How to Urge More People to Focus on What You Have to Say

What is the one thing that almost all writers, communicators or website publishers would love to have? Answer: of course it's more readers, listeners, viewers or visitors? Yet the modern pace of life tends to encourage a short attention span. Often, we just don't seem to want to focus on a topic for long - the threat of boredom is ever present. Of course, we can blame all sorts of causes: television, the "rat race" approach to living, and so on. However as a group who desire to improve how we communicate, I suggest we first embrace the reality of and work with "short attention span syndrome", then explore new, better ways to share our message.

Often, the central aim of any communication is to urge or persuade as many of your targeted audience as possible to focus on your piece and to then respond or react in a specific way.

To do that, you can simply "talk" (or write) at the same level as most of your target readers. How?

Consider the following guidelines:

• Write as you would speak.
• Keep your writing simple whenever possible.
• However, write or communicate in a way that is relevant and suitable to your audience. If you're communicating to the general public on a popular theme, you'll use one approach. If you're addressing business owners, you'll want to use a different approach. If you're writing for a university group, your topic will most likely benefit by having more meat, thought and depth of coverage.
• Insert the most important content at the start of your piece.
• Write, speak or present your message concisely whenever possible. By all means be engaging! Write creatively and controversially if that's your beat. Evoke the senses and emotions; seduce and guide your reader and build suspense if your writing demands. Just don't ramble on and play with overly complex words and sentence structures, when simple, short and sweet informative chunks get your point across more quickly.
• Write logically. Then weave in (illogical) surprises if that approach seems beneficial.
• Relax - it shows in your writing or speaking. If you're not having fun, or you're not "in the flow", your readers can sense this in the sweep of your "thoughts on paper".
• Have fun - ditto.
• Be careful with humor. Why: what you may think is funny may be seen as offensive to someone else. Cultivate an empathy for the other person's situation. Have consideration for others and think through your flow through before writing a single word (or as you're writing, re-write as required). Humor "gone wrong" has a way of coming back to haunt you.
• One way to improve a written piece quickly is by applying the following simple rule: resist the urge to write in a "literary" style. Usually, to write in a "literary" language of yesterday is a really bad idea, especially if you're using irrelevant Latin phrases that most people do not understand or care about.
• However, there is one exception: if you're writing a document for use in the legal profession, or a similar field, verbose wordiness may be unavoidable, and even perhaps be deliberately cultivated and celebrated. Then, such a choice may make perfect sense - at least from the perspective of a lawyer.

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