Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes
Writers have to write A LOT to get good. Talent and intelligence may play a roll in writing skill, but I believe effective writing is a learned skill like any other. You have to practice a lot to be at the pro level.
Today’s consumers are over-communicated to, pressed for time, and perhaps a little lazy. They want to know what it’s about fast and they don’t want to read your languid prose.
It’s frustrating, but we have to accept that the longer and more detailed our writing gets, the less likely we are to seduce readers into accepting our ideas.
Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat?
At worst, readers take one look at your long salesletter, bloated video run-times, sprawling blog posts and articles… roll their eyes (or yawn) and move on (I’ll tell you why in a bit).
At best your readers are fans who have decided they like your writing. Don’t count on getting too many of these rare birds on your lists though.
Writing To The Common Denominator
People want clarity and brevity. They aren’t stupid - they just prefer easy.
It’s not just about selling products, it’s about selling people the idea they should be paying attention to what you want to tell them.
At regular intervals in your written communication - perhaps once or twice every page - you should be placing markers of some sort that help your readers to scan and interpret the shape and meaning of what you’re trying to get across.
Making Better Markup
These markers can be bolded text emphasizing some relevant concept, cross-headings and section headings, bullet lists, Johnson boxes, callouts, sidebars, colored or italicized text, different type faces and font sizes…
Of course if you throw all those together in one web-page it starts to look like it came from HTML Hell.
We’re in an era of Visual Communication
… and the young people now are accustomed to, and expect, a style of communication that is frankly “dumbed down”. Print-era writers are probably more skilled readers than many many of today’s smart young folks – and it will probably hurt our ability to reach them if we don’t bring our writing to the level they prefer.
In short – just because today’s buyers prefer short, dumbed-down, visual communication doesn’t make them stupid – but it is foolish for us professional communicators not to adapt to their preferences.
I recently talked with one of my buddies who builds websites and he was talking about the effectiveness of having simple and visually appealing sites. He said people don’t read websites like they read anything else. They are different from anything else.