No ‘Pat yourself on the back for choosing us’
“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.… Read the full article
Ann Wylie’s blog of writing tips
How to turn features into benefits
Lead with the benefit, substantiate with the feature
I once reviewed an article for a company’s sales force with the headline:
Extraordinary customer experience: Be a customer advocate.
… Read the full articleHow to craft reader-centered writing
Use you for all audiences, channels
You. It’s a power tool of communications.
The second person increases readability, boosts opens and clickthroughs and is the most retweeted word in the English language.… Read the full article
Top organizations use reader-centric approach
High performers focus on readers 71% of the time — IABC UK study
Seventy-one percent of high-performing organizations focus their messaging on audience’s point of view.… Read the full article
Writer centered vs. reader centered writing
Stop We-We-ing on reader
It feels so good to talk about ourselves.
Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read the full article
What is reader-centered writing?
Avoid Institutional Narcissism
Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.… Read the full article
How to craft reader-focused writing
Stop it with the ‘At XX, we …’ construction
At Wylie Communications, we believe that writers should write and that approvers should check the facts and leave the headlines alone.… Read the full article
Learn reader-centered business writing from Dale Carnegie
Take a tip from the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People
I was coaching a communicator for a California health insurance plan the other day.… Read the full article
What’s the impact of human-interest stories?
Show readers one person — not 1,001
Quick! Would you rather spend $10 million to save 10,000 lives from a disease that caused 15,000 deaths a year, or save 20,000 lives from a disease that killed 290,000 people a year?… Read the full article
Use WIIFM marketing to persuade
Focus on what the reader wants
If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?
One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.… Read the full article