In my previous article, ‘Why don’t people listen?’, I introduced the concept that, in business writing, the audience is actually more important than the message. If you disagree, take a look at each of the examples below. These are all real situations I have encountered among my clients. In each, the writers ignored the needs, wants, attitudes or backgrounds of their audiences.
The business policy
Audience: non-English background employees
What went wrong: overly complex structure, formal vocabulary
What happened: the policy was misread and legal problems arose
The screenplay
Audience: Australian movie-goers
What went wrong: depicted Australian people and landscape in patronising caricature
What happened: the viewers rejected it
The email
Audience: a business colleague (and rival)
What went wrong: full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
What happened: the recipient forwarded the email with a derisive comment to others in the office, including the writer’s boss
The marketing brochure
Audience: potential new customers
What went wrong: full of industry jargon and acronyms
What happened: customers did not understand what was being offered, and ignored it
The internal memo
Audience: powerful, busy executives
What went wrong: took two pages for what only required a paragraph
What happened: the memo went in the bin without being read
The company website
Audience: potential new customers
What went wrong: Deliberately hid company services from the home page, requiring visitors to ‘explore and interact’ to find out
What happened: Visitors left the site and moved on to a competitor
I could triple this list without needing to think too hard. It still astonishes me when people assume that, just because they have taken the trouble to write something down, others will bother to read it and, even more unlikely, will respond in exactly the manner the writer would like (change their opinion, change their behaviour, spend their money…).
Social commentator Hugh Mackay describes this apparent delusion on the part of the writer as the ‘injection myth’.
“The ‘injection’ myth treats messages rather like drugs which act on other people’s minds. It assumes that messages have inherent power (their ‘meaning’)… Having created our message, we now choose a medium for injecting it into the mind of the other person. The medium we choose is the equivalent of a hypodermic syringe or even a gun: we load our message – like a drug or a bullet – into the medium and then inject it via the eye or the ear – or preferably both. At that point, we’ve done all we can. The drug, entering the mind of the other person, will now do its magic work. It will cause that person to think what we want them to think, to feel what we want them to feel or, if it’s a really powerful message, it might even get them to do what we want them to do.”
Hugh Mackay, Why don’t people listen? Pan Macmillan 1994
If only the ‘injection myth’ were true! Why don’t people listen? Well, frankly, why should they?
In my next article I’ll explore how you can get to know your audience. If you know what your readers want, and you’re willing to give it to them, you’re one big step closer to having them actually hear (or read) what you have to say.
‘Talk Without Being Interrupted: a guide to writing in the workplace’ by Naomi Hulbert will be released in its second edition shortly: more tips, more strategies and more easy exercises to help you become an effective, successful writer at work. Visit http://www.naomihulbert.com
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