Writing & Content Creation

5 Rules for Thought-Provoking Content

How to make your audience think deeply

One habit I’m using in my reading sessions is to take notes of the sentences that catch my attention and save them in a draft that I’m keeping for myself. This habit helped me to create articles like “How to transform your dull sentences into engaging ones?” and “5 tips for snappy and efficient technical writing” which were loved by many readers.

A few days ago, I checked the draft again and was surprised that it contains almost 15K words. I read it again and noticed that many of these sentences are thought-provoking. This reminded me of one writer who left this platform a year ago: Zat Rana. I started reading his essays in 2018 and though I don’t agree with all his ideas; I enjoyed a lot of his work for a simple reason: it’s thought-provoking.

Thus came the idea of creating this piece where I tackle five rules I’ve noticed in what we call thought-provoking content.

In order for content to trigger you, it should challenge your view, sharpen your critical thinking skills, or invite you to clarify your thought processes. In the next section, I’ll break down some common techniques to do this — along with many examples — that you can apply to grab your audience’s attention and trigger some psychological or emotional response in them. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Table of Contents

1. Ask Questions
2. Strong Statement
3. Inspiring Quotes
4. A Creative Thinker Voice
5. Metaphors and Idioms

Ask Questions

Knowing how to ask a question is an art and a way to live an authentic life. Sometimes, the clue to solving a tough problem is finding out the right question to ask because an open-ended question causes you to think deeply.

Examples:

Why many creative people who worked for Steve Jobs said they will never ever work for him again?
“Can humans live without an overarching narrative to guide their lives? Can society survive without the binding glue of God and morality as one?” — Materialized Meaning
“How long does it take to build a permanent habit? How long until you can reap the rewards of an exercise regimen or a work routine without having to think about it?” — The Problem With Habits
“Why do people do what they do? What are the patterns that govern the laws of nature? Ever since I can remember, I have been fascinated by these questions and their implications.” — On taking the next step in the journey
How to find a common origin story that many people can relate to?
Are you trying to fit in and find your tribe?
What’s the most important marketing skill to have on your resume?
What experience you would like to have under your belt?
How amenable are our societies to change scenarios?
“What gets you geeked about writing?” — The Writing Cooperative

Strong Statement

A strong statement is a confident claim about your topic. It’s a great technique because your readers will want to see how you support it regardless of if they agree or disagree with your declaration.

Examples:

“There are two states of being: surviving and thriving. To survive is to limit downside, to eliminate the risk of ruin — it means fulfilling our basic need for food and shelter and companionship. Thriving is different: It’s an attempt to transcend a state of existence not out of fear but out of desire and yearning.” — Why Don’t Most People Reach Their Potential?
“One of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century, ironically, thought that the discipline of philosophy was mostly useless.” — The Experience Paradox
“Creativity is nothing more than emergence. Whether it’s producing a divergent mathematical system to ground a new approach to physics or simply making a new dish for the guests, the product — the art, the formula, the technology — is a whole that is generated out of a set of existing, disparate parts.” — The Genius Advantage
“Humans are driven to act by two primary sources of motivation: fear and desire. We avoid what is harmful, what is painful, what has the capacity to damage us. We strive for what is beneficial, what is pleasant, what has the capacity to fulfill our hopes and dreams.” — Beyond Insecurity
“Scientists have known for a while now that galaxies within a few million light-years of distance can affect each other in predictable ways. What they didn’t know, however, was that there are possible interactions that can supposedly occur between galaxies that are 10 and, sometimes, 20 million light-years away from each other that can’t be explained by our current cosmological models of the Universe and mere gravitational fields.” — The Invisible Strings
“There are three competing theories behind why the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche went insane: the first, the most popular, is that he contracted Neurosyphilis; the second, based on a study of his medical records, suggests that he began to show signs of dementia; the third is simply that he mentally saw things or thought things that pushed him over the edge.” — The Art of Balancing Inner and Outer Complexity

Inspiring Quotes

An inspirational quote might be a good idea to start your topic with. Make sure you choose a relevant quotation where the words are striking, powerful, or memorable so that the reader will be more inclined to keep reading.

