By understanding how your reader infers meaning and how they identify the relevance of your message, you can write your content in a way that will appear interesting and highly relevant.
The inferred meaning will be based on the information you have provided and their own experiences. In order to guide the reader to your desired meaning, expectation of relevance must be raised.
This is achieved by informing the reader of your intentions. An excellent way of doing this is by outlining your 'promise' clearly and openly at the beginning of your article.
The reader will only hold interest in your article if the intentions behind the information meets their expectations of relevance to their experiences and circumstances.
This could be improving their knowledge, settling a doubt, confirming a suspicion, or correcting a mistaken impression.
By creating a familiar environment, you can include experiences which the reader will relate to. You can then use this environment to provide the information that steers the reader to your desired meaning.
The higher the level of sophistication of the reader, the higher the expectation of relevance will be expected. Depending on the level of sophistication of the reader you are interested in, you can distort the environment to suit the message.
A sophisticated understander will be able to understand and detect deception. With this reader, you can focus the message within the environment and use 'alternate universes' to infer your message swiftly and concisely.
A cautious optimist will be able to detect deliberate deception, such as irony. With this reader, you must be careful that the environment is plausible, otherwise they may wrongly interpret the meaning behind your message.
A naively optimistic interpreter will accept the first interpretation they find. With this reader, you must ensure that the environment does not violate true experiences, otherwise they may also wrongly interpret the meaning behind your message.
These are known are the Gricean Maxims :
As a rational reader will have a natural tendency to infer relevance in all situations, the reader will choose the closest principle that meets their own expectations.
However, the Gricean Maxims must hold true according to your anticipated reader. Truth, for example, will still be met where deception is used for the sophisticated understander if it is used to create an environment where the reader uses the deception to infer the correct meaning.
If the reader can immediately apply this new information with their experiences and deduce positive conclusions, then the information is relevant and valuable to the reader. If the reader takes the new information and then chooses experiences that provides the greatest relevance, then the relevance of the information will vary between readers. Your article will provide more worthwhile conclusions to the reader with the most experience.
Therefore to improve relevance, you need to express meaning by providing the most appropriate principles of information that satisfy the Gricean Maxims, and create the most appropriate environment for your desired reader.
If you allow for different levels of sophistication of reader to infer meaning, you must create their expectations based on different maxims. If you can achieve this, the result will be that your article will be relevant to readers at all levels of experiences, and hence seen as an incredibly powerful and very relevant article.
This workshop will cover the following areas:
Further workshops include Marketing Analysis, Writing Styles, Search Engine Optimisation and Measure for Success. These introductory workshops are 45 minute telephone calls to be held once a week (a time and day that fits). Those companies who wish to take this further can arrange one-2-one training or join an existing workshop group held on Wednesdays or Thursdays.
Elements of writing great content
How to keep your prospect captivated
