“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Study after study shows that when you add interesting, concrete details to your message, people remember them — sometimes to the exclusion of less fascinating, more abstract ideas.

But the power to attract may also distract readers from your main idea. If your “seductive details” don’t illustrate your key points, they can:

• Draw attention away from more important ideas (Luftig & Greeson, 1983)
• Disrupt text processing (Garner, Gillingham & White, 1989)
• Cause readers to forget the important information while remembering the interesting stuff (Baird & Hidi, 1984)

“Interesting but unimportant information frequently disrupts the learning of more important ideas,” writes Suzanne Hidi, associate member, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science.

‘The seditious dealings of seductive details’

Indeed, say two researchers at Texas A&M University.

Ernest T. Goetz and Mark Sadoski reviewed the literature on “the seductive detail” and found these problems with that assumption.

So are readers being “bewitched by distracting details, bothered by incoherent text or bewildered by incomprehensible abstractions?” the researchers ask.

Not on your watch. Instead of adding irrelevant but colorful details, illustrate your important points with relevant concrete details. Make the important interesting, and people will remember your message — main points as well as colorful details — for far longer than if you bored them to death with important abstraction.

Avoid ‘Visual Vampires.’

Call these interesting but unimportant elements “Visual Vampires.” That’s PreTesting’s term for images that attract audience members in television ads but that don’t draw them to the product.

PreTesting is a Tenafly, N.J., company that gauges consumers’ reactions to ads by measuring their “saccadic” eye movements, or how fast their eyes vibrate.

Ads featuring men with wacky, red, pigtail wigs (Wendy’s), dogs wearing dentures (Citi) and an exotic woman stretching (Hormel) all grabbed attention. But they failed to keep it long enough to for viewers to read the copy or hear about the products.

Build an argument.

So take a tip from Hemingway. Ask, are your creative elements architecture, helping you build your argument? Or are they interior design, just putting wallpaper over your message?

If they’re interior design, they could be distracting readers from your key ideas. Instead, support your abstract, important ideas with concrete, interesting material.

Remember: It’s not enough to make your copy interesting. Our job is to, in the words of James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, “make the important interesting.”

___

Sources: Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Winter 1990, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 549-571

Kenneth Hein, “Beware of Visual Vampires, Warns Measurement Firm,” Brandweek, Nov. 26, 2007

The post Communicate, don’t decorate, for creative content marketing appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

After I presented a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop recently, an attendee pulled me aside. “The speeches I write are just 20 minutes long,” he said. “I can’t afford to make room for anecdotes, metaphors and wordplay.”

I told him he couldn’t afford not to make room for creative elements — that those may well be the only parts of his speech his audience listened to.

That conversation reminded me of an old joke among professional speakers:

“When should you use humor in a speech?” a young speaker asks an experienced orator.

“Only when you want to get paid,” the veteran answers.

The same thing is true for writers: When should you use creative material in your message?

Only when you want your audience to pay attention.

Attention is Job 1.

Grabbing attention is one of the four key responsibilities of a business communicator. After all, our job description is to get readers to:

• Pay attention to our messages
• Understand them
• Remember them
• Act on them later

And that takes creative story elements.

It’s true. Creative material:

1. Grabs attention.

Meet your Broca’s area — a small part of your brain located in the frontal lobe of your left cerebral hemisphere. It’s your body’s language control center.

You can thank your Broca’s area for helping you sort through the equivalent of 174 newspapers, ads included, that you and everybody else gets bombarded with each day — without having to process every word.

Remember that old Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson?

What we say to dogs: “Okay, Ginger! I’ve had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!”

What dogs hear: “Blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah.”

Your Broca’s area is Ginger: not paying much attention to most messages — until something really interesting comes along.

Well-worn phrases like “a rough day” are so familiar they don’t activate your Broca’s area. Plain old ‘splainin’ doesn’t do anything for it either.

But creative techniques like wordplay activate Broca’s area (PDF).

Want to cut through the clutter of competing messages (PDF)? Activate readers’ Broca’s area with wordplay and other creative techniques.

2. Keeps that attention longer.

Here’s a finding that will surprise absolutely nobody: Creative sentences encourage reading more than boring ones, according to 1986 research by Suzanne Hidi and William Baird.

