Algeria AgencyDigital marketing
Copywriting: writing is not styling, it is ordering
Almost nothing that decides a commercial text is a matter of style. It is the order, the vocabulary, and what you are not entitled to claim.
The article on content marketing says what to write: a real question, a complete answer, at an address you own. It says nothing about the sentences, and that is this article’s subject.
Commercial writing is misunderstood because it gets classed with literature. It belongs closer to logistics: making information arrive in the right order, in the words the reader uses, without asserting what cannot be proved.
Three things decide nearly everything, and none of them is a talent. The order the elements arrive in. The vocabulary, which is not yours but the buyer’s. And the claims withdrawn, because an unverifiable sentence transfers the burden of believing you onto the reader.
The rest — rhythm, image, phrasing — exists and is worth something, but afterwards. A well-ordered badly written text sells; a well-written badly ordered one gets read to the second paragraph.
Order first, write afterwards
The first version of a commercial text should be a list, not a paragraph. A list of what the reader has to know, in the order they need it, with the answer first and the conditions after.
The default order of most company texts is exactly the reverse: the company is presented, the sector is placed, the approach is announced, and the information arrives in the fourth paragraph. That is the order the author thought of it in, not the order the reader needs.
The useful order has four beats. What it is. What it costs and how long it takes. What to do to get it. And finally the special cases, exceptions and qualifications, which only an already convinced reader will read.
A simple test separates the two: delete the first paragraph. If the text works better, that paragraph was a warm-up and should never have been published. The test succeeds on most of the texts we take over.
Once the order is right, the writing consists of joining things up. It is quick work, and it is the part that feels like the trade when it is the last step and the least decisive.
The reader is holding a phone in one hand
A material decision precedes every decision about language, and it is measurable rather than aesthetic: your text will be read in a narrow column, held in one hand, often standing up.
In the second quarter of 2025, mobile subscriptions were 88.71% of the country’s internet subscriptions against 11.29% for fixed lines. That is not an audience statistic but a layout constraint that reaches all the way up into the syntax.
In a column that wide, an eight-line paragraph is a grey block filling the whole screen. The reader does not read it: they skip it, and they skip the sentence with the price in it. Paragraph length is not a question of taste, it is a question of whether the information survives.
Three rules follow and they can be checked by eye. Three to four lines per paragraph. One idea per paragraph, not two. And anything countable — sizes, lead times, wilayas, conditions — taken out of the paragraph and put in a list, because an enumeration inside a sentence is unreadable on a narrow screen.
The last consequence is the most counter-intuitive: writing short costs more time than writing long. A well-ordered six-hundred-word text takes more work than a fifteen-hundred-word one, and that is why it is so rare.
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter of 2025
The words you use are not the words people type
Here is the part nobody treats and that decides half the result: the object you sell carries at least three names, and you use one of them — the supplier’s.
The case is easy to recognise. The catalogue says "generating set", the customer says "motor". The invoice says "split air conditioner", the customer says the short form. The manufacturer says "wall covering", the customer says wallpaper. Neither is wrong; only one of them gets typed into a search box.
On top of that comes the local situation, which multiplies the entrances again. The same object is named in French, in Arabic, and in dialect written in Latin characters. The article on search advertising establishes that the third form is often the least contested, because almost nobody in the trade writes it.
The method for finding those words requires no tool: reread thirty incoming messages and note how your customers name what you sell. It is an hour of work, it gives the real vocabulary, and it nearly always contradicts the internal terminology.
The writing rule that follows: use the customer’s word in the title and the first sentence, and the technical word afterwards, once, for precision. The reverse — trade term at the front — pushes away exactly the reader who was going to buy.
The reading language is not always the first one
A commercial sentence in Algeria is often read in a language that is not the reader’s first. That says nothing about their education; it says the reading load is real, and it gets paid in people leaving.
What costs is not the vocabulary, it is the construction. The subordinate clause, the aside, the double negative, the conditional, the sentence that postpones its verb: each requires holding the beginning in memory until the end, and on a narrow screen that memory is not available.
The correction is mechanical and costs nothing. One idea per sentence. The verb early. Negation avoided where a positive form exists. Asides deleted or turned into the next sentence. The result is not an impoverished text, it is a text that arrives.
Administrative turns of phrase deserve a mention because they are everywhere and serve nobody: "within the framework of", "it should be noted that", "we have the pleasure of informing you". They come from official correspondence and add a layer of translation in front of the information.
All of that concerns text written in advance. Answering a message received is a separate decision, because the reader has already chosen their language and that choice carries information: which language to answer in, and to whom is decided per channel.
