As a modern writer you know attracting your audience’s attention has never been harder.
But what if there were strategies you could put in place to produce the kind of writing your audience wants to read? After all, that’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?
Well, they’re out there, and we’re uncovering two tactics here: simple techniques that come together to create interesting, coherent content, whether you’re writing for your blog or social media.
Earning Audience Attention in the Digital Age
These days, we’re bombarded by content all day long.
Blogs. Social media updates. Instant messages. Netflix.
I could go on and on but you know the drill.
Now writing is a powerful tool to break through the noise. With writing, you can connect with new readers, customers, and professionals from across the world. You can use writing to build rapport with people you’ve never even met.
But this only works if people want to engage with your writing. And for that to happen, your writing must be compelling and clear.
I’ve turned to two research papers to set us on the path to developing thoughtful, engaging writing that captures the reader’s attention from the first word.
How to Write Interesting Articles
In a 1971 paper, That’s Interesting, Murray S. Davis set out to examine the elements of interesting theories.
And though Davis’s focus is on social phenonemen, we can apply his ideas to content development.
(I found the paper that inspired this post via an article from Jeff Goins published on the Buffer blog.)
Davis writes:
“Interesting theories deny certain assumptions of their audience, while non-interesting theories affirm certain assumptions of their audience.”
So by providing a new, different take on the audience’s existing ideas, you’re taking the first step to writing something interesting and new.
“The interesting is something that affects the attention. Websters Third defines interesting as “engaging the attention.” The question naturally arises: Where was the attention before it was engaged by the interesting?”
Think about that: where is your reader’s attention before they find your work?
Davis draws on a descriptor from Harold Garfinkel (1967), that says we live in a state of low attention called “the routinized taken-for-granted world of everyday life.”
Audiences turn to their focus to the interesting because these topics “stands out in their attention in contrast to the web of routinely taken-for-granted propositions that make up the theoretical structure of their everyday lives”.
Of course, modern audiences have a relentless stream of competing priorities vying for their attention. In between the business of life, you reader has her pick of long-form articles, videos, and brief updates.
So, the need to engage the reader becomes even more important.
Here’s where it’s useful to consider these four questions, suggested by Davis:
- So what?
- Who cares?
- Why bother?
- What good is it?
Keep coming back to these questions as you write.
Examples of Interesting Content
It’s all good and well to learn about the ingredients of interesting writing, but how do we put these into practice? Put another way, what do these theories look like on paper?
Enter Davis’s interesting index, a list of categories of the types of interesting content.
As you read, try to consider the types of posts you could create using these formats.
Generalization
a. What seems to be a local phenomenon is in reality a general phenomenon.
OR
b. What seems to be a general phenomenon is in reality a local phenomenon.
As an example for generalization, what’s happening in your industry? Is there a specific trend that seemed like it was confined to a group of consumers, but you’re seeing evidence that it’s happening universally?
And then, conversely, is there a specific trend that’s only impacting one group of consumers?
Evaluation
a. What seems to be a bad phenomenon is in reality a good phenomenon.
OR
b. What seems to be a good phenomenon is in reality a bad phenomenon.
We often see these contrarian posts that challenge our traditional way of thinking.
Consider these posts from Medium:
Why Viral Marketing is Overrated
Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful
Of course, attacking the status quo just because you can doesn’t always make for compelling reading. And Davis provides a guide for evaluating a topic thoughtfully.
Choose aspects of the subject you want to evaluate, selecting either the best or worst attributes.
“Should his audience customarily view the phenomenon in its best light, he can then view it in its worst, and vice versa.”
Examples:
- The Dark Side of Personalised Marketing Strategies
- Why Customer Churn can Help Your Business Succeed
Another approach is to change the baseline, the indicator by which the phenomenon is measured.
You could, for example, use a past comparison or future projection for evaluating the topic.
Example:
Instant Messaging is Setting us on a Path to Destroyed Focus
How to Write Better: Eliminate the Uninteresting
Now that we have strategies for coming up with interesting content, let’s look at what to avoid.
It all starts with knowing your audience and their “assumption-ground”. What does your audience know and assume about a topic?
Davis lists three reactions that deem a theory uninteresting:
- That’s obvious
- That’s irrelevant
- That’s absurd
That’s Obvious
Your audience won’t find your work interesting if you’re telling them something they already know and believe.
For instance, a blog post announcing that marketing can help people learn more about your business is not interesting.
“The audience’s response to propositions of this type will be: “That’s obvious!”
That’s Irrelevant
Your audience will reject your content if it has no relevance, when it “does not speak to any aspect of this assumption-ground at all”.
“In effect, the proposition is saying to its audience: What is really true has no connection with what you always thought was true…The audience’s response to propositions of this type will be: “That’s irrelevant!”
This is where, again, we can see the importance of gaining a deep understanding of your audience.
That’s Absurd
Imagine this article: the quality of customer service, marketing, and your product have no bearing on business success.
This challenges everything we know about the qualities of a healthy business.
“In effect, the proposition is saying to its audience: Everything that seems to be the case is not the case at all. Everything you always thought was true is really false…The audience’s response to propositions of this type will be: “That’s absurd!”
The Structure of Interesting Content
Novel ideas are compelling, but we can’t rely on interesting content alone.
Finding an interesting theory is not enough, your audience needs to understand what you are trying to convey.
Paul J. Silva, discusses how to make your writing interesting, in his paper, Interest—The Curious Emotion, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
He presents is with two indicators of interesting content.
“The first appraisal is an evaluation of an event’s novelty–complexity, which refers to evaluating an event as new, unexpected, complex, hard to process, surprising, mysterious, or obscure
“The second, less obvious appraisal is an evaluation of an event’s comprehensibility.”
So, on comprehensibility, is your text clear, concrete, and easy to understand?
Celebrated writers like George Orwell have stressed the importance of simple, clear writing.
Silva then curates research on interesting writing, expanding on this point.
“…the largest predictors of a text’s interestingness are (a) a cluster of novelty–complexity variables (the material’s novelty, vividness, complexity, and surprisingness) and (b) a cluster of comprehension variables (coherence, concreteness, and ease of processing). Intuition tells us that we can make writing interesting by ‘‘spicing it up’’; research reminds us that clarity, structure, and coherence enhance a reader’s interest, too
When it comes to interesting, compelling writing, novel ideas are as important as clear, coherent structures. If you consistently bring these two concepts into your writing, you’ll have effective tools to produce the kind of writing your audience wants to read.
