that two to three paragraphs should do the the job. We know that it can be tempting wax lyrical about your friend and describe every moment that you've spent together from finger painting at playgroup to the dinner you had last Tuesday but you'll be upping their chances on the site if you try to keep it short and sweet.
The tone of your description is even more important than the length. Even if you're a glass half empty type, you need to get into a positive frame of mind before embarking on describing your friend and avoid any doom and gloom.This isn't to say that you should make your friend out to be a squeaky-clean Mary Poppins type, but a bit of careful phrasing can go a long way. For example 'Fenella has just about recovered from a painful and drawn out heartbreak' versus 'Fenella is recently back on the dating scene'. You can see which one sounds better and will do Fenella more favours. Keep things upbeat and don't underestimate the power of the language that you use.
The idea is to make your friend sound like a fun person to be around. Whilst a few words about your friendship is great and lets potential dates know that your friend is a personable and social type, it's important that you don't use the whole description to just talk about the two of you. Use your knowledge of your friend to demonstrate what they're like - a couple of funny anecdotes can go a long way to turning your friend from a profile on a dating website to a real and eminently dateable human being.
If you're looking for some more ideas, we post a Profile of the Week every Wednesday so you can check out the profiles that catch our attention. Keep your eye on the blog for more tips and advice very soon.
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