Once you’ve found your focus and written your one-sentence story summary, use it.

A well-written summary statement can become a headline, deck or theme sentence. That summary communicates your idea clearly to your reader while it keeps you on track.

Here’s how some writers and editors have used summary sentences to make their points:

• What to buy when you have enough to give the very best: the theme sentence for Ingram’s magazine guide to luxury gift giving
• How to manage your newfound nest egg: the theme sentence for a mutual fund company’s marketing magazine article on how baby boomers should handle an inheritance
• Build new networks, reach real people, master social media: the theme sentence for PRSA’s 2009 Digital Impact Conference

“When you have that ‘one thing’ … that free offer, 20% discount or whatever … get it into your headline,” writes Nick Usborne, author of NetWords.

Use it … or your readers might lose it.

Test for focus.

Finally, make sure every paragraph — indeed, every sentence, every phrase, every word — in your piece works together to support your theme. To test this, reread your copy with your focus in mind.

With each paragraph, don’t just ask, “Does this paragraph work?” Also ask, “Does this paragraph work to further my focus?”

You define your focus more by what you leave out than by what you put into your story. So if a phrase or sentence doesn’t pass the test, take it out.

That’s focus.

The post Make your key point in writing appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Years ago, I ran across this passage Stephen Schiff wrote about Australian film director Fred Schepisi for The New Yorker:

Later, I interviewed a startup president whose gestures reminded me of Schiff’s Schepisi. I noted the entrepreneur’s hand movements and wrote this lead:

It’s definitely not Schiff — today, I shudder at the verb move — but it’s a whole lot better than it would have been without Schiff.

Don’t just read as a reader.

To model the masters, make sure you’re not just reading as a reader.

Readers read for information and entertainment. Writers read for information and entertainment, too. But they also read for something else: technique.

Another writer might introduce you to a new way of crafting a headline, mastering a metaphor, structuring a story or describing gestures.

How do you read as a writer? Every time you read your favorite books or a piece of creative writing you love, focus on technique, not just the story. You’ll learn to read for writing, not just for pleasure and information.

How do you separate your reader from your writer so you can see the technique?

• Move from your pleasure-reading spot. I do my writer-reading on planes and at my desk. I read as a reader on my couch or in bed. Read the book or other piece in the right spot.
• Before you start reading, gather the right tools. Reading like a writer used to take highlighters, pencils and sticky notes. Now I use my Kindle’s clippings and notes features to capture great passages and write myself notes about them.
• Don’t get swept away. The problem with reading as a writer is that when you read the good stuff, you can get lost in the prose. When you feel this happening, force yourself to snap out of it and focus again on technique.

I never would have remembered Schiff’s passage when I needed it if I’d read it only as a reader. But because I had my writer hat on — because I noticed and studied the technique — I was able to take Schiff’s approach into my toolkit.

Create a clip file.

While you’re reading, look for passages to save and study. Every time you hear yourself saying, “I wish I’d written that,” “that” goes into your clip file.

The result will be an archive of tantalizing twists of phrase, powerful plays on words and stunning snippets of storytelling. Then, when you need to write a creative passage, you can dip into your clips and riff off of one of your favorites.

One of the passages in my clip file is:

When I invited participants in a workshop to model that passage, one wrote:

In another workshop, a P.R. agency’s accountant — the accountant! — modeled that passage to come up with this sentence:

If an accountant (did I mention it was the accountant?!) can come up with that passage, imagine what you can do!
___

Source: Stephen Schiff, “A Cinematic Gallant,” The New Yorker, Dec. 20, 1993, p. 60

The post How do you read like a writer? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Online readers read shallow and deep, according to The Stanford Poynter Project: Eye Movement on the Internet, a study by Stanford University and The Poynter Institute.

So how can you give your in-depth “divers” enough information without overwhelming your casual “surfers”?

“The Internet is for everybody,” write Daniel A. Cirucci and Mark A. Tarasiewicz of the Philadelphia Bar Association. “It’s for the 30-second reader, the three-minute reader, the 30-minute reader and even the three-hour junkie.”

So how do you serve all these groups?

Write for three audience groups.

Present each message for:

• Lookers, who may give you 10 seconds. Get these folks’ attention with a sharp headline and large image.
• Skimmers, who may give you 30 seconds. Reach them through display copy: headlines, decks, subheads, links and bold-faced lead-ins, for instance.
• Readers, who may give you 2 minutes. These folks may read the paragraphs.

