We all know that the best writing (blog posts, newsletters, books, etc.) feels like the writer is speaking directly to us, the readers. In this post, I’m going to show you how you can do this in your own writing. I am going to talk to you about the 3 steps to easier and more engaging writing.
As with most writing-related things, it is a skill that can be learned. The steps we’ll cover are as follows:
- Get to know your ideal reader,
- Anticipate your reader’s questions, and
- Use those questions to structure your writing.
When you follow these three simple steps, your writing will be easier to produce and have a greater impact on your readers.
Ideal reader
The first thing to know about your ideal reader is that it is one fictional (or hypothetical) person.
‘But I want lots of people to relate to my writing!’, I hear you exclaim. No worries; they will, but only if you write in a way that lets them do that.
When we try to address a broad audience, we end up watering down our message so much that it doesn’t really connect with anyone. However, when we write to one ideal reader, our writing comes across as more conversational, approachable, and relatable.
For example, my book, There’s a Book in Every Expert (that’s you!), is addressed to a female business coach who wants to write a book. Despite that, it has helped male life coaches, female accountants, and male and female university lecturers with their writing.
Now that we’ve established that you need one ideal reader, you need to get to know her (or him or them). This process is a bit like those ideal client exercises you’ve likely done – for a good example, have a look at Gemma Storey’s ‘Why You Need to Know Your Ideal Client’.
The most important thing for most writers is getting a clear understanding of how much your reader already knows about what you’re writing about.
If you assume she knows more than she does, she’ll be frustrated by your writing. If you assume she knows less than she does, she’ll be bored. When you pitch your writing just right, she’ll be fascinated!
Getting to know your ideal reader is a topic that needs a post all its own – and I’ve written such a post. You can read it here: ‘Who Is Your Ideal Reader?’
As you’ll see, the post is about getting to know your reader for your book, but the advice I give there applies equally well to bloggers and newsletter writers.
Answer your reader’s questions
Now that you know your reader, it’s time to use that knowledge to make your writing easier. First, you need to state the main point you want to make in your post, newsletter, or book in a single, simple sentence. That’s called your statement of argument (or for any Americans reading this, your thesis statement). You need to make sure your statement of argument is something your ideal reader is interested in and that you pitch it at the right level to connect with her where she is right now.
Then, list all of the questions your reader might have about that statement. Finally, delete or combine questions as needed until you get a manageable number for what you’re writing.
To see how this works, we’ll look at how I used the method for this post. My statement of argument was this: ‘When you write directly to your ideal reader, your writing is easier and it has a greater impact on your readers’.
Look back at the introductory section, and you’ll see how I used my statement of argument to lay out what I was going to discuss in the post.
My list of questions included:
- What is an ideal reader (IR)?
- How do you get to know your IR?
- Why only one IR?
- What about everyone else who reads my stuff?
- How does knowing my IR make writing easier?
- How do I focus my ideas?
- How do I use my IR to decide how to structure my writing?
This list could (and did) go on, but this is enough to make my point. As you can see, questions 1, 3, and 4 were combined in the section above (Ideal Reader), and question 2 is touched on there, but dealt with more fully in the post I linked to at the end of that section. Questions 5 and 6 are the focus of this section, while question 7 is the topic of the next section.
Other questions I listed and deleted were similar to those asked and answered in ‘Who Is Your Ideal Reader?’ I deleted them because they were beyond the scope of this post, and because I’d already addressed them in the linked post.
Put your questions to good use
The final step is to put the questions you keep into a logical order and answer them. In this post, it wouldn’t have made sense to discuss how to use your ideal reader to structure your writing before I’d explained what an ideal reader is.
Why? Because my ideal reader almost certainly isn’t familiar with the idea of the ideal reader (the first subsection of this post). Also, you need to know what you’re writing about before you can think about how to structure it (the second subsection of this post).
Thinking about these kinds of structural issues in the abstract can be hard. But when you’re looking at a simple list of questions and thinking through how you’d discuss them with a friend, it’s suddenly a lot easier!
If you need further support with your writing, click here to see how I can support you!
Bio
Published author and expert writing coach, Jennifer Jones has been helping people become happier, more productive writers since 2001. She trained to teach writing during her PhD at the University of California at Davis. She has taught at universities in the US and the UK, and now coaches consultants, coaches, and healers to write their credibility-building books. Jennifer’s book, There’s a Book in Every Expert (that’s you!), came out to rave reviews in 2020. When she’s not talking about writing, she can often be found researching and writing about Victorian medicine and popular culture.
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