My writing team had one of those tough assignments recently that only a geek like me can fully appreciate.

Our job: to transform technical medical text into a fascinating research report that patients, donors and neurointerventionalists alike can understand and enjoy. In some sections, superstar writer Dawn Grubb literally had to look up and define a term in every sentence.

But definitions and descriptions take you only so far. Sometimes it takes an analogy to fully explain technical topics to readers. So I was delighted to read this passage by Dawn:

Writing complex copy? Add an analogy.

Here’s how:

1. Ask your subject-mattter expert.

Sometimes, all you need to do to get a comparison is to ask. The question to ask to get a metaphor is “What’s it like?”

That’s the approach Roger von Oech, author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, recommends. His workshop participants ask:
“What’s it like?” to create metaphors for the meaning of life. Two of my favorites:

Life is like an unassembled abacus. It’s what you make of it that counts.

Life is like a maze in which you try to avoid the exit.

To help your subject-matter expert provide an analogy that anyone can understand, ask the question:

If you were explaining this concept to a class of third graders, what would you say it was like?

2.  Ask Google a question.

But what do you do when it’s just you and a ream of technical documents with no human expert in sight? That’s when Dawn and I turn to our best friend and research assistant, Google, for help.

Dawn started her search on neurointerventionalists by typing “What is brain mapping?” into the Google search box. The results took her to an almost poetic answer at How Stuff Works, one of my favorite Websites for defining, describing and comparing technical terms.

At How Stuff Works, you can learn enough about complicated processes and procedures — from LASIK surgery to liposuction, from cloning to currency — to be able to describe them in conversational terms. And, if you’re as lucky as Dawn was, you might find a good analogy there, as well.

3. Turn Google into a thesaurus.

Just type “define: term” into Google’s search box. You’ll get all the definitions of your terms that appear on the Web — and you just might get a free, bonus analogy.

For a blog post, I recently Googled “define: cochlear implant.” One result included this analogy:

The cochlear implant is often referred to as a bionic ear.

My lead for the blog post:

Think of a cochlear implant as a bionic ear.

4. Get a quick education online.

Once you’ve chosen your analogy, you need to develop it.

When I was developing a horse-racing analogy for a behavioral finance article in a mutual fund company’s marketing magazine, I needed a lot of help.

I turned to OneLook Reverse Dictionary and looked up horse-racing to brush up on the vocabulary. This tool lets you describe a concept to get a list of words and phrases related to that concept.

Then I looked at Wikipedia’s horse-racing page for a fast education on the topic.

Between these two resources, I found enough anecdotes and analogies, facts and phrases and images and ideas to develop extended analogies for several articles. Here’s one section of the final piece:

Find and develop your analogy.

Don’t have access to a subject-matter expert? That’s no reason not to add an analogy to make your technical topic easier to understand. Instead, use Google and other online tools to identify and develop analogies for your complex concept.

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While we talk a lot about what to write — More stories! Fewer words! Shorter sentences! — we don’t focus so much on how.

Most of us were never taught to write. We were taught instead to rewrite: how to spell, punctuate and use the right grammar. As a result, we try to do three things at once: Figure out what to write, write it and get it right. No wonder writing is so hard!

But if you’ll break your work up into three stages of the writing process and write step by step, you’ll write better, easier and faster. This process has saved me thousands of hours of writing time over the course of my career.

Are you ready to write better, easier and faster? Here are the three writing process steps:

I. Pre writing

Pre writing is where you get ready to write, or develop a plan for your story. This step includes everything you do to prepare to put the first word onto the page:

A. Research. You’ve heard the phrase “hog in, sausage out.” That means that what you get out of the grinder will be no better than what you put in it.

That’s certainly true in writing. No matter how accomplished a writer you are, your story will be no better than your material. To research your message, conduct:

1. Background research. Think of this as homework. This is all the research you do to get ready for the interview — from reviewing your subject-matter expert’s deck to asking Google to define cochlear implant. That will help you:
   • Save time gathering information. Why reinvent the wheel?
   • Prepare for the interview. (No more embarrassing questions!)
   • Dig up juicy details that bring your story to life.
2. Interview. When you nail down the basic facts in your background research, you can use the interview to add humanity and detail to the story. Instead of covering the five 5 W’s, you’ll spend your precious interview minutes getting anecdotes, analogies and compelling quotes. Think Terry Gross, not your high school journalism teacher.
3. Observational research. You’ve heard of MBWA, or management by walking around? This is WBHA, or writing by hanging around — going to the scene to observe. Take a tour, watch a demo or see your subject in action. There’s nothing like being there to add compelling detail to your story.

