Do you think that writing killing posts is an art? To some extent, it is. But it’s more about skill and technique especially if we are talking about academic writing, copywriting, but even fiction writing requires from you following some rules.
If you feel that writing is too hard for you, never give up. There are many of those who also thought like that but after trying these techniques, they understood that writing could be mastered. They will help you influence the readers better, as you will find proper approaches to using words in your writing.
All these techniques have been approved and recommended by Harvard linguists, so you may be sure that they will work for you.
Grow your vocabulary
According to The Economist research, an average English-speaking adult knows around 25,000 words. Sounds impressive, isn’t it? But you definitely never use all these words in your daily life. You come across them in books, newspapers, on TV and radio. This is the so-called passive vocabulary.
A kid of 4 knows only 4,000 of words, while the child of age 8 knows twice more. A person keeps growing the vocabulary throughout all his life. This is an unstoppable process. It ends only when a person gets old and starts to forget things.
An extensive passive vocabulary is the first step to growing your active vocabulary and start to use new words and expressions in your speech. So how to grow it?
Read more fiction
Read some industry articles and researches
Read thesaurus
Create the list of synonyms and antonyms
Try to use each new word at least several times in your writing
Create images, not sentences
When you read a book, you see not the words, but the images. This is the effect that you need to reach with your writing.
This is not an easy task, but you definitely need to master this technique if you want to influence your readers. If you want to practice in that, write some horror stories as they work perfectly to work on the skill to create images with words.
Another thing to consider is to talk to your reader like you are talking to your friend. In most cases, writing sounds artificially: too many strange words, too many clusters and constructions, and too many grammatically correct sentences. However, we never speak like that in a real life, and that only prevents from creating images in the mind of your reader.
Never be too clever
People do not like to feel dumb. If you write something, make sure that the audience understands that. This rule is equally applied to writing literature review template and a piece of fiction. Just imagine the situation that you start to read an article, but every message is too complicated for you. Will you continue to read it? Will you share it on Facebook?
If you need to add some complicated things to your writing, make sure that the audience will understand them. If you have any doubts, it will be better to explain this idea to the readers. In this way, you will establish a proper connection and trust with your audience.
Even if you write some article to an industry magazine, you are to be sure that every single person that may read this text will understand everything here.
At this point, we may also speak about your audience. If you write for a certain group of people, it’s easier to find the ideas that they will definitely understand. Therefore, it’s always better not to write for everyone, as there is no topic that will be interesting to every single person.
Guide your reader
When writing, you may forget that your readers know nothing about your intentions and the bigger idea that stands behind your writing. Therefore, you should remember to provide information step by step and explain how everything is interconnected.
Many would ask how to guide the reader if you are writing a suspense or thriller story. Here, the same rule is applied. But you don’t need to reveal all the truth from the very beginning, aren’t you?
You should become a guide to your readers. If you don’t want to tell something to them, just don’t do that, but build your story in such a way, these things will appear later. Never leave questions without answers, until you become a well-known writer who can do anything in his texts.
Read promo materials, watch ads
It does not matter what kind of writing you are working, if you need to know how to influence readers, you are to read promotional texts of the biggest brands. Just check a famous Volkswagen ‘Think small’ advertisement. For more than 50 years it has been used as the best sample of texts that influence the readers.
Watch the Cannes Lions festival of creativity to understand how the most famous brands use texts and images to communicate with people.
We would recommend you to pay a precise attention how they use verbs in the slogans and texts. If you analyze any of the ads, you will notice that the number of verbs here exceeds the number of nouns. The matter is that a verb is far stronger than a noun and it helps to provoke a real action.
As you have already noticed, many of writing techniques are connected with psychology an understand how a person thinks. If you are pretty interested in how to influence people, don’t lose a chance to dig deeper into psychology. You will surely find answers to your questions and will get to know how to communicate with people.
If you want to check how these techniques work, just start to use them for the next text that you will write. Master them with every single piece of writing, and soon you will notice that you are close to be called a pro writer!
Lori Wade is a freelance content writer who is interested in a wide range of spheres from education and online marketing to entrepreneurship. She is also an aspiring tutor striving to bring education to another level like we all do. If you are interested in writing, you can find her on Twitter or Google+ or find her on other social media. Read and take over Lori’s useful insights!
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