Writing for the Web author Crawford Kilian calls them:

• Viewers, “those looking for entertainment, who think dancing boloney is fun”
• Users, “those who go to the web to get information they need for specific purposes”
• Readers, “those who are willing to put up with poor screen resolution so that they can actually read something that interests them”

And branding guru Bob Killian suggests writing for three groups:

1. Quals, or people who just want to hear your brand story plus maybe one proof point. They make up 86% of your human audience, Killian estimates, and 86% of your best prospects, as well.

“When they land on your home page, they’ll give you 4.5 seconds to make clear we-make-widgets-that-wiggle, and we-ship-globally-in-24-hours. (One defining story, one meaningful differentiator),” he writes. “If the first paragraph is ten lines long, they bail out. If you layer on 10-reasons-why, they … bail out.”

2. Quants, or folks people who also want to know your proofs and processes.

Quants “will read the nutrition chart on the peanut butter jar, read the prospectus, read the insurance policy, and so on,” Killian writes.

“They want more than your story; they want drill-down data about ingredients, processes, testimonials, proof statements of any kind – they’ll even sit still for 10 reasons why. These data points can’t be ignored since they are 14% of your human visitors.”

3. Bots, or search engine robots. They’re looking for the same level of detail as the Quants.

How do you reach all of these folks?

Write shallow, deliver deep.

For the web, you may need to write shorter, making each web page as tight as possible. But you also need to deliver longer pieces for your deep divers.

“Open with kernels for the 30-second reader,” write Cirucci and Tarasiewicz. “Break to bits for the three-minute reader. Branch to detail for the 30-minute reader. Link to verbal and visual feasts for the three-hour junkie.”

As Eric Morgenstern, president and CEO of Morningstar Communications, counsels, offer your readers:

• USA Today level
• Wall Street Journal level
• Harvard Business Review level

Let them choose.

Or, if you, like I, are more inclined to favor a bacon analogy, think of these layers as:

• Amuse bouche
• Appetizer
• Entree

Or, as one PR pro (whose name I’ve lost) put it:

• Bite
• Snack
• Meal

For an executive speech, for instance, you might offer:

• A headline and summary blurb on the homepage
• A one-page summary of speech highlights
• The full text of the speech
• The speech in streaming audio and video

Visitors can surf as shallowly or dive as deeply as they prefer.

“There’s a story to make obvious, and drill-down stuff to make available,” Killian says. “Never confuse the two.”

Move readers up the attention ladder.

The good news is, you may be able to move these folks up the ladder of attention. If the 10-second view is interesting enough, you might turn a looker into a skimmer. If the display copy delivers real value, you might turn a skimmer into a reader.

But even if you don’t move visitors up the attention ladder, you need to reach each group where they are. You need to write for all of your readers.

The post Skimming, scanning and close reading appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Pull quotes — aka callouts, breakout quotes or pullout quotes — are “the print equivalent of a sound bite,” according to the authors of The Newsletter Editor’s Desk Book

Actually, I think they’re more like movie trailers. They show just enough of the best stuff to entice readers to buy a ticket for the full show.

And that’s the power of a provocative pull quote. If it’s juicy enough, it can convince someone who’s already decided to skip the story to give it another chance.

Pull quotes increase reading and more.

Why callouts? Because they:

1. Increase reading

In 2004, two Swedish researchers used an eyetracking lab to find out how readers view elements like callouts. After tracking 26 readers as they viewed 34 Nordic newspaper pages, the researchers found that pull quotes pull readers into the article. Specifically, readers:

• Viewed stories with callouts before those without
• Read the callouts, usually right after they read the headline

2. Boost communication

In a survey of academic research on pull quotes, two professors at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill report that readers:

• Better understand the important parts of a story when pull quotes draw their attention to important information
• Are persuaded by the viewpoints represented in the callouts
• Remember more information from vehicles that use more callouts
• Find channels more enjoyable and readable if they use more callouts

Plus, pull quotes make messages more memorable, according to David Ogilvy’s research. “They are above average in recall tests,” he wrote in Ogilvy on Advertising.

3. Multiply clicks

One blogger saw 800 clicks on a single tweetable quote, reports Kevin Lee of Fast Company

4. Make your message look easier to read

Pull quotes break up the text, providing visual relief. And if it looks easier to read, more people will read it.