Hidi and Baird studied creative sentences like these:

• Adult wolves carry food home in their stomachs and bring it up again or regurgitate it for the young cubs to eat — the wolf version of canned baby food.
• Thomas Edison became the most famous inventor of all time even though he left school when he was only 6 years old.
• A canary can also bluff by playing dead. A frightened canary may go limp in someone’s hand.

Here, in contrast, is the first sentence in the latest news release listed on BusinessWire right now:

Did you read to the end? Of course not.

And that’s the deal. Creative material keeps attention longer — throughout the passage or the piece and over time. Indeed:

• Ads with metaphors in the headline get read more completely than those with literal headlines, according to an archival study of 854 ads.
• Newspaper articles using the storytelling structure are more likely to pull readers across the jump that those using the inverted pyramid, according to research by the American Society of News Editors.
• A blog post with a creative lead drew 300% more readers and 520% more readingthan one with an abstract lead, according to an A/B test by Groove HQ.

Want people to read more of your message? Keep their attention with creative elements.

3. Makes readers’ brains light up.

Think of description as virtual reality:

• Describe a scent, and your readers’ primary olfactory cortexes light up.
• Describe texture, and you activate their sensory cortexes.
• Describe kicking, and not only do you stimulate their motor cortexes, but you stimulate the specific part of the motor cortex responsible for leg action.

“Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters,” reports Annie Murphy Paul in “Your Brain on Fiction” for The New York Times. “Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.”

Paul reports on new studies that show how description, metaphor and storytelling can make readers smell scents, feel textures, experience action — even understand others better.

But write abstractly — aka, the way we usually do in business communications — and readers’ brains remain dark.

Want to stimulate some brain activity around, say, your CEO’s latest strategy or that brilliant Whatzit you’ll be releasing later this month?

Creative material is the answer.

4. Makes people read more carefully.

A hand shoots up in my Art of the Storyteller workshop, where we’ve been talking about wordplay.

“But,” the communicator says, “don’t you risk confusing people with wordplay?”

Well, yes, I said. Yes, you do. And that’s part of the point.

When readers encounter wordplay, they first try on the literal meaning of the words. When that doesn’t work, they seek alternative meanings.

Same thing happens with metaphor.

Because readers spend extra time processing wordplay (PDF) and metaphor, they pay closer attention to your message, understand it more fully and remember it longer.

Some of the power of metaphor and wordplay, researchers believe, comes from readers’ delight in figuring out the right answer.

Call it the pleasure of the text. That pleasure may cause them to slow down and savor your message.

5. Gets readers to linger over your message.

Readers in one study read 479 words a minute on average. But they read only 394 words a minute — 18% more carefully — when reading the passages they most enjoyed.

“My purpose is to make what I write entertaining enough to compete with beer.”

Anonymous

In other words, they savored the copy, reading almost 18 percent more slowly. Call it ludic reading — from the Latin ludo, or “I play.”

Pleasure reading is a form of play, writes researcher Victor Nell, author of Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. He studied 245 subjects during six years to learn how people respond to writing they enjoy.

While he can’t say for sure why people read the passages they enjoy most more slowly, he thinks it’s because they move from skimming to savoring.

Researchers estimate that people can read as fast as 600 to 800 words a minute while still understanding each thought fully. (That’s known as “rauding” among reading experts.)

Often, though, people “bolt” the text, or just skim for an overview.

But when they come upon passages they enjoy, readers stop bolting and start paying closer attention to the copy.

So when should you use creative material? Only when you want your audience members to savor your message.

Are you using creative elements to draw attention to your message? Or are you trying to light up readers’ brains with the same old blah-blah-blah?

____

Sources: “Reading Creates ‘Simulations’ In Minds,” NPR, Jan. 31, 2009

Véronique Boulenger, Beata Y. Silber, Alice C. Roy, Yves Paulignan, Marc Jeannerod and Tatjana A. Nazir, “Subliminal display of action words interferes with motor planning: A combined EEG and kinematic study,” Journal of Physiology-Paris, Vol. 102, Issues 1–3, January-May 2008, pp. 130-136

Steven Cherry, “This Is Your Brain on Metaphor,” IEEE Spectrum, April 6, 2012

Michael Chorost, “Your Brain on Metaphors,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 1, 2014

Roger Dooley, “Your Brain on Stories,” Neuromarketing, Jan. 21, 2010

Steve Frandzel, “Metaphors Make Sens(ory Experiences),” The Academic Exchange, Emory University, May 11, 2012

