Want to Gain People’s Attention? Get Creative
When everyone you work with faces an information overload, you’ll never get them to pay attention to your written material if you use conventional methods. To gain their attention, you have to be creative.
One way to gain their attention is with tantalizing titles. Book titles I especially like include Why We Buy by Paco Underhill (which he followed with Call of the Mall) and How We Know What Isn’t So by Thomas Gilovich.
Think about how you can do the same with your work material. Try to create titles that will grab your readers’ interest and whet their appetite. What about a proposal titled How to Benefit from Customer Complaints or guidelines called Three Surprising, Simple Steps for Spectacularly Savvy Service?
A second way to gain readers’ attention is with opening lines. One of my favorite opening lines from the fiction world is: “On a cold blowy February day a woman is boarding the ten a.m. flight to London, followed by an invisible dog.”
That’s the opening line of Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction. I don’t have the patience to wade through one hundred pages before the plot begins to thicken. I want to be hooked by the end of the first sentence, and Lurie’s book did that for me.
Consider how you might use opening line attention-getters in your reports, proposals, instructions, emails, and newsletters. For example:
- If you think 1,500 calls per month to the help desk is a lot, wait until you read what customers have accomplished as a result of our help.
- This is a set of guidelines about security procedures for people who hate to read guidelines about security procedures.
For a laugh, contrast these opening lines with submissions to the Bulwer-Lytton competition, a whimsical competition that challenges people to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Here’s one of my favorite winners.
A third way is to personalize your message. This came to mind recently when I was contacted by an author who asked if I would read his book and write a review. In his request, he listed several books for which I’d posted reviews on Amazon and explained why these books meant a lot to him. To locate these books, he had to dig through several pages of my reviews. His personalized approach was attention-getting at its best.
Finally, don’t drive people away by using big words when small ones will do. There’s no need to say “at this point in time” when you can simply say “now,” or “as per your request” when you can say “you recently asked.” A conversational, down-to-earth style will gain more attention than pompous professional prose. Obfuscate at your own risk.
