Break through the noise online and communicate clearly by writing to your audience and adapting your message to your medium.
The online world is renowned for short attention spans, suspicion and distrust, and distractions at every turn. Despite lots of fuzzy talk of digital communities, the online communicator finds more distrust when first meeting people because normal communication cues that we rely heavily upon, such as tone, volume, and accent of voice, eye contact, body language, clothing and accoutrements, are absent. The online communicator must work doubly hard to keep – and hold – the attention of their reader.

Here are some surefire tips to keep your reader engaged:

1. Know your audience – an oldie but a goodie! What sings to one audience croaks miserably to another. Advertising writing needs to appeal to the broadest possible audience so stay away from words like ‘blessing’, ‘vibration’, ‘resonate’, etc.
2. Know your medium. There are places for detailing your credentials, but a banner ad or Tweet isn’t it. Think about font size, character limits, word or sentence cut-offs and cull, cull, cull.
3. Put the reader first. Make it clear first up how what you do will benefit the reader before going into details.
4. Use real words. Apart from the obvious Americanisation of our language (no, that is not an acceptable word!), look to use simpler, clearer words when possible. Avoid weasel words at all costs! Examples include ‘solution/s’, ‘innovative’, ‘going forward’, ‘live’ (what else am I suppose to do?)
5. Use present continuous tense. Present tense, used appropriately, is more engaging.
6. Direct readers with directives. After all, you want them to attend a yoga class, book a massage, naturopathic consultation or whatever. So use ‘Enjoy’, ‘Come visit’, ‘Book’, etc, and give all necessary info for them to do so.
7. Put the most important first. Fashion your writing like a newspaper article – the first sentence is a hook with the most appealing details. Subsequent sentences colour in the story with more crucial info first, and further background following. It is designed to be culled from the bottom up.
8. Check your rhythm. Language has rhythm which becomes clear when you read aloud. You will hear when a sentence is disjointed or back-to-front, when a short sentence is required, when ‘which’ or ‘that’ is more appropriate and when and when not to punctuate with commas or the much-maligned semi-colon.

Last month I wrote about my daily job Tweeting. I used to take a rather dim view of this as an expression of 140 characters didn’t seem like ‘real’ writing. But Jane Caro, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival last week, pointed out how her advertising copywriting background had given her great discipline in writing – most noteably because the audience is ambivalent or actively disinterested.

My first professional writing job was as webmaster of a major whitegoods company. Trying to make dishwashers, dryers and vacuum cleaners sound interesting was a challenge; one of my first story leads on washing machines languished for months on end. The story got written eventually – I just needed a hook to make washing clothes sound like an engineering intrigue.

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