Julio González, Alfonso Barros-Loscertales, Friedemann Pulvermuller, Vanessa Meseguer,  Ana Sanjuán, Vicente Belloch, and Cesar Avila, “Reading ‘cinnamon’ activates olfactory brain regions,” NeuroImage, May 2006

Wray Herbert, “The Narrative in the Neurons,” We’re Only Human, Association for Psychological Science, July 14, 2009

Simon Lacey, Randall Stilla and K. Sathian, “Metaphorically feeling: Comprehending textural metaphors activates somatosensory cortex,” Brain & Language, Vol. 120, Issue 3, March 2012, pp. 416–421

Raymond A. Mar, “The Neural Bases of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension,” Annual Review of Psychology, Vol. 3, 2011, pp. 103-134

Victor Nell, “The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure: Needs and Gratifications,” Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Winter 1988), pp. 6-50

Annie Murphy Paul, “Your Brain on Fiction,” The New York Times, March 17, 2012

Pradeep Sopory and James P. Dillard, “The Persuasive Effects of Metaphor: A Meta-Analysis,” Human Communication Research, July 2002

The post Why creative content marketing works appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

My crotchety neighbor likes to quote his favorite philosopher, Anonymous:

“If a man speaks in the forest, and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong?”

For communicators, the question is a little different. David Murray, executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association, says:

“If nobody hears your strategic messaging, does it make a sound?”

The biggest risk in communications is not that we might offend someone with creativity or write something that’s eye-rollingly goofy. The biggest risk communicators run is that we never get heard at all.

How do we engage people and get them excited about our content? The key is to make our content more creative.

Whatever type of content you’re creating — from long-form blog posts to teeny tiny social media updates, from content marketing pieces to speeches, from web pages to white papers — you’ll create more successful content when you make it creative.

200 years of research

In the early 19th century, German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart said that interest leads to understanding, learning and memory — and even inspires readers to learn more.

For nearly 200 years, researchers, philosophers and communicators have seen the link between interest and learning.

One of those researchers is Suzanne Hidi, associate member at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s Centre for Applied Cognitive Science. In “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” she presents a research review on how interest helps people learn.

Interesting copy, according to Hidi’s review of the literature:

• Encourages reading and improves comprehension (Hidi and Baird, 1986)
• Increases understanding (Bernstein, 1955)
• Aids in learning (Hidi and Baird, 1986; Shirey and Reynolds, 1988)
• Helps people remember (Hidi and Baird, 1988)
• Helps readers to come up with fuller, better and more creative responses (Bernstein, 1955)

And that, of course, will dramatically increase your business success.

Why creative content writing? Because creative content:

1. Grabs attention.

Our readers receive the data equivalent of 174 newspapers a day — ads included, according to a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication.

How do they sort through all of that incoming to select the tiny fraction of pieces they’ll actually read?

They ask what they’ll get out of it versus what they have to put into, according to communication theorist Wilbur Schramm’s Fraction of Selection Model. (Or “expectation of reward divided by effort required,” in Schramm’s words.)

One of the key rewards of reading is entertainment. That’s another reason a high-quality content strategy includes creative content writing.

2. Keeps attention.

Creative material also keeps attention — through the piece and over time.

“Make the important interesting.”

— James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly

That’s one reason the entertaining feature-style story structure outperforms the boring inverted pyramid in study after study.

That means the communicator’s job is to “Make the important interesting,” says James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.

3. Communicates better.

Some concepts you can only explain through creative writing techniques.

“Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.”

— Marshall McLuhan, communication theorist

For instance, former surgeon general C. Everett Koop once compared a sophisticated technique for correcting an undeveloped esophagus to “threading together two wet noodles in the bottom of an ice cream cone with your eyes closed.”

That’s a concept you can only communicate to a lay audience by using the creative technique of metaphor.

4. Enhances credibility.

People are more likely to believe information if it’s presented as an anecdote than if it’s presented as a number, according to Peg Neuhauser’s Corporate Legends and Lore.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

— Mark Twain

Why are stories more credible than statistics?

One reason is the Peer Principle of Persuasion: People connect with people. Readers find messages more readable, understandable and persuasive when you let a person stand for your point. That’s one reason human interest is so persuasive.

And why are statistics less credible than stories?

Your readers have learned not to trust every number they encounter. “There are three kinds of lies,” as Mark Twain said back in the day. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

5. Lingers longer in the readers’ mind.

People are more likely to remember creative content than boring content.