One practical point to finish: numerals read better than words in every language. "3 days" rather than "three days", "12,000 DA" rather than twelve thousand dinars spelled out. It looks beneath a careful text and it is what the reader’s eye is hunting for.
The objection before the argument
An ordinary commercial text lists benefits and waits. A text that works names the reason not to buy first, because the reader already has it in mind and will read nothing until it has been dealt with.
Your objections are known and there are few of them: it is expensive, it will take time, it will not work in my case, I have tried before, I do not know you. About five, and your salesperson hears all of them every week.
Writing them down is uncomfortable and it is the best investment in the text. "Yes, it costs more than the option across the road, and here are the two cases where it is not worth the difference": a sentence like that produces more trust than three paragraphs of benefits.
The form that works is acknowledgement followed by a limit. Acknowledge the objection without minimising it, then say precisely in which case it is decisive. A text that admits a limit becomes credible about everything else, and the effect is measurable in the messages that follow.
The opposite — handling the objection by going around it — shows immediately. Answering "in reality it is an investment" to a price objection fools nobody and signals that the question was understood and avoided.
A number in place of an adjective
Every adjective in a commercial text is a blank the reader has to fill in, and they fill it in suspiciously. "Fast", "robust", "affordable", "bespoke": none of that is information.
The rule is to replace, not to add. "Fast delivery" becomes "delivered within 48 hours in Algiers, 4 days in other wilayas". "Experienced team" becomes "eleven years, two hundred and forty installations". "Affordable price" becomes a price.
Replacement has a useful side effect: it exposes the claims you cannot support. If "fast" does not become any number, then speed was not a fact but a wish, and the sentence removes itself.
There is a constraint we apply to ourselves and to clients’ texts: a published figure has to be dated and verifiable internally. It is the same rule as for the data cited in our articles, and it matters more here because an unverifiable commercial figure ends up disputed by a customer.
A word on percentages, heavily used and rarely useful: "30% faster" with no point of comparison says nothing. The absolute number is nearly always better, because the reader can compare it to what they live with today.
The words that cost: guaranteed, certified, approved, leading
Some words commit you further than the author believed. They are not forbidden; they require a document, and the document is rarely asked for before publication.
"Guaranteed" presupposes a written warranty, with a duration, a scope and a procedure. Used as an intensifier — "guaranteed results" — it creates an obligation you did not want and that an unhappy customer will remember very precisely.
"Certified" and "approved" denote an act by a third party. If one exists, name the body and the year: that is worth immeasurably more than the adjective alone. If it does not, the word has to leave the text, including when the whole sector uses it freely.
"Leading", "number one", "the best": those formulas cannot be verified and they produce the opposite of the intended effect. An Algerian reader who sees "market leader" on a site they have just found does not read a proof, they read a sentence everybody writes.
Two fields demand extra caution and are handled elsewhere in this series: healthcare, where a promise of outcome has no place, and financial services, where the mandatory disclosures are not a layout option. In both, review by the professional concerned is not negotiable.
The title is a promise, and it gets kept
The title is the only part of the text everybody reads. It is also the only part that travels alone — in a search result, in a share, in a message. So it has to be accurate on its own, without the text behind it.
A useful title carries the subject and the promise, and nothing else. "Prices and delivery times by wilaya" is a good title. "Our commitment to serving you better" is not: it does not say what the page is about, and the reader who wanted lead times has already gone.
The rule that costs most to respect is this one: if the text does not keep the title’s promise, it is the title that is wrong. A title announcing a price has to be followed by a price in the first screen, or you have produced exactly the disappointment the reader was expecting.
Subheadings follow the same logic and serve something else: they let the text be read without being read. A reader skimming the subheadings has to come away with the whole summary. That is how most long texts are actually consumed.
Finally, write the titles after the text, never before. A title written first steers the content towards a promise nothing has yet verified, and it is the commonest cause of texts that never land.
The call to action names a gesture
The end of a commercial text asks for something, and the phrasing decides what happens next. "Contact us" asks the reader to decide what to do, which is exactly the work they do not want to do.
A useful call names a precise gesture and states what the reader will get. "Send the part reference by message, we confirm availability and price within the hour" asks for a defined action and announces a deadline.
It also has to match how people actually write to you. If 80% of your enquiries arrive by messaging, the call to action cannot be an eight-field form. The friction is not in the text, it is in the channel the text imposes.
One call per page, and it repeats rather than diversifies. Three different proposals at the bottom of a page — call, write, fill in, subscribe — produce hesitation, and hesitation ends with the tab being closed.
