Triple Your Communication Power With This One Weird Trick

For months I’ve be dying to use this title, but I didn’t want to waste it. Today’s topic was a perfect opportunity because of this intensely valuable lesson: the title of a piece is its single most important component.

Follow me here and I think you’ll forgive the “one weird trick” trick.

There are two kinds of audiences– voluntary and involuntary. Your material’s title is critical in winning the minds of both groups, but in different ways.

Teachers who mark papers, panels who read proposals, and judges who read facta, for instance, have no choice but to read the tomes dropped in front of them. Readers of novels, magazine articles and the Friday Briefing, on the other hand, have no obligation to read anything.

Those of us who write for voluntary audiences understand the need to grab attention “out of the gate”, but those who write for an involuntary audience don’t always appreciate that this skill is just as important, and perhaps more so. If you are able to rise above your competition of mind-numbing, spirit-quenching drones, you’ll be a hero.

I should know. The law can be pretty dry– tax law especially, and divorce law not much better. When I was in law school I wrote a paper on the interplay between divorce and tax law. Deadly stuff.

But just because the subject matter is arcane, the written analysis need not be. Even after I had nailed the content and the analysis, I spent months writing and re-writing for style, and agonized to get the title just right. Then I submitted the paper.

Along with dozens of others, it went off to be read by long-suffering academics across the country. It was a decent paper and the analysis showed up in legal literature for some time, but it was the title, “Winding Up the Family: Some Tax Implications” which gave the paper the big lift it needed and won me the Lieff Prize and a tidy bit of cash.

You see, from the outset I was determined that the involuntary reader would pick up the paper and say, “Hmmm, now that’s interesting!” Apparently it worked. The involuntary reader is stuck with you, so use a good title to make friends at the outset.

The voluntary reader, however, is even tougher. They owe you nothing, they have no obligation to read. As a writer, it’s entirely up to you to grab the reader’s heart and soul and make them want to dive in. Your title is your big (and usually only) chance.

Whether your reader be voluntary or involuntary, your absolute best chance to have them read and assent is to grab their attention and goodwill with a clever, salient, memorable title.

And that’s almost the whole lesson, but not quite. It’s not complete without this: you can’t be a one-trick pony. No matter how amazing your title, if you don’t seal the deal in your opening paragraphs, you’ll still lose. The great title earns you an opening, but it’s only an opening. You have to validate the reader’s invitation to continue.

Hey, maybe you can triple your communication effectiveness just by learning to write knockout titles! But that’s not a weird trick– it’s only common sense.