SENDING SIGNALS!

Monday, June 04, 2012

Bulletize Your Presentations - Think Like A Mad Marketing Tactics Pro

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I enjoy narratives, explanations, details, wordsmithing, and the subtleties of the English language. I am a natural writer and I am also a natural reader. Sadly, that puts me in about 6.85% [an invented and unreliable statistic] of the populace of the English-speaking nations. I must discipline myself to distinguish between the art of writing and the art of communications. Hence, this article.

Effective messaging requires maximizing impact in minimal time. This means a employing a tremendous economy with words, reduction of narrative, breaking things down into sharp, brain-piercing pieces, and either providing numbered lists or bulletized lists. These later are preferred.

Here are the facts, and what to do about them:

1. Today’s reader is riddled with information hitting us from every side.
2. Traditional and online media assault our senses to the point of sensory shutdown.
3. Consequently, today’s reader is strongly attracted to numbered lists.
4. A numbered list promises a starting point, a conclusion, and milestones along the way.
5. A numbered list contains the fewest possible words.
6. A numbered list feels memorable, portable and doable.
7. A reader who would have glanced at your headline and then moved on will often give your message a second look when they see a numbered list.

8. Information in paragraphs feels casual and intimate.
9. Information in a numbered list feels authoritative and useful.

I wish that I could tell you more, but then, I'll simply make you forget about the significance of what you've just read.

Douglas E. Castle for The Sending Signals Blog and the Mad Marketing Tactics Blog.

Monday, October 24, 2011

The Messaging Power Of Poetry

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Douglas E Castle wrote:

"Poetry is the soul's tool to induce, in the reader, a transcendent experience. It has the means to engage all of the senses and to to envelop them in a pervasive and palpable mood. It is the ultimate alchemy of the written language, wherein the impressions created by the finished work, in total, far exceed the weight of the sum of the words taken individually. Perhaps poetry represents the most efficient means of written communication; it opens a heretofore invisible door and beckons the reader to enter a sacred, private dimension." ---------------

Never underestimate the power of well-crafted poetry to convey vivid messages and profound swings of mood. Throughout history, poems have inspired great acts and almost super-human deeds, just as they have driven many a lonely soul to take action to either satisfy its longing for communion with a companion, or to act, in resolute despair, to end its suffering.

Every poem is a like a painting, except that its point of entry to the inner person is through a different channel. Take some time to read some poetry. Take some time, if you're inclined to write some - it can teach you a great deal about yourself that you have long suppressed or hidden from your own conscious mind. It is profoundly cathartic, and pairs a person's inherent creativity with a message or story which needs to be given a voice.

Douglas E Castle [http://aboutDouglasCastle.blogspot.com]