What the call must never do is promise faster than you can deliver. "Immediate reply" on an account that answers the next morning creates a precise, checkable disappointment, and it is the kind of sentence that produces a public comment.
Register: and the Arabic people actually write
Register is the one genuine style question in this article, and it is settled by observation rather than principle: write the way your customers write to you, and look at thirty messages before deciding.
In French, the formal form remains the norm for most activities and the informal one works in young sectors — sport, fashion, fast food. What never works is changing halfway down a page, which happens as soon as two people write the same text.
In Arabic the question is different and more delicate: what gets written in commercial communication is standard Arabic, with a few concessions to everyday speech in forms of address. Writing in transliterated dialect in a long text rarely works — it is a spoken language, and it tires the reader.
Mixing is to be avoided inside a sentence rather than between posts. A French sentence with two Arabic words in the middle, or the reverse, reads badly in both. Two short sentences one under the other are better, as the content-creation article already explains.
One last point on person: "we" is the default pronoun of company texts and it pushes people away. "You" should appear twice as often as "we" in a commercial text. Count them — it is a thirty-second diagnosis.
The style guide fits on one page
Company style guides run to twenty pages and go unread. The one that works fits on a single page, is pinned up, and contains only the decisions that genuinely recur.
What it has to contain: the name of your products as it is written, the shape of a price — with or without a space, with which currency abbreviation — the date format, how wilayas are written, and the register chosen.
It also contains the list of banned words, which is the most useful part. The committing words from section 6, the superlatives, the administrative formulas, and the two or three expressions your sector uses that your customers do not understand.
And it contains three examples: a good first sentence, a good call to action, a good ready-made reply. An example transmits a rule better than a rule does, and it survives the departure of whoever wrote it.
That document is the real deliverable of a copywriting engagement, more than the texts themselves. Texts age; the page of decisions lets anybody on your side write more without coming back to us, which is the point.
What we do, and what we will refuse to do
What we will refuse: writing "leading", "number one" or "best" without a verifiable source, and "guaranteed", "certified" or "approved" without the matching document. Those words commit you, and the customer who invokes them later will be right.
We will refuse to bill by word count. It is the market’s standard unit and it rewards exactly what has to be avoided: a thousand-word text is worth less than a six-hundred-word one when the question is the same, and paying by weight guarantees the wrong result.
We will also refuse to write healthcare or financial-services copy without review by the professional concerned. That is not a legal precaution on our part, it is the condition for the text being accurate — and the articles on those two sectors set out what is not permitted in them.
What we do: the survey of real vocabulary taken from your incoming messages; the order decided before the first sentence; the objections written before the benefits; adjectives replaced by dated figures or removed; and the page of decisions that makes you able to write without us.
And what you can do this week, for nothing: take your most important page, delete the first paragraph, and count the occurrences of "we" and "you". If the text is better without its introduction and "we" wins, you already know the two most profitable corrections.
Frequently asked questions
How many words should a page run to?
As many as it takes for the question to stop needing to be asked. Six hundred well-ordered words beat fifteen hundred that circle, and writing short takes more time — which is why billing by the word pushes in the wrong direction.
Should we write the way we speak?
For vocabulary, yes: use the word your customers type, not the catalogue’s. For construction, no: a written sentence has to be shorter than a spoken one, because it is read in a narrow column and often in a second language.
Can we write "market leader"?
Not without a verifiable source, and the effect is contrary anyway: a reader discovering your site sees not a proof but a sentence everybody writes. A dated figure — installations completed, years trading — does the work the adjective does not.
Where should the price go in a text?
In the first screen, with the lead time. It is what the reader’s eye is hunting for, and delaying it does not make them read more: it makes them leave, or send a message somebody has to handle by hand.
Formal or informal address?
Look at thirty received messages and do what your customers do. The formal form remains the norm for most activities; the informal one works in young sectors. What never works is changing in the middle of a page.
What should a style guide contain?
One page: product names as written, the format of prices and dates, the register, the list of banned words, and three examples — a first sentence, a call to action, a ready-made reply. Beyond that it stops being read.
Where we come in
The ratio of “we” to “you” takes two minutes to count and corrects itself. What is left afterwards are the sentences no document supports.
- We list every claim that needs a document behind it, and ask you which one.
- We settle the order of the paragraphs before a single line is written.
- We hand the text back together with what came out of it, and why.
A page that already speaks about your customer and asserts nothing unverifiable does not need rewriting, and we will not invoice one.
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