Lazy Writing Habits That Can Turn Off Your Audience

Increase your writing success by getting rid of writing habits that discourage your readers and decrease your success

Writing isn’t easy. When our writing isn’t flowing, it’s tempting to fall back on what we know. After all, isn’t that the most common advice given to writers, to write what we know?

But there’s a difference between writing something because it’s easy since it’s based on personal experience, and writing something that we strive to make relevant to a wide cross section of our readers. The latter takes a good deal of skill and the sweat of our brow. The former is just lazy. Lazy writing is a quick way to get readers to stop reading our work, both in the short term and the long term.

Writing for Yourself Instead of Your Audience

Lazy writing occurs when we are more aware of what we need instead of what our audience needs. Even when we think we’re focusing on our audience, we might be just thinking about what’s easiest for us to write.

Writing can be a frustrating business, especially when we want to write for ourselves but feel pressured to write for others. It’s really frustrating when we believe we’re writing for our audience but because we actually aren’t, the work we think readers will love bombs.

Sometimes when I write, I’m convinced I have a topic that will be useful and interesting to readers. When one of these articles doesn’t result in much reader engagement, I feel let down and sometimes confused. It feels like I don’t know what the reader wants from me and that I’m wasting my time doing something I’m not skilled at.

It’s easy to talk myself into “writing from the heart,” “writing my truth,” or “writing about commonalities,” erroneously believing that no one has anything truly unique that happens to them. Or that writing about something that is an experience that many people share is enough to engage my readers.

When we write for ourselves we can become myopic. We think that because something happened that impacted us, it will impact others similarly. This is only the case if the piece is written in a way that makes it possible for others to relate to the story and that they can get something out of it.

It’s important to write posts in a way that our audience will find them useful and that there’s something that they can easily apply to their own lives. Assuming that our experiences are common. so people will automatically relate without the need to put in much effort won’t get us the result we want.

We can write about both common and uncommon experiences in ways that readers find useful, making them want to read our stories or in ways that seem to relate to just ourselves and which come across as self-indulgent. Researching what our followers want to read about and the questions they need answered, then skillfully crafting articles that address these desires in ways that create connections between ourselves and our audience takes time, effort and practice. But unless we’re willing to put in the work, our writing will feel more like journal entries, giving the impression that, like Narcissus, we can’t stop gazing at our own reflection.

Don’t Bury the Lede

When you bury the lede you fail to cover the most important or interesting elements of a story in the first few paragraphs. It means your post doesn’t highlight the most actionable items at the beginning of the message. Lazy writing meanders philosophically or is stream of consciousness, such that it follows wherever our thoughts go without any attempt to organize or structure them. We may wander along for a while, providing a bunch of superfluous information or unrelated ideas, not getting to the point of the story until hundreds of words into it.

When I was trained in academic writing, there was a format and structure that was followed. This included a lengthy introduction covering all the research that had been previously done in the area going from most generally related to most specifically related, like a funnel. This was followed by method, results and discussion sections.

So the main thing people wanted to know, the results of the study, didn’t appear until more than halfway into the article. But this was what was expected and readers wanted to be able to evaluate the research based on what previous research had shown. However, This organization made it difficult for me to learn how to write for the internet, which requires an upside down funnel approach.

Today, readers aren’t willing to spend a lot of time reading before determining if the post addressed what they want to know. If you give them what they are looking for or given them too much information upfront, you will lose their attention, they will tune out and likely click off of your article and onto someone else’s. This is why putting a lot of irrelevant information at the beginning will not engage readers. While it’s fine to include background information in a story, it’s best to put it under a subheading and include it later in the post. This will let readers decide whether they want to spend time reading that information or not.

Include Examples, Recommendations and Implications

A good way to make your writing habits less lazy and more reader friendly is to include examples, recommendations or implications or ideally all of the above, in every article you write. These features make even an article that relates a personal story something that your audience can understand, connect with, and use in some way in their own life.

Recommendations capitalizes on an easily understood key fact, point, or idea to remember, that emerged over the course of your story by giving readers discrete actionable steps to follow to apply what you’ve discussed in your story.

I often put recommendations as the second to last thing as they naturally fit there, showing how what you discussed can be put into effect. For example, if the article is about the importance of supporting each other as writers, recommendations might include:

• Share the work of other writers with your network
• Provide a positive review, if possible, for a book they’ve written
• Let fellow writers know about publishing outlets you came across that fit their work
• Leave positive comments on their work

The implications of the story I put in a section I label, Takeaway which is the last section of my post. Whereas recommendations are actionable suggestions for the reader, implications are conclusions drawn from something that isn’t explicitly stated in the main text. The implications provide a clear statement of what can be learned from your story. For example,

The main takeaway for me is that we need to continue to find practical ways to support each other as writers so that we can all continue to grow, improve and feel satisfied in our life’s work. Making a point of communicating how we are doing this, can also encourage others to do so as well.

Takeaway

When we decide to take up freelance writing full time, we often believe we’re working for ourselves. But if we want to grow an audience and earn from our work, it’s important to remember we’re actually working for our readers and to write accordingly. This means finding out what they want to read and writing about it. We also need to make sure we hone our writing skills so our writing is as tight as possible so that every sentence counts and the story is well organized and clear. When we get rid of lazy writing practices, we greatly increase the likelihood that our audience will find our writing worth reading.

Natalie Frank has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology and often writes about how to create a more satisfying and successful writing life. She is the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications. Her collection of poetry, Disguised I Breathe, In Love I Hold, can be found on Amazon under her pen name, Taye Carrol. You can find links to her other work on Medium and follow her here.

If you enjoyed reading this story, you might also like these:

You can follow me and find links to all of my articles, essays, fiction and poetry on Medium here. Thanks for reading!