Getting rid of Mr. Anon
Your style reflects your attitude toward your readers, implying a relationship.
If you intend to provoke a conversation, reveal yourself.
Tone shows how you react to your readers.
Cut through anonymity.
On paper, corporations, universities, and governments have always favored an impersonal style
- Talking in a consensus-seeking committee speak
- Avoiding taking any stand that might offend anyone anywhere
- Squeezing out resolutely anonymous prose.
In the
rush to fill up Web sites, a lot of this faceless prose got posted. So now
some sites are like Wall Street at midnight in winter--cold as granite
under ice.
Your style reflects your
attitude toward your readers, implying a relationship.
The old approach was authoritative: "We know what we are doing, and
you are lucky to be listening to us."
But the Internet works best as a series of two-way conversations.
If you intend to provoke a
conversation, reveal yourself.
At the least, tell your readers as much about your own life as they reveal
in registering, answering your questions, or stating their preferences.
When people sense that you are a real person, they respond.
And if you take a definite position, clearly distinguishing your ideas
from the herd, refusing to take a corporate snoot at them, people get the
sense that you might listen to their own opinions.
I find that the more I express my own individuality, the more I cut
through the plastic, silicon, wire, and glass of the computer and the
Internet.
Tone shows how you react to
your readers.
Contemplate the relationship with Emma, if
you have developed a persona to represent an important niche audience.
Figure out what your stance is.
What are you doing, in this conversation?
What is your aim, in this relationship?
If you want to amuse people
On a site like a webzine, be outrageous.
Go beyond the norms. Get into the intimate details of your emotional sturm
und drang, your paranoid fantasies, if you think they will be entertaining
on a particular site. Recognize what people normally think, and come up
with something different. Your job at a webzine is to provoke discussion,
and the hotter your prose, the more they talk.
Be considerate. Be willing to start with the
familiar, and move step-by-step into the unfamiliar. Teaching requires
enormous sympathy, an intuitive awareness of each moment when the student
may be puzzled, upset, drawn off course. The more you pay attention to the
student's internal experience, the more you can articulate your subject
matter for them. (Too many academics write Web pages to impress their
colleagues, leaving students far behind).
If you want to help people become more
aware
Open yourself up to
sense their inner life, each moment. Tune in to their fears, desires,
dreams, and as you write, imagine how the readers react. Shifting your
attention from your made-up self to your listeners lets the meaning flow
through. Your text loses some of its personal flavor, but takes on a
deeper significance. Oddly, at that moment, some people will start to
praise you for your "original style."
If you just want to be helpful--a good scout
Then be plain. Give up
all those tricks you learned in school, when you were struggling to be
persuasive, attractive, plausible, and convincing. When you are mentally
trying to demonstrate how unusual, special, fascinating, mysterious, or
complicated you are, your writing draws attention to itself, away from the
subject- it's okay if you are deliberately showing off, but not
particularly helpful.
Resource
Who am I writing for, and, incidentally, who am I? (Full chapter from Hot Text, in PDF, 566K, or about 10 minutes at 56k)
I wear this big cowboy hat because I live
in New Mexico,
where the sun is very strong. I put a Lego truck on
my hat brim because I like playing with Legos.
Any questions?