B. Story angle. Like a tree, your message can branch out in different directions. But it should all come back to a single trunk. That trunk is your story angle.

Here’s a quick trick I use to come up with my story angle: Write your walkaway sentence — that’s the one sentence you want your readers to walk away with — in a single sentence, on the back of your business card. Use that sentence as your headline or deck, nut graph and wrap-up paragraph.

Then tape that business card to your monitor while you work. If a single paragraph, sentence or word doesn’t work to further that walkaway sentence, take it out.

C. Structure. Spend a few minutes organizing your message upfront, and you’ll save hours agonizing over it later

Put your effort up top. Most writers invest little time in the pre-writing process, focusing instead on fixing a lame draft during the rewriting phase.

Turn that investment upside down: Spend the bulk of your time getting ready to write, and you’ll spend less time fixing what you wrote. As a result, you’ll write better, easier and faster.

II. Free writing

There comes a point in any writing project where you have to follow Ernest Hemingway’s first rule for writers, and apply the seat of your pants to the seat of a chair. You have to write.

And that’s second stage of the writing process: free writing, or getting your rough draft on paper or the screen. It’s much easier to revise your work when you have a piece of writing to revise.

To free write your message:

• Get your nose out of your notebook. Typing up your notes isn’t writing; it’s typing. Moving your notes around in a Word document isn’t writing, either. The only way to write is to write. You know this stuff! Get your nose out of your notebook and write.
• Banish the grammar police. Use a dash instead of a semicolon? Write “you’re” when you mean “your”? Even misspell the CEO’s name? Don’t worry about it! You can always go back and fix your mistakes later. What you can’t do is go back and breathe life into a rough draft that never really got written in the first place.
• Write quickly, without stopping. In free writing, you want to achieve what creativity experts call “flow.” In that state, you’ll feel as if you can hardly type fast enough to keep up with your ideas — as if the words are flowing from your fingers. The only way to achieve that is to let momentum carry you along. So keep writing.
• Take a break and percolate. Stuck? Don’t just sit there. Do something! Get up. Move around. Get some fresh air. In a minute or two, you’ll find yourself back at your desk, eager to capture your next idea.

III. Rewriting

Here’s where you fine-tune your message: revising and editing and nailing grammar, spelling and punctuation.

This is what we used to call writing!

Spend enough time pre writing and free writing, and rewriting should be a breeze. Instead of heavy lifting — cutting and pasting and moving and fixing — rewriting becomes tweaking and polishing.

Why 3 stages of the writing process?

Writers who divide their writing into these steps are:

• Less likely to suffer from writer’s block
• More likely to meet their deadlines
• Unlikely to get stressed out in the process

Want to write better, easier and faster? Why not try pre writing, free writing and rewriting today?

___

Source: Richard Andersen, Writing That Works, McGraw-Hill, 1989

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You’ve heard about MBWA, or management by walking around? Try WBHA, or writing by hanging around — going to the scene to observe.

Observational research is the most overlooked reporting tool there is. Which is a shame. Because firsthand observation gives your copy color and insight that you can’t get any other way.

“You can observe a lot just by watching.”

— Yogi Berra

Observational research means that you, the writer, experience the event or product or procedure so you can recreate the experience for your readers.

• Covering a new roller coaster? Get on that sucker and ride it.
• Doing a piece on a new medical procedure? See if you can get into the operating room.
• Writing about a new line of chocolates? You haven’t really done your job until you’ve sampled a box or two.

Why observational research?

