Writing Dirty
Photography: dirty hands by y ordan
There is an argument to say that, in the realm of the printed word, what is written is not as important as who writes it. When it comes to web content, however, most people write as if the rule doesn’t transfer — as if the web is the realm of information only, and authors are loathe to leave a mark on their writing.
Writing dirty, as I see it, is not the same as talking dirty. It means writing with humanity. It means encouraging readers to unwrap words and get at their source: the author, the person.
Your readers can’t build a relationship with information. They can build a relationship with you. In this post, I want to discuss how we can de-sanitize our web writing and leave a big, colorful, human smudge on our words.
How did we get so clean?
It doesn’t help that a significant portion of web copy is produced by automated processes and strung together with lines of code: the search results, error messages, and increasingly chirpy user interfaces. There is a human (or several of them) behind all of these things, yet great pains are taken to remove every trace of that contact — as if it would only make everything seem messy.
Wikipedia, for example, is a one-stop information shop borne from the hard work of thousands of authors. You almost wouldn’t know it, though — as if acknowledging human creation would taint what the information is worth.
Social media, too, encourages the author to withdraw from what they create. The hordes of Digg users, stumblers and del.icio.us bookmarkers are treated like (and perhaps deservedly) a horde of locusts: descending on content, utterly consuming it, and moving on to the next thing as quickly as they came.
Who can blame them, though? One prerequisite of so-called ‘Diggbait’ (or so people who write on the topic would have you believe) is that it must be information concentrate. Apparently, any mention of the author behind it will bring tears of boredom to the masses. It seems logical, after all: they don’t know you, so why should they care?
I think the opposite is true. I think this might just explain one reason why social media visitors are deemed to be so fickle. They form no attachments to the content because they aren’t given the chance to.
People are not meaningfully beguiled and intrigued by a funny photo, a bullet-point information list post, a dry-as-bone tutorial. They consume the entertainment value, the usefulness, and then leave, searching for other content with the same qualities. After all, it can be found anywhere if you look for it.
Dirty is interesting
If you write dirty, however, if you situate yourself very much in the content you create, you will intrigue readers — whether they came from Digg on a whim or have been visiting your site for years.
When you learn something about someone it leaves a mark. If you resonate with readers they will want to know more about you. They will travel to your ‘About’ page rather than navigating away, and they may just dig deeper into your site in an effort to learn more.
The argument that people who do not know you are not interested in you is, I think, a falsity. How do you get to know someone in the first place? They give something of themselves, your interest is piqued, and you decide to learn more.
Giving something of yourself, even if it’s just a tidbit, leaves a unique mark. The information you’re communicating can probably be found elsewhere, although in different forms. The mark you’ve left (your signature, if you will), cannot.
Start making a mess
What follows are a few dirty habits you can develop over time.
It’s not about you, it’s about me
Next time your content sings out for an anecdote, reach into the cookie-jar of your own life rather than outsourcing memories. It’s often easier to illustrate your point with someone else’s life, but consider why that anecdote (and that person) are still being talked about: they gave something of themselves — or perhaps journalists did it on their unwilling behalf. Either way, they left their own mark. Leave yours instead.
Sharing stuff-ups
The phrase “We all make mistakes,” is usually met with general acquiescence. Sure, it’s a cringe-worthy cliché, but it’s true. You wouldn’t know it, however, from the way many of us write.
Web writers are more than willing to write about their successes, their expertise, their superior knowledge, omitting completely the years of learning (and failing) that went into forging that expertise. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to develop a human connection with someone who presents themselves as super-human by omission.
Of course, this isn’t intentional. It seems counter-intuitive to acknowledge where we fall short, or have fallen short in the past, particularly when we want to attract praise, not criticism.
In most cases, though, acknowledging mistakes and discussing what you learned from them will resonate with readers, particularly those who’ve made the same mistake, or are doing so right now.
Timothy Ferriss writes a great blog. One of its short-comings, though, is that the novelty of someone being perfect at everything does start to wear off.
What I’m really interested to hear, and I imagine a lot of other people are too, is what Mr. Ferriss absolutely sucks at.
Writing about your mistakes shows your readers that you’re not an expert, or a talented person, because you’re somehow better, but because you made yourself that way. By inference, you’re saying that what you write can help them do the same.
“What are you wearing?”
You’re not producing content in a vacuum. Where did you get the idea? Who inspired you? Why are you interested in the topic? Will how you’re feeling at the moment affect what you write? Are real-life experiences affecting your out-look on things?
You write content at a computer, or in a notebook, and as you do so you’re situated somewhere in time and space. You’re at a specific location, you’re in the middle (or the beginning, or the end) of a day in which stuff happened. You’re not a brain in a vat. Your experiences influence what you write. It’s never a bad thing to acknowledge the world outside your words.
Make it personal
We’ve got something pretty good over those who write for print.
In the print-realm, authors are ‘far too busy’ to deal with reactions to their work. You read a book and, regardless of how deeply it affects you, there’s no easy way to let the author know. Services like Wikipedia seem to deliberately emulate that detachment, as if a certain level of distance were necessary for information to be of real value.
Authors shouldn’t forget that this interactivity is one of the prime attractions of web content. Unfortunately, I think many writers do forget, particularly those who create content which is incredibly popular. How many A-list bloggers or webmasters participate actively and regularly in their comment threads? How many respond promptly to reader e-mails, or respond at all?
Yes, they’re incredibly busy, but it does reach a point of absence where it seems the writer has decided the gains of interacting are far less than, say, the effort required to post a comment.
There also seems to be a tendency, once responding to every comment and e-mail becomes unfeasible, to give-up almost completely, and to respond only when it might damage a friendship not to do so (you may have noticed that a few A-list bloggers tend mainly to comment in response to people they seemingly are already chummy with. New readers? Forget about it.)
This seemingly pragmatic view of costs vs. gains is short-sighted. Each comment, each courteous email goes towards a greater perception that this author respects and is accountable to her/his readers. This author/reader relationship is absolutely invaluable, and worth all the effort it takes to build.
If you can’t respond to each comment, acknowledge that you’ve read and enjoyed them all, picking out those that you can easily respond to. If you can’t respond to emails at the moment, let the person who sent it know, and file it away to be tackled at a later date. There is nothing more defeating than crafting an email only to have it met with silence.
Don’t fall into the trap of failing to acknowledge readers. Get amongst them, get messy with them, get to know them, if not individually then collectively. Don’t negate one of the best aspects of writing for the web.
As you get to know your readers they will get to know you. If you let the balance tip, however, withdrawing from interaction as your content becomes more popular, you’ll inevitably find that new readers won’t develop the sense of intimacy you prized in the early days.
In the long run this neglect could hurt you. It’s easy for visitors to ignore or forget about a faceless author when they go quiet for a week, or write a dud article.
It’s much harder to forget about a friend when the going gets tough.
