Your Message Was Not Received

Posted: September 13, 2013

[caption id="attachment_11560" align="alignright" width="300"]© prikhnenko - Fotolia.com[/caption]Your message has not been received. It could happen if the content relaying that message isn't clear and concise. Make sure your target audience is seeing what you want them to see, without having to work to figure it out.

Mark Nichol, Editor at Daily Writing Tips, shares five simple steps to deliver your content and get your message across.

How to Present Your Content

During a drive yesterday, I noticed again two ways that, in casual contexts, people are careless about their communication. For the first time, however, I realized that unfortunately, there’s a close analogy between the way many amateur writers present information and the way some well-meaning professionals (or other serious writers) do it.

First, I noticed handwritten signs posted along roadsides: advertisements for yard sales and the like. You’ve likely noticed too how poorly many of these signs are executed: The sign maker begins to scrawl some information and runs out of space, compressing a phone number or other key information so that it is barely legible.

Or perhaps the penmanship is poor, and the details are illegible. Or perhaps the print is too small or too wordy (or both) to be read by someone driving by at thirty or forty or fifty miles an hour — or, worse, the message is styled in cursive writing. Occasionally, a sign exhibits a combination of some or all of these problems.

Second, I passed between two small groups of people wielding signs at the crossroads of a small town. There were about a dozen protestors altogether, and though I had slowed to twenty miles per hour to negotiate the narrow road, I couldn’t focus on more than a couple of words on two or three signs before I had passed them.

My passenger, who was at more leisure to read the messages, learned little more than I had: The people were on strike, but where they were employed and what they were striking for remained a mystery even though each of us had a few seconds to scan the signs, because, again, the print was sloppily written or too small or both, and the message was too wordy for motorists to take in during the brief opportunity.

Read the entire article How to Present Your Content, at Daily Writing Tips.