Through observational research, you show your readers what they don’t ordinarily see, make them feel what they don’t normally feel. Observational research:

• Makes writing vivid
• Helps you recreate a scene you’ve witnessed
• Turns stick figures into portraits and adjectives into sensations
• Overcomes distance, putting readers in the scene, making them feel as if they were there

How to conduct observational research

No need to interview group members or analyze data. For the structured observation research technique, you make like Yogi Berra and “observe a lot just by watching.” Here are four ways to conduct observational research:

1. Be there.

Hang up the phone, back away from the keyboard and go to the scene to observe. You can’t observe if you never leave your desk. So try these types of observational research methods:

• Spend a day (or an hour) with your subject matter expert as she goes about her regular business.
• Ask for a demonstration. Get the subject matter expert to show you how she found the computer glitch or otherwise demonstrate parts of the story for you. When writer Cynthia Gorney interviewed Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) for the Washington Post, she asked him to draw one of his characters. As he sketched Yertle the Turtle, Geisel started talking about how he’d developed the character. That got the conversation rolling.
• Take a tour with the subject matter expert. Let the plant manager show you “how things work around here.”
• Find an action setting. Put yourself and your subject matter expert in a situation that reveals something about the topic. When I profiled a customer-service guru, for example, I took him to a white-tablecloth restaurant where I could observe him observing the service.
• Watch the subject in action, then talk. Be on hand while the surgeon performs surgery, for instance, then ask questions afterward.

Wherever you go, get out of your office.

“Place can provoke new information, funny stories, and great dialogue,” suggests Jeff Klinkenberg, author of Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators and other narrative nonfiction books about Florida.

“The way people talk, and what they talk about, is influenced by their surroundings. They may whisper in church, shout on the basketball court, talk nonsense after a couple of tall boys. Or they may chat about something remarkable they’ve just seen, something important.

“When you interview somebody at home, ask for a tour. Every picture, every book, every piece of furniture, can tell a story.”

2. Tune into your five senses.

Once you’ve left your desk for someplace more interesting, report with all your senses.

Remember: You have five.

Different senses affect readers differently. If you want to foster memory and emotion, for instance, focus on the sense of smell. The smell of Lipton’s tea still transports me back to my grandmother’s kitchen, circa 1972.

You can use sound, on the other hand, to build tension. From the tick-tick of the heart-beat monitor to the “Jaws” theme song, sound can create stress in your readers — stress you can “break” by showing how your organization, product or service can solve the problem.

How can you tune in to all five senses? Try this exercise recommended by Perry Garfinkel in Travel Writing: For Profit and Pleasure. Ask yourself:

“Here and now I hear what, see what, smell what, feel what, taste what?”

That way, you’ll capture, according to Kevin McGrath, assistant metro editor at The Wichita Eagle, “not just sights but sounds, smells, actions, reactions, interactions, bits of conversation, facial expressions, posture, clothing and the state it’s in (crisply pressed, badly wrinkled, sweaty, dirty, raggedy, shirttails hanging out etc.), how things look in relation to their surroundings, etc.”

You’ll see how your subject matter expert stands, sits and gestures and what she keeps on the bulletin board.

You’ll notice the sounds the machines make in different parts of the company’s plant, and how your subject’s voice tone changes when he’s feeling stressed out, passionate or joyful.

And you’ll use your senses of taste, touch and smell to recreate the scene for your readers.

“Does a clock on the wall of a high-powered executive tick-tock relentlessly, like a metronome for his pressure-packed career?” prompts David A. Fryxell, former editor of Writer’s Digest. “Do the floors of the manufacturing magnate’s office tremble with the distant pulse of the factory floor? Does the home smell of freshly baked bread, the production plant of ozone, the farm of recently spread manure?”

3. Take more notes than you use.

This ain’t data collection. This is qualitative research, not quantitative.

Still, take lots of notes about your naturalistic observations. You can always toss out whatever doesn’t make it into your piece. Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative nonfiction journalist John McPhee, for instance, might take 10,000 pages of notes for a single book.

And don’t just write down what your subject says, Fryxell suggests. Note his looks and mannerisms too.

“Do his eyebrows twitch like frenzied caterpillars when he talks?” he prompts. “What’s he wearing? Anything sticking out of his shirt pocket?”

4. Look for the telling detail.

Forget representative samples, research questions, observing participants and the Hawthorne Effect.

Instead, seek out “the Yankees cap, the neon sign in the club window, the striped towel on the deserted beach,” suggests Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anna Quindlen. “Those things that, taken incrementally, make a convincing picture of real life.”

That’s all you’ll need for observational research studies.

Tips for these research tools

These observational research methods can be time consuming. Observing the CEO in her natural setting is not for every story.

