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Child

As a blogger, your job is to maximize reader attention. This is a job that might not be quite as hard as you might think.

What it really comes down to is thinking like a child.

For one, small children speak in wants and desires. When they try to make a point, they spit it out. To say this another way, children are delightfully blunt because they don’t know any better.


At The Top Of Your Lungs

How does this translate to your writing?

When building a post, realize that you need to hand your reader “the point” right off the bat. The first two or three sentences will determine whether they take the time to read the rest of your post. If you don’t establish some connection with the reader in the length of time it takes them to get through your first paragraph, you’ve lost them.

The next lesson that burgeoning bloggers can pick up from little children is that children are loud.

When they want you to know something, they shout it at the top of their lungs. As a writer, you need to reach down deep and learn to scream. Whenever there is a detail that you think readers should pay attention to, set it off from the rest of the text. Make sure there is never any question as to where you want your readers eyes to fall.

There are several ways that you can do this, a few off the most common are –

  • Bullets
  • Line Breaks
  • Bold

These may seem like bits of typographical fluff, but they are absolutely critical for your reader and can mean the difference between a brilliant but unreadable waste of publishing space and a true masterpiece.


Dark And Stormy Nights

Your final lesson can be taken from a child’s Crayon Box, learn to sharpen your points.

Young writers are the masters of what literary critics call Purple Prose. What is Purple Prose? This classic example from literatures past should do well to explain the concept,

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Often, we try so hard to try to sound clever in our writing that we move from trying to deliver useful information to our readers, to writing little love letters to ourselves.

Listen, this is important, no matter how clever you believe you are, chances are that only about 50% of the world will agree with your assessment. Unless you have good reason to, don’t rely exclusively on your wit to turn a mediocre piece of prose into something worth reading.

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