Writing for Impact by Bill Birchard

Author:Bill Birchard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

KEEP IT SOCIAL

For the Love of Readers: Connect!

How do you express yourself when only your dog is listening? That hints at the seventh secret to engaging readers. Reveal yourself. Give readers clues as to what’s going on in your head. Let them connect with you, the author, as a thinking and feeling person.

People, and readers, have an inference engine. They infer your personality, beliefs, and motives from your display of voice, worldview, vocabulary, wit, syntax, poetic rhythm, sensibilities, and much more. They do the same for the people you write about.

Readers wake instantly to a chance to connect with you. They also want to connect with the people you include in stories and examples. They, like you, crave to know the intellectual and emotional life of those they’re associating with. And they are rewarded when they can make that connection.

There’s nothing more human than that. Hardwiring prods us to take the measure of other people. How else to assure the well-being of ourselves, our family, our tribe? How else to advance ourselves among our fellows? “At baseline, human beings are social animals, and we’re drawn to social things,” says psychologist David Dodell-Feder at the University of Rochester. “We as a species have this fundamental interest in social things that outpaces our interest in non-social things.”1

We are particularly eager, as scientists like Dodell-Feder say, to “mentalize,” or more simply, to mind-read, to suss out what’s in other people’s heads. Writers can’t re-create the rich effect of interacting with people face-to-face, but they can do something almost as potent. They can drive mind-reading: Through examples, anecdotes, what-if scenarios, and stories, writers can get readers to impulsively glean what’s in their minds and in the minds of people in their writing.

As a test, to show how much of an impact this has, here’s Lewis Thomas again in Lives of a Cell. See if you can resist the impulse to glean what’s going on in his mind as he fancies what kind of music would best explain humans to extraterrestrials: “I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging, of course, but it is surely excusable for us to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance.”2

Thomas surely won the National Book Award at least in part because he wrote to allow, indeed prompt, readers to think about what he and the people he was writing about were thinking. And that mind-to-mind connection is an element of social connection that you can accentuate to engage readers. When you help readers relate to you and the people on your writing stage, you help them connect as if in person. From that the rewards flow.

To be sure, if you’re a reporter for the local news, making a social connection as the author of an article may not be appropriate. As a journalist, I was instructed to keep myself and my dog out of the picture. That’s a rule of the trade.

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