Deadlines and budgets force most communicators to do much of their research via phone. So ask: what story on the agenda this quarter would most benefit from observational study?

Start campaigning today for the resources to go to the scene to cover that event, issue or person.

___

Sources: Ted Anthony, “Communicating Place,” Hallmark Cards Creative Conference, 1997

David A. Fryxell, “The Observation Occupation,” Writer’s Digest, October 1997

Perry Garfinkel, Travel Writing: For Profit and Pleasure, The Penguin Group, New York, 1988

Jeff Klinkenberg, “Writing About Place: The Boundaries of a Story,” St. Petersburg Times, January 1995

Donald M. Murray, Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work, Heinemann, 2000

Anna Quindlen, “Writers on Writing: The Eye of the Reporter, The Heart of the Novelist,” The New York Times, Sept. 23, 2002

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Useful information is among the top three reasons people share information via email or social media, according to research by Chadwick Martin Bailey:

• Because I find it interesting/entertaining (72%)
• Because I think it will be helpful to recipients (58%)
• To get a laugh (58%)

Those findings echo research by three professors at Carnegie Mellon University. They found that the best way to write subject lines that get opened is to show that your email contains useful information.

In a series of “think-aloud” studies, these professors asked participants to sort through emails in their own inboxes and in inboxes developed for the study.

The answer? Readers are most likely to open emails with subject lines that focus on utility, or relevance — on “information I can use to live my life better.”

So how do you write useful, helpful, relevant subject lines that get opened?

1. Lead with the benefits.

Best subject line ever? This one, from Dawn Grubb, got opened fast:

Margaritas today at 5? I’m buying

Opportunities, offers and discounts drive the most opens, according to Lyris Technologies. So focus on what’s in it for the recipient, not what’s in it for the sender.

This one, a promotional email from Portland Monthly’s Shop Talk, had me at Tim Gunn:

Talk to Tim Gunn | Free Kiehl’s Product | Bad Mall Photos

These two benefits subject lines got opened by subjects in a Nielsen Norman Group test — despite the fact that recipients didn’t know the sender (And overcoming sender unfamiliarity isn’t easy!):

Z100 Pays Your Bills!

Lonely Planet’s top 10 beaches

“When users are looking through their inboxes and dealing with vast amounts of email, any indication that a message with worth opening is helpful,” write Kim Flaherty, et al., in Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty.

This classic advice for every message you write — no surprise! — also works for subject lines: Write about the readers’ needs, not about us and our stuff.

So think benefits.

Benefits words are verbs, not nouns. And the voice of benefits is the imperative.

We learned in school that the imperative voice was the command voice, and it can be:

Go to your room! Do the dishes! Take out the trash!

But used for benefits writing, the imperative voice becomes the invitation voice:

Save money! Make money! Save time!

No wonder benefits verbs like add, open and try increase email reading, according to a study by Return Path, a global data and marketing firm. Return Path looked at more than 2 million email subscribers from 3,000 retail senders over a month last year.

(So, for that matter, do command verbs, like register, download and click.)

Phrasee adds weight to this evidence. Phrasee crunched the numbers on more than 40 billion successful (and not so successful) emails to identify what works and what does not in subject lines.

When it comes to verbs, experiential words like celebrate get top results. Commands like spend perform less effectively. (Because who wants to spend?)

And verbs like continues? Those are lackluster, too, probably because continues is a third-party verb (Wylie Communications continues to be great!)

Readers care more about themselves and their needs that about your company and its stuff. I think continue would have fared better (Continue to become a better writer every day.)

Adestra obtained similar results. Adestra analyzed more than 3 billion emails (free download) to learn which words work — and which don’t — in subject lines.

The U.K.-based email service provider found that verbs like buy and save outperformed adjectives — including free. So consider call-to-action subject lines.

So does this mean that Register! Celebrate! Save! is the best subject line ever?

Not at all.

What it does mean is that leading with a benefits-oriented verb, using the imperative voice and focusing on what the reader will get out of your email is a best practice for subject lines. Just like it is for every other thing you write.

2. Write how-to subject lines.

How-to information is the No. 2 type of content that gets retweeted, according to research by Dan Zarrella (PDF), viral marketing scientist for HubSpot. Tipsheets and service stories — aka “how to” stories — are also more likely to be read, used and acted upon.