Examples:

“‘The author must keep his mouth shut,’ Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, ‘when his work starts to speak.’ The rumble of these words echos an important truth.” — What I Believe
“‘All of humanity’s problems,’ the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in his Pensees, ‘stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’” — The Difference Between Being Alone and Being Lonely
“‘Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be,’ the late polymath Blaise Pascal wrote in his now-famous notebook Pensees, ‘if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.’” — What is it that makes us endure?
“‘Time,’ Jorge Luis Borges wrote, ‘is the substance I am made of… a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.’ What the great Argentinian writer was meditating on here is the paradox inherent in our experience of change.” — How to Be a Healthy, Emotionally Mature Adult
“‘And here comes in the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved,’ Niccolò Machiavelli pondered some 500 years ago. ‘It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both; but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.’” — Power as Differentiation

A Creative Thinker Voice

I love this technique — which leverages the strategic use of words to construct a specific reality for the audience — for many reasons:

It creates an artful story.
It helps the readers to see connections, uncover hidden opportunities, and be more creative themselves.
It helps as well to figure out a way to resolve an argument and ideating potential solutions for complex problems.
A writer using this technique does not sound like he is forcing some views on the audience. He rather seems to think aloud or answering a question that you’ve never asked.

Examples:

There is something missing. I get it. But I need to verbalize it. I need to put it into words. Am I ready for it?
“My mind is calm. My blood boils. I don’t know when it changed. I don’t know what changed. This mind used to be scattered. The container was composed. The more the world makes sense, the less I have to say about it. The less I suffer, the less I feel the need to write.” — Is Happiness the Acceptance or the Absence of Suffering?
“What is most obvious is also often most concealed. Much of what we think we know has depths never ventured to because we mistake the surface for the bottom. Such is the case, especially, with human potential.” — What Does It Mean to Be Great?
“Many of the people I feel the most affection for in my life are dead. In fact, a majority of them I have never met. They were bound by different fragments of space, different periods of time, than the dimensional intersections that I occupy.” — Reading Is a Conversation
“Something strange happened with the birth of the internet; something changed about how we understand our identity and our existence. And that something was that our sense of self got translated into 0s and 1s so that we could project a part of our being as a single node into a global network of nodes made up of other-selves.” — The Most Important Skill in the 21st Century
Usage of analogy: “The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s. The speed of sound is a mere 343 m/s. One consequence of this difference is that during extreme weather conditions, we tend to see lightning before we hear the thunder. There is an analogy here that we can use to understand how events in a chain of causes and effects play out.” — How to Predict the Future in an Uncertain World

Metaphors and Idioms

Metaphors are more than just linguistic ornaments; they have psychological effects. A good metaphor helps you to generate new ideas for solutions and realize or feel something you otherwise might not have.

Idioms, on the other side, don’t always make sense literally as well but they let a message sound more snappy and effective.

Examples:

“An elegant foreign language stretched like a glistening membrane atop the ‘real’ language of the people.” — Benjamin Moser
My jaw dropped to the floor when I read his answers.
I’m sure other vendors also have some pretty ugly skeletons, barely in their closets.
I hope you enjoyed your time in the land of rainbows and all things shiny and nice because we’re about to get slapped around the face by the wet fish of reality.
They sprinkle their policies with a steady stream of social proof.
This is the swamp upon which our castles are built.
I have too many ideas and instincts bouncing around in my brain.
Clichés are the backbone of most genres and stories, and they have become quite familiar to readers.
“In physics, numbers and formulas provide the fixed nails on which theories hang as they find their final form.” — The Purpose of Life
It remains an important reference for understanding the ebbs and flows of the digital market.
Singing with the unimpeded optimism can only be seen ironically in shade of the economic devastation and our hindsight knowledge of it.
I’m often struck by how much of our lives go by in a kind of non-noticing haze.
The Arab spring is being put out to pasture.
You can hit the ground running on your next project.
He needs something to help him over the rough spot.
The example I gave is at the shallow end of that spectrum, but it’s not obvious without some careful practice.

Final Thought

To write an essay on a topic that might elicit strong opinions, you should write in such a way that your ideas are open for interpretation and thus can be evaluated by your readers through their own personal lens.

It is important to consider the contextual meaning of your words. Using synonyms and other semantic devices as well as conjunctions to open new contexts can make your content sound more persuasive and engaging for your audience.

Finally, when writing about something that is thought-provoking, it’s important to keep the tone light and positive. You don’t want your readers to get angry or frustrated when they read the essay.

🧠💡 I write about engineering, technology, and leadership for a community of smart, curious people. Join my free email newsletter for exclusive access or sign up for Medium here.