Improving the effectiveness of information

In the previous episodes of this blog about writing effective articles, we have looked at two things: Defining your goal Defining your target audience Now that we have a clear vision of our goal and know for who we are writing this article, the next step is to create a conceptual model of the article. It is like creating the blueprint for your new home: starting as a sketch and in a number of increments it gets more and more detailed until you have reached the point that you can start decorating the house. Creating the overall plan for your article During my study in Linguistic competence, I learned to represent the structure of my text in an hierarchy. While this may work for informative articles, this is in my opinion not the best approach for goal-driven articles. For a goal-driven article the overall structure should in my opinion look like a process: a serial structure of steps leading towards a conclusion.  In this first rough sketch of your article, you start to defi...

In the previous blog posts, we have talked about the criteria for effective articles and how important it is to set a goal before you start. Now suppose you have decided to write an article about new technology that enables organizations to perform better and make more profit. The goal of your article is to persuade the reader to come to one of the conferences where your company demonstrates this new technology. Would you be interested to hear what your neighbor – a software engineer – thinks of this article? Or the gardener? Or your kids? The audience is part of the goal Aim at a specific audience and define them If you write an article that is supposed to generate new opportunities for your organizations, you are typically aiming at decision makers within a specific industry. So while your neighbor – the software developer – can find your article too shallow and lacking the technical details he is looking for, your targeted audience of decision makers could possible find it...