ICYMI: Ann Wylie was our guest on Strategies & Tactics Live on LinkedIn on Aug. 22. Refresh your writing skills with this focused session designed to sharpen your craft.
I’ve been a writing trainer for more than 30 years. In those three decades, I’ve reviewed thousands of messages from hundreds of companies.
I see the same mistakes over and over and over again.
Those mistakes keep us from doing our job, which is to get people to pay attention to our message, read it, understand it, remember it and act on it.
Which of these mistakes do you see yourself and your team members making?
You write about “us and our stuff”…
… instead of about the reader and the reader’s needs.
Unfortunately, that gets in the way of your communications:
Journalists’ No. 1 pet peeve is releases that aren’t relevant to their readers (Greentarget).
Reader-centric communications increase conversions by up to 47% (HubSpot).
71% of high-performing organizations focus their messages on the audience’s point of view. Just 45% of average organizations do (Stephen Welch, Michael Ambjorn).
Is Institutional Narcissism keeping your organization from getting better coverage, closing more deals and performing at a higher level?
You use a structure that’s been proven in the lab…
… not to work with humans.
The inverted pyramid has been proven in the lab, again and again, to reduce readership, slash understanding, minimize engagement, shrink sharing and keep readers from finishing your message (American Society of Newspaper Editors, Newspaper Association of American, Poynter Institute, Reuters Institute).
Despite these findings, communicators keep perpetuating the inverted pyramid because it’s the way we’ve always done it (for more than 160 years, by the way!)
Is your dedication to the inverted pyramid getting in the way of your organization’s success?
You lose your message…
… in words, words, words.
Too many professional communicators write messages, paragraphs, sentences and words that are hard to read and understand. According to 130 years of readability research:
The more you write, the less readers read.
The more information you give people, the less likely they are to be able to do what you want them to do with it.
The longer your paragraph, the more likely readers are to skip it.
The longer your sentence, the less readers understand.
The longer and more jargony your words, the less readers read and understand.
Would your piece be twice as good if it were half as long?
You write for readers…
… but your audience members are flippers and skimmers.
Your audience members are just like you. They don’t read most messages word for word. They skim. They scan. They look.
Indeed, even the most sophisticated web visitors read only about 20% of the words on a webpage (Nielsen-Norman Group). (And that’s probably not the first 20% of the words on the page!)
Are you so focused on reaching readers that you fail to get the word out to your actual audience — the large and growing percentage of people who don’t read most of the paragraphs?
‘Use the bait your fish like’
My grandfather, the brilliant fisherman George Wylie, used to tell me, “If you want to catch a fish, you need to think like a fish. Then you need to use the bait your fish like, not the bait you like.”
If you want to catch your readers, then you can use the same approach.
The problem is, much of the “bait” we’ve institutionalized in our industry is not the bait the reader likes. In fact, many of our writing practices actually repel readers instead of drawing them in.
Could outdated writing practices be keeping you and your team members from catching your readers?
Ann Wylie works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Don’t miss a single tip: Sign up for Ann’s email newsletter here.
Copyright © 2024 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.
Illustration credit: lamaip
The post 4 Writing Mistakes You’re (Probably!) Making Now first appeared on PRsay.