Kiss and Shave Your Readers

I’ll let you into a secret — everyone can write.

But, to deliberately misquote a line from a Chris Rock skit, there’s people who can write, and then there’s writers.

Since the time of the dinosaurs, writing has been considered an elitist pursuit. There are scribes mentioned in the Bible — the keepers of the law — a job which (sort of) evolved into the dedicated letter writer — someone the unwashed masses used to send word to their equally illiterate family a few towns over.

Religion and modernisation continued to hamper literary progress. Priests and scholars would even write in Latin to ensure as few people as possible could understand their learned or holy warblings on…

Times have changed. Or have they? Academics still hide behind the complex and weird — scribbling away in their ivory towers using words like like ‘diegesis’, ‘hermeneutics’, and ‘phenomenology’ to deliberately confuse and baffle us mere mortals.

None of this helps. If the people we think of as ‘clever’ use big clunky words, then everyone who wants to sound clever will do the same, as sounding clever means using big clunky words. Apparently.

Bullshit.

Good writing is about drawing attention to the ‘thing’ you’re writing about; not the writing itself. It helps by understanding who you’re talking to so that you can say what you want to say in a way they’ll relate to.

Once you’ve got that down, there are two things you need to do to your readers.

You need to KISS them — Keep It Simple, Stupid (as the saying goes), or Keep Information Stupidly Simple (which I prefer).

You also need to shave them — with Occam’s Razor. By this I mean ‘explain things in the most straightforward way possible’. You don’t need to tell your readers everything. They’re smart enough to fill any gaps; as long as you set the context.

Readers aren’t stupid. But they need things to be explained clearly and concisely — so that they understand things instantly. That said, clarity doesn’t mean ‘bland’. Writing with personality is key to persuasion, especially in marketing.

If you can make your customers believe there’s a real person underneath all that branding, you’re more likely to make a connection. And ultimately, isn’t that what everyone wants?