Today pretty much everyone has information overload. So many different ‘voices’ compete for our attention that we only have time to give each one a fraction of our time. TV, email, direct mail, social media, txt msgs, personalised digital adverts. All trying to tell us or sell us something.
There are only about 18 ‘usable’ hours – in my day, at any rate. Which turns life into a blur of ‘headlines’ designed to give us the core of the message in a nutshell. But writing to grab attention has two pitfalls that are well worth watching out for.
Pitfall #1 – the little boy who cried wolf
Firstly, hyperbole. This creates inflation in the currency of words – it simply devalues them.
So why does this happen? Because people think the best way to get people’s attention is to SHOUT LOUDER!!! So now an ordinary soldier – just because he’s doing his job in Afghanistan – is ‘incredibly brave’. But how brave does that make the hero who wins a VC? Mega-brave? Squillionically brave? Because just being brave doesn’t cut it any more.
Or, when weather forecasters predict that overnight temperatures will fall from +4C to -2C, they now have to ‘plummet’. Yet last winter some places sank from 0C to -22C… and there were no words left to describe the ‘Siberian’ magnitude of the drop! They’d all been used up.
Pitfall #2 – the wrong end of the stick
It’s all too easy to give the wrong impression to someone with a ‘snapshot’ attention span. Even if there’s no actual headline, we create our own summary based on what we see or hear in the first few seconds.
This second pitfall is often exploited by sales-hungry media, who intentionally leave people with the wrong end of the stick. Because we don’t have the time or attention span to process the information in full, we easily miss the real point and jump straight to the wrong conclusion. Great for ‘hysteria mongers’. But lousy for those of us trying to convey serious messages.
For example, finishing a weather forecast with ‘slight chance of snow on Northern hills’ quickly becomes ‘snow set to hit UK next week’ both in our minds and in the more sensationalist media. And this when the main story is actually about the weather ‘still remaining unseasonally mild for most of Britain’.
The point is this: when we get careless about our language and fail to really emphasise the right messages, we risk miscommunicating. After all, your message is not what you say, it’s what the other person understands.
So given the cacophony of voices and messages we’re all hit with daily, it’s every writer’s job to make sure what they say is clear, interesting, accurate and relevant to their audience.
How to avoid these pitfalls?
Tune in for part 2 next week to find out…
Tags: creative copywriting, language, social media
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