11

Aug

How to Attract Readers to Your Work

We want people to read our work. Otherwise why write in the first place? Be it a Facebook post, article, short story, or something else, we hope to get approval from the reader. You, the freelance writer has something to share and a voice to be heard but please make sure your content is interesting. The last thing you want to do is send your reader to sleep. Unless  you have written a relaxing meditation, in which case bravo!

Here are some tips to keep your writing interesting.

Be concise. Don’t use twenty words when ten words will do. Don’t labour your point just to get to your desired word count. You have more leeway in a poem or piece of fiction to be creative with your wording but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move on to the next plot point sooner rather than later. In an article stick to your theme. If your writing is about penguin migration you probably don’t need to have a whole section on polar bears. Use your words wisely and create pace in your writing. Staying still for too long just so you can impress the reader with your vocabulary will patronise and bore them.

Avoid information overload. In a piece of fiction you do not need to describe everything the protagonist does in the day. Don’t spend a long time describing the scenery, the contents of a sock drawer, or go overboard on explaining your character’s emotional state. Again, the less words you use, the better. The reader should be allowed to use their imagination instead of you doing all the work for them. In an article only use the information you need. When writing an article on the earth’s rotation around the sun you probably don’t need to go into detail explain the workings of the entire universe.

Watch your reader. Have a friend or family member read your work. If you begin to see them yawn, become distracted or collapse with exhaustion then you know your writing is not as gripping as you thought it was. Getting someone’s opinion on your work matters and you should try and get this before you send your work to the publisher.

Learn from your experience. Have your read anything that has bored you senseless? Was reading it a chore rather than a joy? Consider why that was. Was the theme not to your liking? Did the writer move too far way from the theme of the piece? Were you bombarded with facts? Were the sentences too long and filled with unnecessary vocabulary? Were the chapters too long? Could you not relate to the character or the writer? Similarly consider those pieces you found gripping and interesting. Chances are the reasons for this are the opposite to what I just described. Put yourself in the readers shoes.

I hope that you found this article relevant and interesting and you didn’t doze off midway through. I hope you have a good writing day!