How to write an effective pull quote

To make the most of this power point on your page:

1. Choose the most provocative point in the story.

What’s your movie trailer? What’s going to transform committed nonreaders into readers?

When my team writes these design elements for our health care system clients, we don’t focus on the moment Grandpa came home well. Instead, we focus on the most dire moment in Grandpa’s illness:

“It felt like somebody stuck a knife in me and kept turning it.”

Remember: Your callout doesn’t have to be a quote. If it’s not, drop the quotations marks.

2. Use “tweetables.”

Tools like ClickToTweet present important quotes visually and increase clicks and shares.

3. Keep the pull quote in context. 

Callouts carry persuasive weight, so make sure they reflect the point you’re trying to make.

4. Place pull quotes carefully. 

To avoid frustrating readers looking for the quote in the text, place these graphic elements:

• Near the quote in the text
• Before the quote appears in the in text
• In the same order that the quotes appear in the text

“The goal is to draw readers into your pages and to sell them on what’s ahead,” writes John Brady, “not to make them feel like they are watching a re-run.”

5. Keep pull quotes short. 

Limit it to 10 to 20 words or two to four lines. Even better: Bring it in at under 280 characters to encourage tweeting.

“The long-winded pull quote is more likely to turn off readers than sell them on the story,” Brady writes. “Short quotes often look like an eye chart when they dribble down a page; long quotes create a dense-pack look after four lines. In both instances, readability is endangered.”

6. Don’t reveal the ending. 

“Pull quotes that give away the ending are counterproductive,” Brady writes. “As editorial marketing devices, pullquotes are intended to keep the reader in the story right to the last paragraph. Most readers still like to believe in Santa’s clauses. They want to discover what’s under the editorial tree for themselves.”

Finally, don’t drop the pull quotes. These power tools are far too valuable for communicators to ignore.

___

Sources: John Brady, “The Power of Pull Quotes,” Folio:, Nov.1, 2005

Jana Holsanova and Kenneth Holmqvist, “Looking at the Net News: Eye Tracking Study of Net Paper Reading,” Mediekulturer (Stockholm), 2004, pp. 216-48

Rhonda Gibson, Joe Bob Hester and Shannon Stewart, “Pull Quotes Shape Reader Perceptions of News Stories,” Newspaper Research Journal, March 22, 2001

The post How to use pull quotes and why appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Web visitors spend 74% of their time on the first two screens, just 26% on all remaining screens, according to the Nielsen Norman Group

So don’t blow your top.

To reach mobile web visitors up top, communicate the gist of the message in the first four elements of the web page:

1. Headline

Tell the story, don’t tell about the story. “Hallmark doubles profit-sharing contribution,” for instance, not “Benefits changes announced.”

And don’t even get me started on label headlines: “Benefits changes” is not a headline.

Before:

Preventing and declaring conflicts of interest

This buries the topic behind 25 characters worth of –inging words. Plus, it’s unclear: Who’s preventing? Who’s declaring?

After:

Conflicts of interest: How do you handle?

This moves the topic to the top and clarifies who’s responsible.

2. Deck.

Deliver a secondary angle for news stories and a summary for benefits and feature stories. Don’t drop this essential element: 95% of web page visitors look at the deck.

Before: The writer dropped the deck, missing 25% of her chance to get the word out within the top four elements of the story.

After:

Conduct all your business ethically with our new policy

The new deck adds the benefit to the readers and introduces the new policy.

3. Lead

Show, don’t tell. Leads that illustrate the point with concrete material like stories bring the point to life for readers. And they draw 300% more readers and 520% more reading, according to a split test by Alex Turnbull and the Groove HQ.

Before:

I think I’d read 520% more of this if it were 15% more colorful.

After:

Just a light touch of detail makes this piece more engaging, puts the reader in the story and brings the message to life.

4. Nut graph

Put the story into a nutshell in the second paragraph. Don’t drop the deck: 95% of web page visitors read the deck, so it’s a key element for communicating to skimmers and other nonreaders in a hurry.

Before:

I’m sure this is all true, but it doesn’t define the story and move it forward. I’d consider this background rather than a nut graph.

After:

Here, we make the story snappier and get that policy link up among the first four elements.

Now test it.

Now email those first four elements to yourself and test them on your smartphone.

Can you get the gist of the story from the first four elements? If so, congratulations! You pass the 1-2-3-4 test.

The post Get content above the fold on mobile appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..