Ever feel your attention drifting during the middle of a presentation?
Here’s the thing, it’s happening to our blog readers, too. Right now as they read our content.
Fortunately, we can use writing techniques to hold audience attention from the first word until the end of our blog posts.
And that’s all possible once we understand our reader’s natural curve of attention.
Writing for the Memory Curve
I’ve been writing professionally for 16 years, and in the past two years my focus has turned to online content.
In my quest to create engaging content, I’ve discovered that even if you put together content that (you believe) deserves attention, you need to design that text in a way that makes it easy and appealing for your reader to start, and continue, reading.
Here’s how to start.
You’ve heard all of the popular advice for writing online before.
Start strong: effort into crafting a compelling headline introduction for your blog post.
You’ve covered those bases. You’re sure you’re going to hook your reader from the first word.
But then what?
Even if you won your reader’s attention on the strength of your headline and introduction, how do you sustain that interest?
You tap into the natural flow of human attention.
Let’s face it, if you’re writing online, you don’t have a lot of time to convince your reader your post is worth their time.
After all, there’s an explosion of content competing for our reader’s attention.
Think about this: a 2014 Chartbeat study found the average online reader spent just 15 seconds on an article.
If you’ve ever read anything online, that research won’t surprise you.
You might click on the strength of the headline, scan the intro, skim the subheads, and decide to read more.
Suddenly, your attention begins to wane, before fading altogether. It’s not that the article is boring; no, it’s more than that: it’s all thanks to the memory curve.
The memory curve is the human tendency for our attention to peak at the start of a story, dip in the middle, and rise back up at the end.
It’s common in presentations, talks, and, even short business emails.
In the Writing University’s Eleventh Hour podcast, author Anna Bruno suggests understanding the memory curve is critical to keeping your reader engaged in your story.
Though Bruno’s talk was geared towards fiction writing, her ideas can be successfully applied to blog post writing.
In fact, catering for the memory curve, might help transform even a dull business blog post into delightful, captivating read.
Here are practical tips for how you might lessons from the memory curve into practice.
1. Create Beginnings and Endings throughout Your Blog
I want to share a technique with you.
I’m working through a blog post writing course now.
One of the assignments is to post stories on Medium. Before posting the story, you draft an introduction, subheadings, and conclusion. The instructor reviews this outline and, if approved, you complete the full post on Medium.
Did you see that?
The instructors are specifically reviewing intros and conclusions, encouraging students to put special effort into those sections.
Now imagine replicating that approach throughout your blog post. That would make for pretty powerful reading, wouldn’t it?
To keep the pace, Bruno suggests creating beginnings and endings throughout a novel.
Consider the difference could make in your blog posts.
When you’re introducing a new idea in your article, create mini beginnings and endings.
Instead of a traditional beginning, middle, and end – a structure where your reader could simply scroll to the conclusion -you’ve stitched together a compelling narrative, filled with the peaks and turns we find in page-turning fiction writing.
Ok, great, but how does it look in action?
2. Beginnings and Specificity
A great blog post turns on the details.
In the talk, Bruno uses the example of a new chapter where she gave a detailed description of a house. Her editor sent the piece back and urged her to be more specific. The revised draft focused on a trip to the hardware store where two characters were going to buy material for a porch swing. They stayed in the house but zoomed in on the swing.
An example for a business blog might be, if you’re writing about an industry trend, zooming in on a company or person whose story you can use.
Consider this example from Dropbox’s blog. The article investigates the rise of the digital age in Estonia. At the start of this paragraph, we meet a local tech entrepreneur.
“Karoli Hindriks is the Founder and CEO of Jobbatical, an immigration/relocation platform that connects companies with knowledge workers from around the world.”
Once again, we have the opportunity to apply techniques used in fiction writing.
Josyln Chase, in an article for the Write Practice, tells us that no “writer’s toolbox” is complete with a set of hooks, devices for engaging the reader, drawing them into your post.
One way to accomplish this goal, suggest Chase, is to raise a question in the reader’s mind.
“Readers read to get their questions answered. Want to keep your readers turning the pages? Open a question in their minds.”
Consider starting with questions that are important to your reader. What keeps them awake at night?
3. Endings: An Opportunity for Broader Analysis
Think back to a film or series you watched where the entire show was great…except for the ending.
Endings matter so much, viewers voice their outrage if the ending isn’t deemed satisfying enough.
A conclusion is an opportunity for the writer to make a broader comment, said Bruno. So, at the start you went specific, now at the ending, tie it in with an insight.
Consider using an ending to tie up the commentary your shared in the preceeding section, creating a neat summary of your key ideas.
The rules for writing online have changed. It’s not always enough to start with a strong hook and hope for the best. When we writer cater for the flow of the memory curve we serve up content that truly engages our readers, from start to finish, again and again.
Featured image: Photo by Samuel Pereira on Unsplash
