3 Simple Ways to Connect With Your Reader’s Emotions

Make your writing irresistible.

I know something about you. More than anything, you want your writing to grab onto your readers and not let them go until the very end.

You want your writing to be irresistible.

If you’re like most writers, you read others you admire with a twinge of envy. If only you could bottle up some of that magic for your writing, then maybe you could take off too. But try as you might, your writing feels flat and robotic. You have important things to say, but nobody seems to know you exist.

It’s frustrating, and I’m there too a lot of the time. But through study and experience, I’ve found flat writing can take on new life with the right juice.

That juice is the fuel that makes your favorite writers so irresistible. When you learn to connect with your reader’s emotions, your writing will take on a life of its own.

Make your words do the work

Trying to get noticed on a crowded platform makes you feel like you’re drowning.

See what I did there?

I could have said “Trying to get noticed on a crowded platform is hard.” Instead, I said you feel “like your drowning.” While it’s true that it’s hard, drowning invokes a picture in your mind of struggle and high stakes.

I’m finding the more my words invoke pictures in my reader’s minds, the more emotional they make my writing. In her book The Charisma Myth, Olivia Fox Cabane says she coaches public speakers to use visual words to be more charismatic on stage.

Since writing and public speaking share some similarities, it makes sense that visual words make your writing more compelling.

The biggest mistake new writers make

You can connect with readers through emotions, and no emotion brings people together like pain. So if you’re comfortable sharing your pain, you can create a strong bond with your readers. But there’s a catch.

If you vomit your resentment, anger, and frustration all over your readers you will lose them. This kind of over-sharing turns your blog or story into a rant. And while it may draw some attention, you’re only bringing more of that negative energy into your life.

The way around this problem is to only share your pain in a way that adds value.

In the introduction of this article, I wrote about how you (the reader) feel envious (pain) of writers who write so well you can’t stop reading their stuff. You can be safe in assuming I have felt that envy myself, because I have. I’m letting you know I feel your pain without outright stating it.

Writers who successfully tap into their pain do so by identifying a shared pain with their readers. You provide value by highlighting your pain and offering insight on how to get through it — or at least how you’re working through it.

Use teaser tags

If you read my articles, you’ll notice I use a lot of what I like to call “teaser tags.” These short sentences and phrases get tagged onto the end of a paragraph or section to get you to keep reading. Teaser rages draw you further in. (I didn’t invent this technique, I learned about it by reading about copywriting.)

Here are some examples of teaser tags you can use:

• I know what you’re thinking.
• But that’s not all.
• Keep reading to find out more.
• Let me explain.
• More on that in a minute.

Get the idea?

Another effective way to use teaser tags is to ask rhetorical questions (like I did above). I find asking simple “yes” or “no” rhetorical questions keeps readers moving without getting bogged down in arguing with you. Perhaps you want them to argue with you, but you also want them to read until the end.

Final thoughts

No matter what you write, if you do not engage your reader’s emotions they won’t keep reading. Plain and simple.

There’s a reason negative headlines perform better than positive ones, it’s because anger is easier to stir than joy. That doesn’t mean you need to make everything you write negative. But remember, you only have few seconds to grab your readers attention. So be smart, and play to your reader’s emotions.