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11.14.08 Are You Losing Readers?  By Michael Stelzner Ever been down a slide (maybe with your kids) and hit those little bumps every few feet? They slow your decent to a crawl and really make the slide no fun at all. Over time, I have discovered my writing often has bumps that must be "removed" to improve the reader's experience with my writing. Is your writing suffering from friction? What follows are three tips on how to tell if your work has bumps that are preventing reader's from reaching the end. Symptom 1: Does your work bore "you"? When you review your writing, do you find the process difficult or boring? If you're like me, you know when you've hit a home run. You can just tell. Things are sweet and the work just flows. Here's an example of writing without bumps: The perfect storm has arrived, greatly slowing the salesperson's path to success. Powered by an economic downturn and strengthened by highly informed prospects, salespeople face a nearly impenetrable wall of resistance. When times are tough, it's harder to sell. When times are tough, the sales team must deliver. One proven technique involves building relationships with prospects. However, gaining rapport often takes time and, sometimes, travel-two luxuries that are no longer an option. Add the reality of budget cuts facing most businesses, and breaking through to prospects becomes harder. If salespeople are not able to quickly nurture relationships, their ability to build a valuable pipeline of opportunity is greatly hindered. These are the opening paragraph's from a project I recently crafted. Are they perfect? No, but I can tell you this. I spend many days crafting those lines until they were smooth. Symptom 2: Are there too many disjointed concepts? As writers, we often get the feeling we must include "it all." This often means that when we find some great stuff in a few articles and we have some interesting factoids that came from interviews, somehow we must force everything to "fit." The K.I.S.S. principle applies real well here (that means 'keep it simple stupid'). Always aim for simplicity over your desire to make everything fit. Remember, writing is a linear journey for your reader. Just like the slide, all the sections must connect without any holes that the reader will drop through. Here's an example of how concepts can be linked into one clean slide: For salespeople selling costly solutions, the sales cycle will likely stretch longer during an economic downturn. This means more prospects must be contacted to fill the sales funnel. It also means that building trusted relationships will become more important. However, making connections will be harder. "During tough times, prospects feel like they're in a small boat floating on a big sea. Economic forces beyond their control are impacting their ability to move toward their goals. Their focus is to avert disaster and keep afloat, not build new relationships," said Jill Konrath, author of Selling to Big Companies. Notice how a few concepts have been weaved together:
Symptom 3: Do your peers/clients resist providing you feedback? Sometimes the best criticism is silence. When you do not hear back from people, it's kinda safe to assume they have problems with your work and just don't want to break the news to you. I've been down this road hundreds of times. And every time I do not hear back from an important client, it always has to do with some issue with the work (not always my fault grant you). So if you find it hard to get feedback, that's a big red flag that your work "needs work." Your thoughts? I'd like to hear from you? What are some other ways you can detect friction in your work? What do you think about these ideas? Comments About the Author: Visit http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/ for extensive resources on crafting compelling white papers and applying creative marketing tactics. Michael A. Stelzner is the author of the new book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and has written nearly 100 white papers for companies such as Microsoft, FedEx, Motorola, Monster and SAP. |
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