Whose story are you telling?
View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|)
“The story is never about teller. The story is always about the person who is hearing the story. And that is where selfish marketers always fail.” —Seth Godin
One of the hardest things to overcome when writing for an audience is to resist the temptation to talk about yourself.
Schools don’t make it any easier.
There, you are taught early on to make your case to others based on your personal qualities, on the achievements you’ve attained, on the things you have done to do good work.
This approach presumes that if you tell the story about yourself in just the right way, the reader will check off some imaginary boxes of must-have qualities and choose you.
It’s a resume-building way of thinking. And it’s one that’s never in short supply.
It’s not a coincidence then that so many of us struggle to get the attention of readers and customers.
Fiction writers know this. First-person narratives often suffer because it limits you, the reader, to a single way of understanding facts. What if you don’t trust the narrator? Or an even better question: why should you?
Something interesting happens when you take writing that’s inward focused and make it more accessible to your readers. The story you are telling becomes more dynamic. It’s not just about you anymore. We empathize better. We see ourselves in your struggle.
That is how we learn to trust a storyteller.
Nearly two centuries ago, American theologian Horace Bushnell talked about the power of “unconscious influences.” By that, he argued that feelings are contagious and that we can never be too sure how or why we affect others with our influence. What’s most important is to leave room for it to happen.
You might succeed just by talking about yourself. Maybe. But it’s a lot easier to connect with the outside world when you open as many doors and windows as you can in the construction of your story. No matter what you are trying to say, make it more about your reader and you’ll find that those unconscious influences find ways to hook into your message in all kinds of ways.
Here are three ways you can make your writing stronger and more reader-friendly.
Make friends with the word “you”
A recent study looked at nearly one million blog headlines (http://okdork.com/2014/07/22/we-analyzed-nearly-1-million-headlines-heres-what-we-learned/) to find out what gets shared most often. In the top three results were headlines that made use of the words “you” and “your.” In other words, reader-focused stories. Posts that instead opted for teller-focused storytelling—framed with the words “I” or “me”—were three times less likely to be shared. Take a red pen (http://thinkitcreative.com/blog/four-simple-steps-to-a-more-user-friendly-website/) and go through some of your own work. Circle each reference to “I” and ask yourself: “how can this be recast so that what I’m saying here is about, you, the reader?”
Show the benefit
Sometimes it’s unavoidable to lead with facts about yourself. For instance, you could be applying for a job and you want to write a cover letter that’s going to grab a reader’s attention. Rather than just listing a series of personal accomplishments—just like 97% of the other cover letters they will receive—ask yourself “how might this reader directly benefit from these skills or experiences that I offer?”
Your answer will reshape the way you rewrite that sentence into a strong, opening hook. The ability to communicate in benefits is what keeps copywriters in business. But we’re pretty generous about sharing that skill, because we all gain from having to spend less time trying to decipher “what’s in it for me” in what we read every day.
Make the reader part of your story
Let’s say you’re working on a case study for your company. The common temptation is to write a story that talks all about how yourself. Yes, you worked hard and of course you want that to show through. But here’s the difficulty: the reader is less interested in how you solved someone else’s problem. What they are looking for in your story is evidence that you have something that can help them solve their problem. That’s why my advice with case study writing is to lead first with a problem that many readers can identify with (and the same goes for the solution), rather than get granular too quickly.
That’s it for this week. Well. Actually, no. One more thing.
Notice something about you’ve been reading in this piece? It’s all focused on “you,” the reader.
Want to know a secret? I had to rewrite it to make that happen.
Originally, this started as a story about what “I” had found in my work as a copywriter. It’s that easy to overlook. And it’s that easy fix it to make your message resonate better.
Very best, Patrick
============================================================ |IFNOT:ARCHIVE_PAGE| |LIST:DESCRIPTION|
Our mailing address is: |LIST_ADDRESS| |END:IF|
unsubscribe from this list (|UNSUB|) update subscription preferences (|UPDATE_PROFILE|)
|IF:REWARDS| |REWARDS_TEXT| |END:IF|