No wonder Zarrella’s list of the 17 words that get clicked most often include tips and latest.

So find readers’ pain points and offer ways to address them. Words and phrases like how to and secrets suggest the kinds of value-added service stories that readers seek.

And, though Return Path didn’t test it, How to has always been a winner for service stories. Why not test that phrase for your subject lines, as well?

3. Use the magic word.

It’s the most retweeted word in the English language, according to viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella: You.

You is the most retweeted word in the English language.

— Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist

And no wonder. Starting your message with “you” pushes the benefits to the front of the sentence and focuses your message on the reader’s favorite subject.

In fact, we’ve known since 1934 that people love to read about themselves. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale conducted a study that proved that second-person pronouns — you — increase reading, while first-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability.

Now we’re learning this lesson again, this time from Return Path’s study. People are less likely to open and click through emails with first-person pronouns (I, me, our, mine) in the subject lines, according to Return Path. Researchers found that you was the only pronoun that increased email readership.

It’s about the reader! Folks, that’s 85 years of research telling us to write about the reader and the reader’s needs — in subject lines as well as everything else we write. And still, day after day, year after year, we show up at work, open our laptops, and write — once again — about us and our stuff.

So if you want to reach your reader, write about the reader. Don’t write about your organization and its products, services, programs and ideas — aka “us and our stuff.”

In subject lines, as in so much else in life, better you than we.

4. Ask a question.

When auctioneer Dick Soulis let his list know about an opportunity to help producers of a new TV series, his subject line said:

Do You Have A Piece of History?

National Geographic Channel Wants You

And Angie’s List sent asked this question in a subject line:

How long will your paint job last?

Why questions in subject lines?

When the facts are on your side, asking a question is more effective than making a statement, according to research by Daniel J. Howard and Robert E. Burnkrant at Ohio State University.

That’s because people receive statements passively. But with questions, they actively come up with their own reasons for agreeing.

And researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo found that people are more likely to click on question headlines with the word “you” than on declarative statement headlines.

Their advice: Ask intriguing questions that make people think, rather than questions with a simple yes or no answer.

What question could you ask to draw readers into your message?

5. Add a number.

Email Labs ran a split test of these three subject lines. Which do you think was most effective?

• Using Link Click-Through Tracking to Segment Your List
• 3 Tips to Improve Your Newsletter’s ROI
• Build Your List Through “Piggy-Back Marketing”

If you guessed the second, you’re right. “3 Tips” produced both higher open and click-through rates than the other two.

Why? Numerals in display copy sell because they promise quantifiable value. So think 3 Tips, 6 Ways, 7 Steps.

Oddly, odd numbers sell better than even ones. So 7 Steps is better than 10 Tips.

6. Add a sense of urgency.

Subject lines that conveyed a sense of urgency were the top performers in Return Path’s study.

So consider reminding recipients that there’s “still time” to take advantage of an offer.

7. Avoid exclamation points.

The average open rate for subject lines without exclamation points was 18% in one study; those without averages a 17% open rate.

The more exclamation points, the lower the open rate. Subject lines with two exclamation points netted 16.7% opens. Add a third, though, and the rate went down to 16.5%.

Make your subject line work.

Some 35% of email recipients use the subject line to decide whether to open a message, according to a study by DoubleClick.

Which means that this teeny-tiny piece of copy does the heavy lifting when it comes to getting your email opened and read.

To get higher open rates, make the most of your 25 to 40 characters: Show your email list that your email is relevant, valuable and useful to your readers.

Learn more digital marketing tips.

• How to write good email subject lines: These subject line strategies can result in more opened emails.
• How to organize content marketing pieces: Make this your email template.
• How to write a case study: Show what you can do by illustrating what you have done.
• Content-marketing-, social media- and blog-writing tips: Get Clicked, Read, Liked & Shared.
• Think Inside the Inbox: Learn more email marketing tips.
• Reach Readers on the Small Screen: Write to be read on mobile devices.

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Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.

Ask your subject matter experts:

• What happens if our customers buy this product or service?
• What happens if they don’t?
• What happens if members of the community get behind this public policy?
• What happens if they don’t?

