Category: content creation

Thistle-Tomes

Thistle-Tomes

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

The following are my 2024 short takes on all things content in life and work:

  1. No one is an expert on AI yet. Take everything with a grain of salt.
  2. Sustainability should be part of every content strategy and content project.
  3. Lack of specificity on websites can be both a friend and an enemy. Vagueness can leave room for negotiation but also misinterpretation.
  4. Jargon in customer-facing content can be a significant barrier to understanding and engagement.
  5. Something I like to call “name theory” says that what you call something matters. And it doesn’t have to rhyme with “oom.”
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A Guide to Storytelling for Online Content

A Guide to Storytelling for Online Content

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

In today’s saturated digital landscape, standing out as a brand or subject matter expert requires more than just presenting facts and data. It demands capturing the attention and emotions of your audience through the age-old art of storytelling.

Whether you’re a business writer crafting marketing collateral or a technical writer documenting complex processes, incorporating storytelling into your online content can significantly enhance its impact and resonance with readers.

The Magic of Storytelling

Stories, the oldest and most powerful form of communication, have a unique ability to captivate and engage. As Cynthia Lockrey highlighted in her presentation “5 Tips for Impactful Storytelling” (American Migraine Foundation, June 29, 2023), stories are more than just a sequence of events. They are a vehicle for knowledge retention. Research suggests that they can boost retention by 2 to 10 times better than facts alone. But what makes stories so potent?

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Chunking for More Accessible Online Content 

Chunking for More Accessible Online Content 

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

In our omnichannel world, where attention spans are short and the cognitive load is great (thanks, AI!), effective content design plays a key role in reader engagement. It’s more important than ever to structure online text so that our readers can easily scan, understand, and retain the key points.

Double underline that for readers who rely on accessibility aids such as screen readers.

The element of content design you’ll want to apply is “chunking.” Chunking refers to breaking up information into meaningful, bite-sized sections or “chunks” that are relatively similar in scope and intensity. Visually, this means that your paragraphs are short, and there are fewer of them under each subheading.

Richard Johnson-Sheehan, the technical communication guru, generally refers to this idea as “partitioning.” Rather than presenting a dense wall of text, you divide your content into well-organized subsections with meaningful headings.

I offer some techniques for applying this element of content design here. However, the starting point is to understand how chunking aids the reader.

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6 Strategies for Writing Compelling Headings

6 Strategies for Writing Compelling Headings

Debra W Kahn (@debrawk.bsky.social)

I hate to admit that I still have stumbling blocks after decades of writing experience, but, ummm, I do. It’s writing headings. There! I wrote it down—in a public blog post.

If you have the same struggle, I can share some advice and tips with you. No need to go heading-less!

Headings are important because they serve as guideposts to our written content. When effective, they help our readers locate and conceptualize the information they seek from our organizations. (Remember when I wrote about scannability?) Effective headings are especially important in online content, where they continue to feed web search engines, even Google’s.  

Note that Google Search’s March 2024 core update attempts to assess a piece of content’s quality so that our search results contain fewer meaningless clickbait. This puts more pressure on content creators to develop original, helpful online content – including meaningful first- and second-level headings.

Those are strong motivators, right? So why is writing a good heading sooo hard?

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