—The Blog Series: Blog 16

Part 2: Write the Manuscript

Keep Your Readers Glued: The Top 5 Writing Techniques You Can Start Using Now!

Hold on to your seat—your writing abilities are about to accelerate. Here are the top five super-secret fiction-writing techniques you can use to grip your reader—and punch up the impact of your writing!—for every kind of writing you do.

#1—Shorter Paragraphs

Just a glance at pages filled with long paragraphs can give the reader unpleasant flashbacks to the stale, plodding textbooks he endured in high school and college. What’s more, long paragraphs of justified text can be laborious for the eye to follow, and important points can be lost if buried among a dozen other sentences.

The fix is easy—shorten the paragraphs.

In fiction, authors use short paragraphs to speed up the reading pace and ratchet up reader interest. Short paragraphs quickly move his eye down the page and keep him turning pages quicker. Subliminally, that suggests excitement. It’s the secret reason, unknown to audiences, why best-selling novels feel like, and are reviewed as, “page turners.”

In nonfiction writing, this technique delivers a great bonus: Content written in short paragraphs impacts the reader strongest.

Think about it. Which information on the past few blog posts stands out most in your mind? Which is the easiest to recall? Exactly, the information presented in short paragraphs. Not coincidently, it’s also the most important information.

Short paragraphs enable you to make one powerful, memorable point at a time. And they allow the reader to benefit from learning one concept at a time.

How can you develop this technique? Simple. Each mini-topic should have its own paragraph.

Try to limit most paragraphs to three or four sentences. If paragraphs are occasionally longer, no problem. You’ll still keep your reader engaged, and the information will still stick in his mind.

Present the most important information in even shorter paragraphs, as short as one sentence, to ensure that content will stick.

A word of caution: Avoid too many short paragraphs in close proximity. Frequent use of short paragraphs will produce a staccato feel and draw the reader’s attention to the technique and away from the information you want to provide.

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The content for this blog series is taken from my book Business Gold: How to Write a Book to Spotlight Your Expertise, Attract a Ton of New Customers, and Explode Your Profits!, available at Amazon.com. (The publisher, Business Book Productions, is now PogoFish Media, owned by the author of this article).