The Write Rainmaker

Telling Stories

There was once a young man who was highly intelligent and had a master's degree in business, but he made less than his wife, who was a schoolteacher. He was trying to sell life insurance.

One day his wife pointed out something very obvious, at least to her. "You really don't like selling life insurance, do you?" she said.

"Well, no. If people don't really need it, I don't want to sell it to them," he admitted.

"So, find a job where you can sell something you like," was her suggestion.

So he got hired on by a bank in the management training program. He retired from banking 35 years later.

That young man was my father. He had a very successful career selling banking services because it was a product he really believed in. He wanted people to make wills, and to protect their assets with good estate planning. He wholeheartedly believed that those were ways to help people have better lives, and he was successful because he believed what he was selling.

I believe in the power of STORYTELLING. [I wrote about it in more depth actually, over at my personal blog The Crab Chronicles].

This morning, I was reading an interview of author Stephen King, and he talked about how he taught his own children the power of storytelling. Two of his three kids became writers.

Stories are powerful things.

I like this article, The Science of Storytelling: Why Telling a Story is the Most Powerful Way to Activate Our Brains.

The article suggests that humans are hard-wired to love stories, and we actually need stories if we are going to learn.

For the purposes of website writing or blogging, this is the part of the article I found most meaningful:

Write more persuasively—bring in stories from yourself or an expert

This is something that took me a long time to understand. If you start out writing, it's only natural to think "I don't have a lot of experience with this, how can I make my post believable if I use personal stories?" The best way to get around this is by simply exchanging stories with those of experts. When this blog used to be a social media blog, I would ask for quotes from the top folks in the industry or simply find great passages they had written online. It's a great way to add credibility and at the same time, tell a story.

The simple story is more successful than the complicated one

When we think of stories, it is often easy to convince ourselves that they have to be complex and detailed to be interesting. The truth is however, that the simpler a story, the more likely it will stick. Using simple language as well as low complexity is the best way to activate the brain regions that make us truly relate to the happenings of a story. This is a similar reason why multitasking is so hard for us. Try for example to reduce the number of adjectives or complicated nouns in a presentation or article and exchange them with more simple, yet heartfelt language.

 

So if you want someone to buy your cupcakes, or houses on your real estate website, or legal services, or whatever you're trying to sell, you need writing that tells a story, and connects with an audience.

Don't worry about dazzling folks with your language. Worry about connecting. Worry about engaging their brains and imaginations. A good blog is a good story, at its heart.

What Language Do You Speak?

I’ve worked for attorneys for a long time, but I can still remember as a brand new paralegal being very confused when listening to attorneys talk. They’d use words I didn’t know, terminology that was completely foreign to me, like “liquidated damages” or “deposition prep” or “summary judgment.” Once I realized the scope of what I DIDN’T know, it scared me.

Of course, I learned the lingo. I wouldn’t have been able to do my job otherwise.

Sometimes people would ask me what I did, and I learned quickly to translate it into “civilian” [non-lawyer] language.  For instance, I might say “I spend a lot of time responding to discovery requests.” That got a blank stare from the person. If I said “I spend a lot of time preparing written responses to questions from the opposing attorney” that was better.

Every profession has its own language. My dad was a banker and I used to listen to him throw around strange words like “fiduciary” and “trust.”

I once dated an engineer, and when I would try to describe something mechanical I’d find myself using the word “thingy” a lot. Fortunately, he thought it was cute, not annoying.

When you write for a website or blog, it’s important to figure out who you are writing for and what language they speak.

If you are writing for your peers, folks in your profession who know your language, it’s much easier. Everyone is on the same page.  If you’re writing for someone outside your field, though, it’s more tricky. What happens a lot of times is that professionals forget which words were once strange and foreign to them, and they have a hard time “translating” their thoughts into a general, universal language.

I worked on my daily hometown newspaper years ago when I was still in high school. I mainly ran errands, but the managing editor let me write feature stories now and then when I came to him with an idea he liked. My very first story, though, meant re-writing the first paragraph many times. [The first paragraph is called the “lead” and it’s crucial to get it right so the reader will read the rest of the story.] I kept re-wording and re-writing, and he kept red-penciling it until I was nearly in tears. Finally, he sighed heavily. “Dee, you have an extensive vocabulary. You write like a college student. We write articles basically on a 6^th grade reading level. The big words and long sentences don’t work, especially in the lead.”

I was shocked. Wow.

Without dumbing down your content to a ridiculous level, the trick with webwriting is to write clear, concise, and easily readable copy.  Don’t speak a “foreign” language. Don’t make paragraphs too long and blocky. Make your point, and don’t belabor it. Don’t put so many SEO terms that the language is stilted.

Like the dancing of Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, it looks easy to do, but it requires many hours of training and practice to pull this off.

If you’re thinking about writing a blog or website article for someone outside your profession, give some thought to your language and how it will sound to someone else.  If it seems too daunting a task, or too time-consuming, give me a holler and I can help.

Me and Dad, about 1988