(I’m not alone in thinking this – no less than POTUS himself agrees!) 4. The more reading you do, the more you stretch the empathy muscle you need to flex when it’s time to get inside the head of your target audience. Learning about other people’s lives through nonfiction or getting inside the heads of characters different from you in fiction is a practice in empathy. Quick side note: this is something else that reading helps with. The more you understand about your target audience – their wants, needs, concerns, values, interests – the easier it will be attain the level of empathy needed to write effectively for them. Or even better, a conversation with someone that’s in my target audience. One of the greatest gifts I can come across in my research as a freelance content writer is a blog post with members of my target audience offering up their opinions in the comments, or a LinkedIn group where the people I’m writing for are active participants in the discussions. That means understanding your audience –getting inside their head to figure out what they’re thinking and the kind of topics and writing they respond to – is an extra step that quality content writers have to make and a skillset in and of itself. My values aren’t necessarily the same as theirs. My interests aren’t always the same as my audience’s. The golden rule we’re taught as kids is flawed because how I want to be treated isn’t always how other people do. It seems simple to say that different people see the world differently, but in practice it feels unnatural to us. Actively work to empathize with your target audience.Įmpathy requires work. And the results won’t end up any better for the extra trouble that goes into it. Unless I don’t do enough research, then the writing is like extracting teeth – slow and painful. I spend more time on research than I do on writing. ![]() The first step to every writing project (unless it’s on a subject you already know inside and out) has to be spending time on research. Well, you can, but it will be needlessly difficult and come out sounding like BS (cause that’s what it will be). ![]() You can’t write about something you don’t know about. Gaining a clearer picture of what you like to read will help you shape your own voice as a writer and replicate what works so well when other writers do it. Spending time with the work of great writers is how you learn what kinds of words and sentence structures work well together, and what kind of language and writing styles feel awkward, haughty, or needlessly obtuse. Fiction, non-fiction, magazine articles, blog posts – it’s more important that you read anything you can find that’s by good writers who use language well than it is that you read things that are in the format you’ll be writing in. Reading the type of writing you’re doing – just be a prolific reader all around.
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