Tell Them A Story Before You Tell Them What To Do
Do What Others Aren’t Doing to Get More Readers
Published in
3 min readOct 15, 2020
Writers on Medium and its publications, Quora, LinkedIn, and other text-based social media platforms love to tell us how to do things:
- How to write better
- How to make money
- How to get a boyfriend
- How to raise kids
- How to grow cucumbers
- How to recover from a divorce
- How to do X faster
- How to slow down
The list is endless. Readers respond well to “how to” until it becomes redundant. And much of the “how to” do this and that is redundant. Another word for “redundant” is boring. Readers don’t like boring!
I write a lot about writing. I’m interested in writing. I read what others say about writing and how to improve it. I read books about writing. I’m also bored with the same advice over and over.
“Nothing to read here. Move on.”
The Difference between Ho-hum “How-to-Write” and Wow “How-to-Write”
A how-to- write article that gets a “wow” has a personal story. Maybe a couple personal stories. Could include something…
