Response to Chapter 2, 3, & 5

Hannah Chenoweth

Reading Response

September 10^th, 2014

                After reading Chapters 2, 3, and 5, I realized that to be concise is to be efficient. I have some trouble with this; I always find myself giving unnecessary over-explaining, details, metaphors, and using dramatic language. However, Chapter 5 was pretty clear about the fact that happy talk and instructions must die. I am going to keep my call to action straightforward because it’s not difficult to understand, but my usual tendency would be to over-explain. I believe following this advice will make my audience more likely to listen. I also need to make it clear that my call to action is clickable (a hyperlink) or else my entire presentation will be useless. The main message of almost all three chapters is that people whiz through things, so everything must be clear and purposeful. I now realize I shouldn’t include so many repetitive images of glasses, which I was going to include. One image will get the point across and keep the attention. I really liked the quote in Chapter 5: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”  Getting rid of noise was a main point as well. I have a lot of statistics about my issue, but in reality I should just pick a few that hit hard to be most effective. The rest will become just noise, knowing what we do about how the audience uses the web. What we know is that readers muddle through, scan, satisfice, etc. I plan to take what I learned to make my presentation as successful as possible.