Or take a tip from Kelly Parthen, PR manager at Agilent Technologies. She keeps asking her subject matter experts: “So what?” “So what?” “So what?” Eventually, they get to the benefit.
Keep asking, and you’ll hit benefits like:

They’ll be able to watch twice the TV in half the time.

They’ll ensure that their children’s school buildings aren’t constructed of corrugated cardboard.

They’ll get the body of Kendall Jenner while following an all-Twix-bar diet.

However you find them, benefits will make your products, services and ideas — not to mention your copy — more relevant and valuable to your reader.

That means you will…

Having trouble finding your benefits?

Try prompting your subject matter expert with the line “that means they will …” The end of that sentence is likely to be a benefit.

Your subject matter expert says, “We can handle our client’s internal audit functions.”

You say, “That means our clients will …”

Your subject matter expert says: “That means our clients will free up their own employees for bottom-line projects and better control the costs of producing internal audits.”

Now you’re talking benefits.

Present your benefits, too.

“That means you will …” also makes a great way to present your benefits:

Try it.

The post How to find benefits, not features appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

What’s the least important element in a release — less important even than the dateline or the boilerplate?

Quotes, say one in four reporters surveyed in a study by Greentarget. According to Greentarget’s research:

• 13% of journalists never use quotes from releases.
• 31% rarely use quotes from releases.
• 28% use quotes from releases only when they’re on deadline and can’t get an interview.
• 28% use quotes from releases regularly.

What’s their beef?

• 50% complain that the language doesn’t sound natural.
• 34% say the quotes aren’t substantive enough.
• Only 9% have no complaints about the quotes.

“Please don’t make me wade through a bunch of boilerplate, taglines and patting-ourselves-on-the-back quotes to find out if the news release is relevant,” begs one journalist surveyed by Greentarget.

Another writes: “I dislike press releases that have ‘spin.’ I just want the facts. Not a sales pitch, not canned quotes about how fantastic the person/company/event is.”

‘Don’t sound natural’

“Most quotes in press releases sound like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons: ‘Wah wah wah wah.’”

— A frustrated PR pro

These aren’t unreasonable complaints, considering the wah wah that passes for quotes in releases these days.

Here are three quotes from releases posted on PRNewswire recently. (I could show only one in my PR Tactics column, because these suckers weigh in at more than 100 words each — 20% of my word count. Think about that for a minute.)

Wah wah, indeed.

Transform the wah wah.

How do you get the wah wah out of your release quotes? Make quotes:

1. Short.

While PR quotes measure in the triple digits, journalists use much shorter quotes. In fact, the average length of a quote in a recent issue of The New York Times, not including attribution, was between 19 and 20 words, according to a 2015 Wylie Communications analysis. The most common length: seven words.

So “peel the quote back to one great sentence,” counsels Jacqui Banaszynski, a chaired editing professor at the University of Missouri.

How about:

“Hot rodders, racers and other street performance enthusiasts will now be able to do something better [we can’t figure out what from the release], thanks to our merger,” Callahan says.

2. Rare.

Don’t use quotes to convey basic information, as in this release on the Hip Hop Hall of Fame:

“The program curriculums are currently being designed and prepared to launch first class this fall with all classes online in 2016,” stated Pierre Voltaire, the Educational Program Coordinator Consultant.

Instead, paraphrase.

3. Personable.

Clearly, no human ever uttered the words, “MSDP provides the ideal partner for Holley, a Lincolnshire portfolio company that is the leading manufacturer and marketer of performance fuel and exhaust systems.” Just as no human has ever sought “customizable, comprehensive literacy solutions.”

Write quotes that sound human, not like a computer spit them out. Here’s one to model, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the New York Daily News about the declining health of 9/11 rescue workers:

“I’m begging for someone to help me,” Valenti said. “I do not want to die.”

4. Creative.

Quotes should sound like more than just the most basic parts of human speech. Make your executive seem eloquent — even interesting. Here’s a New York Times quote by former New York mayor Ed Koch on political consultant David Garth:

“I said, ‘Listen David,’” Mr. Koch recalled, “‘You want me to kill my mother? Tell me what time and where?’”

Now, that’s a quote that reporters won’t shoot down.

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Love them or hate them, hashtags may help you increase retweets.

