The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming

I was feelin' sad and kinda' blue,
I didn't know what I was a gonna do.
The Communists was comin' around,
They was in the air,
They was on the ground,

They wouldn't gimme no peace.

                                                                                        — Bob Dylan

Russian trolls have invaded our homeland, according to The Atlantic.

Posing on social media as angry Americans, they're riling our political factions.

"The ultimate intent is not so much victory for a certain side, but a loss for everybody: sapping the credibility of US institutions and tearing open as many wounds as possible," The Atlantic reports.

"After Election Day, we should not be surprised to find a vocal group of internet users with mysterious IP addresses decrying the result as a fraud and driving talk of conspiracy—and even of resistance or secession.

"In time, we may see a multiplying number of homegrown violent extremists (along the lines of the infamous Oregon militiamen), encouraged by the subtle manipulation of a certain rival government."

They have us by the brains.

Our only defense: a little critical thinking.

According to The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking, " Much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought."

To improve your critical thinking, the Guide says, you need to:

• Raise and formulate important questions clearly and precisely;
• Gather relevant data and use abstract ideas to interpret that data;
• Come to reasoned conclusions you can test against others' standards;
• Stay open minded and explore alternative systems of thought; and
• Communicate effectively.

Laundry Lists Kill

Want to kill audience interest quickly? Use a laundry list.

"We think dumping the entire contents of the benefits-basket onto a reader, viewer, or listener will outpull selective choice," copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis once said. "Not so, because emphasis becomes diluted. When you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing."

But wait, it gets worse.

Laundry lists not only kill interest. They can kill a deal.

Good salespeople know this intuitively: If you want to kill a deal, introduce an extraneous element. Laundry lists introduce baskets of them.

Laundry lists bar interest and block deals. So avoid them.

To create a responsive ad, letter or email, choose one benefit your audience values, and subordinate the rest.

Content Marketers: Don't Take It Anymore

Content marketers: Don't be a one-hit wonder.

By repurposing your most popular piece, you can enjoy a string of hits, says Emily King on ContentMarketingInstitute.com.

Copywriters at King's B2B agency transformed "The Seven Types of B2B Copywriter," an article in the firm's newsletter, into 10 additional pieces over two years.

"We realized that this message had legs, after seeing good click-through rates," King says.

"We decided that it would be a shame to limit that message’s audience to the select (read tiny) bunch of discerning B2B marketing professionals who subscribed to our newsletter. We had to take the message wider."

By "atomizing" the article, King's agency stretched the shelf-life of the original piece, and reached audiences who prefer their content delivered through platforms other than an e- newsletter.

As a result, her agency's revenue increased 28%.

From the article, King's copywriters created:

• A blog post (a simple cut-and-paste job)
• A podcast (featuring an outside journalist)
• A board game (Funnel! The Content Marketing Strategy Game)
• A conference presentation (The 7 Types of B2B Copywriter)
• A second podcast (featuring highlights of the presentation and a slide deck)
• A second blog post (recounting the development of the board game)
• A third podcast (featuring interviews with the game creators)
• A quiz (allowing B2B copywriters to identify their types)
• An infographic (depicting the 7 types of copywriter)
• A third blog post (namely, the King wrote for ContentMarketingInstitute.com)

Chunking the original article worked, King says. "Each new effort not only garnered new interest in our idea and our business, but also brought a new audience to our related content pieces."

Try it yourself.

You don't have to be a one-hit wonder anymore.

Give Hooptedoodle the Heave-Ho

There’s a great power in words,
if you don’t hitch too many of them together.

— Josh Billings

"Delete" is the key to sharper storytelling—and maybe the cure for Content Shock.

Or, as novelist Elmore Leonard put it, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

The web's awash with crap content, writing that confuses and bores and bogs down readers with too much "too much."

Prolix writing exhausts us; and writers who produce it, Leonard says, are "perpetrating hooptedoodle," a word coined by another novelist, John Steinbeck.

Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday (a sequel to Cannery Row) included a prologue that featured two characters speaking, Mack and Whitey No. 1.

One night Mack lay back on his bed in the Palace Flop house and he said, “I ain’t never been satisfied with that book Cannery Row. I would of went about it different.”

And after a while he rolled over and raised his head on his hand and he said, “I guess I’m just a critic. But if I ever come across the guy that wrote that book I could tell him a few things.”

“Like what?” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well,” said Mack, “like this here. Suppose there’s chapter one, chapter two, chapter three. That’s all right, as far as it goes, but I’d like to have a couple of words at the top so it tells me what the chapter’s going to be about. Sometimes maybe I want to go back, and chapter five don’t mean nothing to me. If there was just a couple of words I’d know that was the chapter I wanted to go back to.”

“Go on,” said Whitey No. 1.

“Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing—I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,” he went on. “I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it—but not too much of that.”

“You sure are a critic,” said Whitey No. 2. “Mack, I never give you credit before. Is that all?”

“No,” said Mack. “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. The guy’s writing it, give him a chance to do a little hooptedoodle. Spin up some pretty words maybe, or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up in the story. So if the guy that’s writing it wants hooptedoodle, he ought to put it right at first. Then I can skip it if I want to, or maybe go back to it after I know how the story come out.”

Indeed, Sweet Thursday readers could encounter two fancy chapters inside, "Hooptedoodle 1" and "Hooptedoodle 2." They could skip them, if they wished.

Storytelling won't advance your goals if you don't recognize the power of well-chosen words. Don't burden readers with hooptedoodle; leave long-form flights of fancy to the poets.

There's power in your "Delete" key.

Use it.

Exorcise Adverbs

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Stephen King

Click-baiters adore adverbs:

• Powerfully Effective Content Marketing
• The Writing Resolution You Can Actually Keep
• The Amazingly Simple Anatomy of a Meaningful Marketing Story
• 8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content
• How to Immediately Become a More Productive (and Better) Writer
• What to Do When You Absolutely, Positively Must Know If Your Content Will Rock

But adverbs overpromise and add little; in fact, they weaken the words they modify.

Dressing up a word with an adverb is like "putting a hat on a horse," claims The Elements of Style.

Don't do it.

Don't overdress your words.

Understatement's the best way to put forth an idea, as the late copywriter Herschell Gordon Lewis insisted.

Good writers get this.

Adverbs rarely appear on pages crafted by Kurt Vonnegut, Elmore Leonard or Stephen King.

But look at a passage by an over-writer like William Peter Blatty (taken from his novel The Exorcist):

The Jesuit moved slowly forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went calmly up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

Here the same passage again, with the adverbs exorcised:

The Jesuit moved forward, oblivious of Chris, who was gaping in wonder; of Karl, stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. He went up the staircase, slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister.

Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then the demon laughed and Merrin came out. He closed the door and started down the hall. Behind him, the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him, an odd expression on her face.

More chilling, no?