I got a mail from a friend asking me to use my literary skills or the lack of it to edit a mail that he wanted to send out to friends, in the hope that they would forward it to their friends and so on and so forth. I edited the article which was etched in the third dimension out here.
The thoughts that ran through my head while writing were:
1) The choice of media is important. Instead of sending the content out in a mail it would be more appropriate to put it on a blog and send the link to the blog out, so that there would be just one place for people to comment on it.
2) The other important thing was to add a tad bit of humor to the article, without which it becomes tough for unknown people to take an interest in it. Humor is important in life; its a means to more important ends, but not an end in itself. Humor is like food, water, blood and oxygen for a body, but that is not the point in life. But without it there is no life.
3) What we were trying to do is sell our article to the common populace. They are the customers, they have to buy in and they have a choice whether to do so or not. Then again the customer is not God, the customer is a human being and the only way to reach out is to write from your soul; the soul cannot be outsourced. I will only add the humor part and some tweaks here and there for better reading. The underlying content/message had to come from him.
PS: He hasn't paid me anything for the editing yet. need to get a treat from him :-)
What you find below are some excerpts from articles from http://www.gapingvoid.com/
Start a blog:
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Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, and people pay attention. Say something dumb, and youʼre ignored. We big media folk just can't seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to discern between smart and dumb. It makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one's business.
Write from the heart:
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There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you. As a professional writer, I am interested in how conversation scales. How communication scales, x to the power of n etc etc. Ideally, if you're in the communication business, you want to say the same thing, the same way to an audience of millions that you would to an audience of one. Imagine the power you'd have if you could pull it off. But sadly, it doesn't work that way. You can't love a crowd the same way you can love a person. And a crowd can't love you the way a single person can love you. Intimacy doesn't scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon. It's not a big deal. Whether you're writing to an audience of one, five, a thousand, a million, ten million, thereʼs really only one way to really connect. One way that actually works: Write from the heart.
The thoughts that ran through my head while writing were:
1) The choice of media is important. Instead of sending the content out in a mail it would be more appropriate to put it on a blog and send the link to the blog out, so that there would be just one place for people to comment on it.
2) The other important thing was to add a tad bit of humor to the article, without which it becomes tough for unknown people to take an interest in it. Humor is important in life; its a means to more important ends, but not an end in itself. Humor is like food, water, blood and oxygen for a body, but that is not the point in life. But without it there is no life.
3) What we were trying to do is sell our article to the common populace. They are the customers, they have to buy in and they have a choice whether to do so or not. Then again the customer is not God, the customer is a human being and the only way to reach out is to write from your soul; the soul cannot be outsourced. I will only add the humor part and some tweaks here and there for better reading. The underlying content/message had to come from him.
PS: He hasn't paid me anything for the editing yet. need to get a treat from him :-)
What you find below are some excerpts from articles from http://www.gapingvoid.com/
Start a blog:
------------
Blogs are funny things. Say something smart, and people pay attention. Say something dumb, and youʼre ignored. We big media folk just can't seem to get our heads around that concept, for some reason. Regular blogging can help train you to discern between smart and dumb. It makes it easier to extend this to the rest of one's business.
Write from the heart:
---------------------
There is no silver bullet. There is only the love God gave you. As a professional writer, I am interested in how conversation scales. How communication scales, x to the power of n etc etc. Ideally, if you're in the communication business, you want to say the same thing, the same way to an audience of millions that you would to an audience of one. Imagine the power you'd have if you could pull it off. But sadly, it doesn't work that way. You can't love a crowd the same way you can love a person. And a crowd can't love you the way a single person can love you. Intimacy doesn't scale. Not really. Intimacy is a one-on-one phenomenon. It's not a big deal. Whether you're writing to an audience of one, five, a thousand, a million, ten million, thereʼs really only one way to really connect. One way that actually works: Write from the heart.
4 comments:
Write from the heart.
And write for yourself.
I know and thats why I said, "The soul cannot be outsourced".
I only added the humor part... and some tweaks here and there for better reading....
Alice, i am trying very hard to visualise u saying all this on a stage facing 1000000 people...
charismatic content
Reema... But I am saying this on stage facing 1000000 people :-)
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