Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

10Swap Places with Your Reader

“The reader doesn't turn the page because of a hunger to applaud,” said longtime writing teacher Don Murray.¹

Good writing serves the reader, not the writer. It isn't self-indulgent. Good writing anticipates the questions that readers might have as they're reading a piece, and it answers them.

Some writers adopt this mind-set during the initial writing phase. But this perspective is especially helpful on the rewrite or edit, once the first draft is out of your head and onto the page.

Swap places with your reader. Be a skeptic of your own work. Get out of your own head, and into your reader's or your customer's. Relentlessly, unremittingly, obstinately think of things from your readers' point of view, with empathy for the experience you are giving them.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote: “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” (Hat tip to the Economist style guide for that one.²)

You might notice that the idea of serving the reader in the realm of writing isn't unlike how the best content marketing serves the customer (or user, a word I hate to use to refer to people).

Yet often in writing and ...