How To Get Your Point, Make Your Point, And Stay On Point

By Author: Roy Rivera
Total Articles: 38
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Just about everything you want to write can be distilled by four critical questions. These questions work on all levels of a document, too, from the largest, document-wide perspective, down to your individual sentences. Take these questions to heart!
What do I want my audience to know?
What does my audience want to know?
Where is this information best demonstrated?
Why is this important?

What do I want my audience to know?
This is the big one. Asking yourself this at the outset can help you establish why you're sitting down to write, and it doesn't matter if you're writing a blog entry, a novel, or a marketing circular. When you start writing, ask yourself this question to focus your attention and to focus your point. As you go through your writing task, ask yourself this question to keep your paragraphs united, to keep your sentences flowing, and to keep your words working together. Question one can also work for you as a behind-the-scenes question, since the way you phrase your answer for yourself might be different from the way you phrase it to your audience!
What does my audience ...
... want to know?
Once you've clarified for yourself the point you want to make, be sure that it makes sense to your audience. Since most of what we write is for the use and benefit of others, it's important to keep their needs and wants clear.
Where is this information best demonstrated?
Now we're going on to the ways that you prove your point or show how your idea works. You can use examples, explanation, or demonstrations to prove the point that you've established with question one and honed with question two. This question works by giving you a way to write your examples, but it can also help you keep only the best examples, since "best demonstrated" means by you, too, so when you're done writing, make sure you apply this question to your text.
Why is this important?
In other words, so what? You have a point you want to make, you have examples for it, but so what? Why is what you're writing about important--both to you and to your audience? The answer to this question establishes a foundation for your document, so don't skip it!
Apply these questions to your copy writing at any point. You can use them at the beginning of your writing process to brainstorm or to create a brief summary of what you're going to write. You can ask yourself these questions about documents you're writing in order to keep yourself focused. You can apply them in order to know when to stop writing--if you've adequately answered the questions, it might be time to stop.
You can also use the four questions when you're editing your own work or someone else's work. Again, apply the questions to the document as a whole, as well as to each of the points along the way; by doing so, you'll find that your writing will benefit greatly.

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