Why ‘Clarity’ Is a Powerful Tool to Grow Your Audience?
Write with clarity and engage your readers better than ever
Do you know, Microsoft study finds the average attention span of your online readers dropped to 8 seconds as compared to 12 seconds in 2000?
Writing online is slightly different from writing a book offline. Why? Because due to the drastic drop in the attention span of online users over the past years, now you have only eight seconds to catch their attention.
I know this is ridiculous. Only eight seconds? What can anyone write in eight seconds to catch the readers' attention? Here comes the question of clarity.
Especially in this particular platform, I have seen many writers with offline expertise and academic certification struggle to get decent traction. I have read some highly-researched articles that have almost no response from readers.
You may have vast experience in writing offline (newspaper, magazine, academic texts, etc.) but writing online is different. And clarity can be one of the best tools to grow your audience here.
Yes, you can do lots of things to improve your writing, such as introducing simplicity, balancing your ingredients, creating narrative-elegance, and so on.
But today, we will focus only on clarity and try to understand why it is a powerful tool to write your next article in a more sophisticated way and grow your audience.
What is Clarity?
Clarity is the perception of understanding. It means when anyone reads your article, he/she understands what you are saying in it.
Your writing must have the sharpness and focus on the main idea/ideas to make it transparent and lucid.
Well, just to clarify, here I am not talking about poetry or spiritual writings. I am discussing the articles we write online in general.
This Is How It Looks Like Without Clarity
Let's look at the below image to understand how our writings may look like if they lack clarity. Try to understand what you're getting from the following image.
Do you understand what it is? I hope not. If I tell you that it is from a world-renowned artist, then you might try to gauge what those random strokes mean or what that black circle and a white ball represent?
But if I say that it is a painting from a newbie painter, most likely you will reject it saying - this is crape and nonsense. It doesn't mean anything.
Now, try to understand. If you are a writer with no influence worldwide and you continue to produce unclear, fluffy, and obscure writings, can you expect others to read them and dig deep to find out the hidden meaning of it? Of course, you cannot expect that.
That is why when a person decides to read an article online, he/she expects to read enjoyable, informative, understandable, and well-crafted writing.
So, keep that in mind, and try not to write your article like the random unpenetrable series of strokes on the canvas - because no archeologist is waiting to discover them, at least not in this online world.
How to Write With Clarity to Grow Your Audience
When you write, make sure that you are keeping your focus on one or two main ideas. Structure your article systematically that clarify your topic better. I think the following steps can help you.
Know what you are going to write
When writing a novel or story, many of us first start writing, and then the characters slowly reveal themselves. Again many poets have just one vision or found a stanza humming in their minds, and then when they put the pen on paper, the rest appears. It is common and completely okay. But when you plan to write a post that you will share online, this shouldn't be the case.
Know beforehand what you are going to write. Do not wait for any miracle. Do not wait for the right information to come to you. You take time and know the relevant information needed for the text.
For example, if you want to write about the fire incidents of Amazon forest, you should search for the articles already published in different news sites, magazines, web-portals beforehand. And then you select your own angle and stick to it.
If you follow this to make your article focused, the readers will grow interests in your writings. And they will finish reading with a clear understanding of what you are talking about and from which angle.
Remove irrelevant information (ideas, sentences, words, phrases, etc.)
Imagine, if I start writing about online marketing in this paragraph and let you know how much I got last month, will that make any sense? Yes, I can be desperate to show you my worth, my knowledge, achievements, etc., but for this particular article, that is entirely irrelevant.
In many stories, I have seen that writers want to showcase their experiences, accomplishments, or struggle to highlight how much he/she knows about any particular topic.
Trust me. Nobody wants to know how genius you are. All they care about how well you are serving their purpose with your writing.
So, don't overwhelm readers with irrelevant information, intricate sentence structures, phrases, and archaic words.
If someone gives you an article written in Latin and you don't know the language, how long can you concentrate on that? Maybe you will prefer some funny YouTube videos without spending your time on that post.
So, make your article transparent and easily digestible that anyone who reads can understand what you are trying to convey.
Overcome the temptation
Be precise. If possible, do not repeat the same information twice, And don't write too many things in one long paragraph. You may divide long-paragraphs into shorter ones and keep them concise and focused.
In most cases, so many things float in our mind when we start to write an article. But don't be overwhelmed. Overcome that temptation and put only important-and-relevant information and leave the rest.
No matter how important your information is, if that is not relevant, remove it immediately.
When you offer relevant, smart, condensed writings to your readers, they will love reading it and build trust in you. Consequently, they will be encouraged to read more of your pieces.
Put on your reader's shoes
When you finish your first draft, take time, and read it again and again from the reader's point of view. Pretend that you don't know anything about that particular topic and are reading someone else's writings - not yours.
If you can do that, you will easily find out the obscure-ideas, boring description, unnecessary usage of rare words, faulty sentences, etc. Then, you can make the article more accessible to readers by making the necessary changes.
It is a crucial step because putting on your reader's shoes is not easy. You have written it and all the things in your head, you know it all. So, this step needs your careful observation. If possible, you can send it to your beta reader to have his/her thoughts on this.
Thus, when you publish your articles with clarity, the readers will benefit from them, and they will get interested to read more of your writings.
Final Thoughts
Writing is a tough job, and writing with clarity is even tougher, as you must battle with your mind continuously and edit your article over and over again. But it's achievable if you keep a learning mindset.
➰Focus on one/two main ideas in an article.
➰Research well and exclude all irrelevant information.
➰Polish your sentences, changing intricate structures into simple ones, and remove rare words/phrases.
➰Put the reader's shoes on and read like you are reading other's article without any knowledge about it. Then, make changes accordingly.
Finally, say goodbye to your fuzzy, out of focus writing and start publishing with clarity to get more engagements than ever.
Happy writing.
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Thank you for reading.
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* The article was originally published on Medium (link)
About the Creator
S M Mamunur Rahman
Freelance Writer | Blogger | Editor of The Masterpiece
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