Will word for food » Writing for the Web

It’s said that, when you’re in love, you think every song you hear is about you and your situation. Lyrics mean more. For me, regardless of my personal situation, the lyrics of Maxïmo Park have a resonance, as do those of Radiohead (mostly - I’m still yet to work out what “Push/Pull Revolving Doors” is about).

The same is true of certain books or films - we can often feel they’re talking directly to us as individuals, and there’s a great sense of comfort in that. We like to feel that we’re not alone in a situation - especially a difficult one - and even fiction can help. Whether it’s true or not, we like to think the author has experienced what we have, although you’ll often read interviews with authors expressing surprise about this phenomenon. So how does that have anything to do with writing for commercial audiences? How can you make a dull public sector case study resonate with people?

Know your audience

If you know your audience, you can tailor what you do to them a huge amount. It’s easier with a small audience, of course, and it’s easier still if you have a niche product or service - you can make certain assumptions about what your readers are going to be like. It also works with larger audiences. Although we’d all love to think we’re very different, there are fundamental cultural similarities, morals and values we’ve grown up with and shared experiences we’re all shaped by. French social theorist Émile Durkheim called this the collective conciousness, and it has parallels with Jung’s collective unconsciousness - shared attitudes and behaviours which are basic aspects of being human, innate rather than learned.

The assumption I made in that last paragraph - that we’d all love to think we’re different - is an example of the sorts of assumptions you may be able to make. Assumptions are dangerous, of course, but you should be able to back them up with some facts, especially because - in the most part - your audience will be self-selecting. Only certain types of people will be using your website - because they’re interested in the product or service you offer - and you should target your language towards those people. If you can find out more about your readers - by doing a survey or encouraging feedback - so much the better, but always be aware that surveys are a passive way of finding out information and rely on a certain sort of person - active readers who are willing to engage - who may only form part of your audience. Incentivising data-gathering can help get more people to give you feedback, though, if you can afford it.

The assumptions you’re able to make can feel pretty specific, too; good use of language - which I’ll get on to in a moment - can help with this. We want to feel like we’re being spoken to directly; we want to feel that - although we’re individual - we’re not alone. And because of that we’ll read in to things how we want to.

Just be generic enough

So why do we always feel songs are about us when we’re in love? It’s because we want songs to be about us, and when we’re in an emotionally vulnerable state we want that even more. We look for meanings which aren’t necessarily there because we twist words to our situation. It’s how a lot of psychics “work” - they prey on the emotional state of the people who come to them and say very general things until they gather enough information to make (slightly) more direct points.

Of course, you can’t target your site only at people in love, but you can make your writing open enough in meaning to let people see their own meanings, and you can use shared experiences to make that even more powerful. Going back to the issue of songs with meaning, let’s take an example from Maxïmo Park - Books from Boxes:

You spent the evening unpacking books from boxes
You passed me up so as not to break a promise
Scattered polaroids and sprinkled words around your collar in the long run
Said you knew that this would happen

So who hasn’t unpacked books from boxes? Who hasn’t had a sense of melancholy caused by finding old photos? The sense of melancholia invoked by these particular shared experiences are reinforced by fairly generic - in fact, incredibly open - references to promises. Because I know what it feels like to unpack boxes - and because I’ve been in situations with promises and love and things - I make my own mental ties between the feelings and between unpacking and promises. In my life, these situations haven’t ever come together exactly like this - the emotions I get from this song are from events many years separate. But A big part of me wants to tie them up into one neat package which someone else has experienced.

We also relate songs and books and films back to the emotions going on around us when we first experience them. Visual imagery around an article - or descriptive language - can create these feelings or remind people of past situations and get a strong emotional response. If that’s what you’re after, pick the images you place with an article carefully to reinforce feelings in your writing. They may seem somewhat abstracted from the real focus of your writing, but the subtle cues they trigger will help with the emotional context.

How does this affect what you write? Well, you need to remember the following points:

• Know your audience - this will help you target experiences and context as well as the language and content
• Don’t rely too much on specific examples - the more specific your examples are, the less likely they are to resonate with a cross-section of your audience
• Allow your readers to make emotional connections - use loosely connected feelings invoked by events - leaving out some of the context will allow readers to make the connections they want to, based on their experiences, rather than trying to relate to something specific on your terms.

And to reinforce the lesson, and because it’s a beautiful song, here’s Maxïmo Park - enjoy:

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