I tell my kids there’s a movie quote or a song lyric for any situation. It’s one of my superpowers as a dad.
For instance, I recently was asked to review a whitepaper. It was 26 pages and highly technical. My main takeaway, though, was there was no main takeaway.
Which leads to this gem from the ever-quotable “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” …
“And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!”
Harsh, I know. But true.
It’s a victory to have your content read, and you can’t squander that by missing the mark. Here are a few easy ways to make sure you get your point across:
✍️ Keep it short and sweet. Sometimes this isn’t possible, but when it is: get in, make your point and get out. That’s why social posts and 30-second videos are so effective. (In the old days of Twitter’s 140-character limit, I found that to be a great writing exercise to be as concise as possible.)
✍️ Make it skimmable. You probably started reading this and then scrolled a bit before stopping at this list. That’s fine – and on purpose. Things like headers and bullets help guide readers to the important stuff.
✍️ Sum it up. Newswriting uses a nut graph – a sentence or two that explains the whole article. If you read nothing else, you’d still get the gist. For a longer piece like a whitepaper, it may be an executive summary. But if you don’t make it clear what the reader should take from the piece, they’ll either take nothing (and not come back) or decide for themselves.
For this whitepaper, I recommended and wrote an executive summary. I more forcefully stated the main argument. And I pulled out the main discussion topics using bold headers, so readers won’t have to search hard to find them.