Or so says Dan Zarrella, HubSpot’s viral marketing scientist. Zarrella analyzed his dataset of more than 1.2 million tweets to find out whether hashtags made these news items move further and faster.

The results? Tweets that contained one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be retweeted than tweets that did not.

Still … don’t overuse hashtags. Need a hilarious reminder? Check out this Justin Timberlake and Jimmy Fallon video.

And keep in mind this quote, by The New York Times social media staff editor Victor: “The noble hashtag is cursed by a problem Yogi Berra could appreciate: Too many people use it, so no one goes there.”

• Use hashtags, according to research by Buffer Media. Tweets with hashtags get twice the engagement of tweets without them.
• But don’t overuse them. Tweets with one or two hashtags get 21% higher engagement than those without, Buffer found. But engagement drops when you add more.
• Make them short. Keep them to 6 characters or less, recommends Vanessa Doctor from Hashtags.org.

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Google: It may be the next best thing to being there.

The best way to get description is to go to the scene and observe. The second best way to get description: Whatever gets the job done.

Which — when editing a story about something that happened many, many months ago in a country many, many time zones away — often means Google.

Here are two examples, from stories I recently edited for a client:

1. Robin Hood caps and sloganeering

For this story, the client got right to the point in a newsy lead: We helped ensure security for everyone involved at the G20 Summit.

But if you’ve written a good headline and deck, your readers already know that. Better to start with the problem, then bring it to life through scene setting so people can see what a big deal it was to accomplish this mission.

To set this scene, I simply reviewed news coverage of the event online.

Research time: 15 minutes.

2. ‘More than a mile into the sky’

In this piece, again, scene setting not only grabs attention but also helps illustrate the problem the organization helped its client solve. Details, again, via Google.

Research time: 15 minutes.

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While news stories make up the bulk of the content on three European news sites, most of the most-shared stories are features.

Or so says Satu Vasantola, Journalist Fellow at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

85% of the articles Helsingin Sanomat publishes are news stories, and just 15% are features. But 34% of the most shared stories were features.

Vasantola analyzed the most-shared stories from three European news sites:

• The BBC
• Helsingin Sanomat, the largest subscription newspaper in Finland
• Yleisradio, a Finnish media company

Features most shared.

Here’s what she learned:

• Features were the most shared articles at Helsingin Sanomat. 34% of the most-shared stories were features. But 85% of the articles the newspaper publishes are news stories, and just 15% are features.
• News articles and videos were the most shared at the BBC. 23% of the most-shared pieces were feature articles.
• Features were the most-shared Yleisradio pieces. 55% of the most-shared pieces were features.

Want to get shared more often? Vasantola suggests that you write stories that:

• Combine personal angles with national or international perspectives. People want stories about individuals as well as facts and statistics.
• Evoke feelings — especially positive ones. “Pure facts and figures are not enough; people want the facts to be served with emotions and stories of individuals, but stories that cleverly combine (inter)national and personal details,” Vasantola says.
• Make it relevant. Touch on everyday topics such as health, children and money.

“Interesting,” Vasantola writes, “is the new important.”

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Source: Satu Vasantola, “Do you think it is sex? You are wrong! This is what people share most on social media,” Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2014-2015

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Why make copy clearer and more readable?

In “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” two researchers at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) list these reasons:

• Messages are becoming more complex.
• Attention spans are shrinking.
• Audience members have learned to expect clearer communications.
• People sometimes accuse organizations of deliberately obfuscating information.

6 fallacies of complex communication

Why, then, do we persist in muddying our messages? One reason, the authors say, may be that we believe that complex communications are more:

• Authoritative
• Immune to criticism
• Complete
• Appealing to approvers
• Sophisticated
• Credible

Problem is, write authors Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D, and Nicole Bischof, these assumptions “are based on the premise that the receivers of a complex message will blame themselves for not understanding it.”

And that’s not true in this information-rich world, where if you don’t communicate the message clearly, someone else will.

Besides, write Eppler and Bischof, years of research on persuasive communications show that messages are credible and convincing only if audience members connect with them. And nobody connects with overly complicated information.

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Source: Martin J. Eppler, Ph.D., and Nichole Bischof, “Complex to Clear: Managing Clarity in Corporate Communication,” University of St. Gallen, November 2011

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