Day 218: Use reader-friendly terms to persuade your reader to act.

Unless you are writing in a journal or a diary, you are writing to an audience. And if you want your reader to think, believe, or act in some way, you are writing persuasively. One of the ways to persuade your reader is to use terminology that reflects your reader’s interests.

While facts are fine, you need to show your reader how to think about them, i.e., you need to provide an interpretation of those facts. The interpretation should be relevant to the interests of the reader. This is a form of spin. You provide the information, but you provide it in a way that leads to a particular interpretation.

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For example, let’s say that a store is extending its hours on the weekends. The store owners want people to shop during those hours, particularly people who don’t otherwise shop at that store. The advertising people could distribute information saying

“ABC Store is now open until 8:00 p.m. on the weekends.”

This is the fact, but how does this connect with customer’s interests? On the other hand, the advertising people could interpret those facts and say,

“We extended our weekend hours for active lifestyles.”

A person receiving this information will think, “I’m pretty active. Those extended hours are perfect for me.”

Here’s another example. Let’s say a movie theater knows that the movie Three Candles won’t have many viewers. Three Candles is a gushy drama about parents’ relationships to their children, and that means low ticket sales. The theater owner realizes that lowering the ticket price will encourage more people to attend, and an increased audience size will more than make up for losses on individual tickets. How, then, will the theater owner get more people to buy tickets for Three Candles?

The theater could promote the facts:

“We are lowering our ticket price for Three Candles.”

That will encourage some people to attend. On the other hand, the theater could promote

“We’re offering family-priced tickets for Three Candles.”

Now, the reader may think, “Hey, I have a family, so I need to be careful about expenses. A family price is just what I need to take my family to the movies. Let’s go!”