Two Tools to Strengthen your Reader Dialog

Researching and reading readers will help you reach them.

Photo: Amy Hirschi on Unsplash

Whether we want to entertain, inform, or persuade, a writer’s most precious resource is reader attention and interest. Readers don’t just receive our words — they make sense of them in ways we can anticipate. In face-to-face conversation, we can read expressions from across the coffee table, but writers don’t have the luxury of that feedback.

True, sometimes we just have something we have to say — but usually, writing is an implied dialog. The better you know your reader, the better the dialog and the more satisfying the results.

OK, knowledge of our readers is important. So how can writers understand and appeal to their readers?

If you’re ready to dig deeper into the heads of your readers, here are two psychological tools that might speed, focus, inform, and inspire your writing.

Why Focus on Readers?

First, improving your reader awareness will help you to…

· choose vocabulary, examples, vocabulary, examples, and references that reach readers;

· find new ideas and angles;

· write more efficiently and minimize rewrites;

· increase the number of readers and followers;

· be more aware of your own drives, perspective, and style;

· uncover fresh, stimulating information, ideas and connections;

· energize your connection with readers and increase interaction;

· replace stale assumptions about how readers will interpret your words;

· flesh out and deepen fictional characters, their motivations and actions.

How Most Writers Imagine Readers

We study how to write, but not how to read potential readers. Most writers are discouraged from even trying because there are so many factors to juggle: reader knowledge, passions, culture, experiences, etc.

Making it even worse, these factors often interact. For example, readers about travel probably care about culture, budget, passions, practicalities, and time — aspects that often affect each other.

Almost everybody uses demographics to understand readers. But age, gender, income, education and location are too superficial, too broad, to help much. Then there’s Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (too theoretical), and Focus Groups (impractical for most writers).

You might have also learned about readers by joining relevant groups on Facebook or other Social Media and reading posts. This is even more instructive if you pose questions to the whole group and note the responses. But this can be time-consuming and unreliable.

Most writers have at least some subconscious sense of their readers, especially when we are similar. But this comfort can be a trap, making us reluctant to set off on adventures that could improve our writing… and reader interest.

It’s easier to just vaguely imagine a potential reader, or maybe use a friend to stand in for all our readers. Usually, though, we stick to standard assumptions and habits. This discourages us from considering new topics, different writing styles, etc.

Most of us feel a little rudderless as our story starts to take shape. Or we worry about missing an valuable point.

If this describes you, try out one or more of these tools. Not only will it be fascinating, but any time spent learning about and applying these tools will more than pay off in your writing.

To strengthen my fiction, for example, I go to the Myers-Briggs website below. After finding the category that best fits each major character, I read its detailed descriptions and connect those to the plot. These few minutes help me add a wealth of insights to the “Depth Points” I use to enrich each character’s personality, suggest action, conflict, change, and quirks.

Simply learning and thinking about audiences will loosen your imagination’s muscles… expand your audience understanding… spark new ideas. In effect, you are telling your subconscious to get to work.

Two Tools

Luckily, helpful research tools are free and easy to use, offering a structure that helps anyone quickly generate ideas and increase inspiration and insights.

So let me suggest these two tools. Advertisers use the first to target audiences in sharp detail. The second is used in psychological evaluations, to compare a potential employee’s characteristics to a job’s needs.

These research tools are practical, respected, and easy to access. Use the links below, or your own search, to learn more. I’ll suggest other ideas if you leave a question or comment for me.

1. Psychographics

Advertisers now overwhelmingly depend on Psychographic research.

Demographics is so 1960 with its rough external factors. Psychographics goes deeper — focusing on the values, activities, lifestyle, and other drivers of audience attitudes and behaviors. In particular, this technique is used to predict how audiences will respond to advertisements.

Advertisers spend a fortune researching their audiences. But it costs nothing for a writer to use psychographic categories as “sensitizing concepts.” Not only is this useful, it is fun to strengthen our sense of ourselves and readers.

Psychographics suggest “clusters” of attitudes and behaviors, each of which suggests priorities, attitudes, emotions, etc. This lets nonfiction writers figure out which aspect of the topic will most attract and resonate with readers.

An example of one of the most popular, VALS, is reprinted at the end of this story. If this is intriguing, you can easily go online to find all the details you could ever use. Treat these as starting-points, since nobody perfectly fits any category.

As you’ll see, the VALS system locates consumers (in our case, readers) into eight categories:

1. Innovators

2. Thinkers

3. Believers

4. Achievers

5. Strivers

6. Experiencers

7. Makers

8. Survivors

Identifying the priorities and motivations of each group will expand your sense of what will encourage readers to keep reading your story. Naturally, you should adapt the categories to fit your own experience.

Vals framework — Values attitude lifestyle — Vals model (marketing91.com)

2. Meyers-Briggs

Though superficially similar to Psychographics, this system has a different purpose. Created by a mother and daughter team in the early to mid-1900s, it uses questions assign people to 16 distinct personality types on 8 scales.

The site listed below is extremely useful, since it explores how each type functions in major aspects of life— work, leisure, relationships, etc.

Employers use these personality styles to match potential employees with positions. Though popular and widely used (it has little competition), Myers-Briggs isn’t universally accepted by psychologists. But it’s more than valid enough to reveal patterns, reflections and insights that quickly strengthen a writer’s audience sense.

This is a great way for fiction authors to develop deep, complex, yet integrated and relatable characters. For nonfiction articles, the categories suggests fresh audience and topic research. Its biggest drawback is suggesting too many ideas!

Just for fun, you might take a free test to investigate your own personality.

Personality Types | 16Personalities

Using These Research Tools

Both with my own writing and during 45 years as a trainer, I find that writers tend to fall into increasingly narrow, rigid assumptions about readers.

Here are four ways to become more reader-centric.

a) Expand your awareness by occasionally taking, say, 20 minutes to review the categories suggested by each system. This will increase your general appreciation of the depth and breadth of readers.

b) Prepare before starting a longer piece: choose a personality category that fits your topic, then imagine what that hypothetical person would care about. Imagine chatting with them about your story and what it means to them.

c) Strengthen your writing by choosing any new reader category, then imagine writing for those readers. This will stretch your writing skills. I was forced to do this before editing a book on materials engineering (!). I realized that re-thinking reader priorities had helped make my own writing more organized and logical.

d) Integrate reader knowledge into your writing. For ambitious writing projects, thinking about the reader at each stage — conceiving, outlining, drafting, writing, editing — will streamline the process. This will make each draft more focused and crisp, and you will need less rewriting and deletion of sections that don’t fit.

Respect and Connect with Readers

In decades as a journalism and writing coach, I learned that every writer benefits from increasing their reader awareness, accuracy and alertness. These tools might help take your writing to the next level.