Are You Guilty?
I recently read a post about how no one wants to read the stuff that you write (the author used a less polite word, but the meaning was the same). I wasn’t surprised in the least to know this since I already have such a short attention span for reading blogs. (I skimmed that same post to decide if it was worth reading.)
The author’s field of interest is advertising, but the basic idea applies to all writing. Simply put, you must avoid falling in love with your own words so much that you think your readers will too.
The Useless Must Be Killed
As someone once said, you should “Murder Your Darlings”.Meaning that you shouldn’t become attached to the cute and clever things you write, or other wordsmithing. Remove needless words mercilessly as they gets in the way of the connection between you and your reader.
And so, just as you shouldn’t get attached to your own cute and clever writing, you also shouldn’t be offended when other people don’t really care about them either.
This is amplified further when you produce digital media where people “skim, scan or scroll” your information until they find something they are interested in and then they might read that.
Cut your writing down to what you want the reader to know and leave it at that. Anything else is fluff.
Same For Traditional Print Media
I just received a letter in the mail from a nearby medical center. It looked pretty much like Public Relations B.S., but since it was addressed to me I felt some strange obligation to at least glance at it.
I skimmed the 3 main paragraphs and noticed that each contained a single highlighted keyword. This was all I read. By the time I got to the end I realized nothing in it was particularly new or of interest to me, so I tossed it, though I appreciated that they made it easy for me to decide quickly.
These are good lessons to learn when you begin writing. I think everyone, even experienced writers can fall into this trap. Which is why revision is so important. But it’s especially relevant for the digital audience.
If you want any hope of being read, keep it brief or else you may misunderstood, or even worse — ignored.