One reason, according to Neuhauser: People process just plain facts in one way — intellectually, it goes through their brain. But they process the creative technique of storytelling in three ways:

1. Intellectually
2. Visually
3. Emotionally

That’s three ways readers can tamp it into their minds … and three ways they call pull it up later, when they want to remember the story and its point.

6. Gets shared.

If you want your message to get shared, you need to give readers something worth sharing. People are likely to share humor, stories and other entertaining elements.

People are most likely to share information, according to research by Chadwick Martin Bailey:

• Because I find it interesting/entertaining (72%)
• Because I think it will be helpful to recipients (58%)
• To get a laugh (58%)

But when was the last time you had some friends over for a pitcher of your signature margaritas, and you all spent the evening batting around a few good statistics?

If you want people to share, give them something shareable.

7. Slashes burnout, improves performance.

Content writers enjoy creating content that’s entertaining more than hashing out the same, old Ws and H again and again. That means they’re more likely to stay engaged with their work when they’re flexing their writing skills.

That’s a win-win for employers as well as communicators.

8. Sells products, services, programs and ideas.

As midcentury adman David Ogilvy said:

“Nobody ever sold anybody anything by boring them to death.”

Want readers to buy your Whozit or Whatzit? Choose creative content writing.

Learn more about creative content writing.

Find out about:

• A creative process for coming up with better topic ideas and other concepts
• How to optimize creative content for search engines and real readers
• How to write with description, wordplay and other creative techniques

The post Why creative content writing is important appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

My grandma and namesake, Annie B. Vrana, was an Oklahoma farm woman and one of the most colorful people I’ve known. When she spoke, she painted pictures in your head.

What I didn’t know then that I do know now is that word pictures increase understanding. Because Grandma talked in pictures, we could literally “see” what she was saying.

Here are some of my favorite Grandmaisms. See how she made concepts concrete by turning ideas into things.

What’s wrong with this gene pool?

Now my sister, Lynn, is sounding a little like Grandma. Here are some of the colorful phrases she uses at work:

• Let’s hunt where the ducks fly.
• I did some quick napkin math …
• I’ll shake trees and see if I can get an answer.
• We need to brush out the hairballs on that poodle.

How can you make your communications clearer and more interesting by turning your ideas into word pictures?

The post Paint word pictures appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Some topics are hard to tackle. Brand guidelines, casual dress codes and safety, for instance, all come across as finger-wagging, nagging stories.

Unless communicators at the Workers Compensation Board of Alberta (WCB-Alberta) are doing the writing, that is. These folks write about safety daily and are great at finding creative ways to tackle this tough topic.

My favorite series to date: Safety and the movies. In this popular package, WCB-Alberta writers scour popular films for safety tips.

These excerpts are from “Safety and ‘The Hunger Games.'”

How can you use popular movies, TV shows and books
to make your point more creatively?

The post ‘Don’t light your clothing on fire’ appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

You could say that in Cleopatra’s time, women had few legal rights. Or you could say, as Stacy Schiff does in Cleopatra: A Life:

When it comes to writing concretely, lead by example. Add an example — an illustration or a “for instance” — to prove your point.

Why? Concrete examples like Darth Vader toothbrushes and Pepto-Bismol-slathered schnauzers change pictures in readers’ minds and move them to act.

Or, as my favorite philosopher, Anonymous, says, “A pint of example is worth a gallon of advice.” And as Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Prize-winning theologian, writes, “Example isn’t the main thing influencing others. It’s the only thing.”

For your inspiration, here are three more examples of examples from Cleopatra: A Life:

1. Paint a picture.

This passage shows the street life during Cleopatra’s day in a handful of concrete examples:

2. Bring personality to life.

This example gives readers better insight into a name from history books and plays:

And:

“Insatiable collector” says one thing. “Started a war for freshwater pearls” says something else again.

3. Illustrate culture.

And it’s one thing to say “a good Roman avoided Greek” and another to offer these examples:

Show, don’t just tell.

Example is one of more than 6 types of concrete material to try.

“If you really want to shake people out of their reverie and motivate them to sit up and take notice,” writes Sam Horn, author of POP! Stand Out In Any Crowd, “say those two simple words, ‘for example.’”

How can you make your point with example?

What questions do you have about using examples in your message?

The post Examples prove the rule appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..