Persuasive writing

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

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

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

Steal from this What’s In It For Me example

‘Say goodbye to the 60-hour workweek’

You know that the topic is never the topic: The reader is the topic.

You’ve acknowledged that readers don’t care about “us and our stuff”; they care about themselves and their needs.… Read the full article

What’s the effect of statistics in persuasive writing?

Reframe the data to improve decision-making

People in one study rated a disease that kills 1,286 people out of every 10,000 as more dangerous than one that kills 24.14% of the population (Yamagishi, 1997).… Read the full article

Promises, promises

We want to act consistently with our commitments and values

Social scientist Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues asked potential voters on the eve of an election to predict whether they would vote and why.… Read the full article