Engaging Your Audience – Part Five – Keeping and Growing Your Audience

Engaging Your Audience – Part Five – Keeping and Growing Your Audience

Conflict #4: How do I keep them coming back?

The answers are brief, but the practice is essential.

1. Identify your Audience 
2. Stay Productive (Substance) 
3. Keep Relevant (Style) 

Identify your Audience.

Who are you working for? If you don't know, stop what you're doing and figure it out. There should be a clear image in your mind of the type of person you need to reach. They're out there, whoever they are, but you need to know before you waste days (years?) of energy and hundreds (thousands?) of dollars reaching them. Teachers have an easier time with this, since their audience is generated for them each year. Writers should do a quick internet search of your genre. Find threads and forums and figure out what needs are not being currently met.


Stay Productive.

Audiences are insatiable. They crave entertainment and information and if you are not continually producing, then they will move on to a new source. Don't take this personally. The audience certainly doesn't.

Imagine yourself an educator who attempts to teach the same lesson day after day or a writer who posts the same blog verbatim. Your audience would (and should) drop you in an instant.

Teachers are repeatedly tested professionals, who are forced to produce something new each day under threat of student riots and the supervision of curricular demands. By design, this focuses instructional development and improves the delivery of content.

Writers aren't so rigidly structured. As a rule, writers should blog between books. Not only does this keep you working until a new book idea develops, it helps maintain good writing habits.


Keep Relevant.

Social media is critical. Marketing yourself poorly is almost as bad as not having anything to promote.

This is the second-most important skill-set of any self-published writer. Authors need a website and a smattering of accounts on Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, Pinterest, or Linkedin. Without these steps, your work may never get discovered.

Unfortunately, teachers are insulated in a system that doesn't require them to be relevant. That doesn't mean that many pioneers haven't taken it up on themselves to do so anyway. www.Edmodo.com is the classroom's Facebook. This username and password protected site allows for discussion and assignment posting as well as a quiz generator, gradebook, and class calendar. It is the current primary and secondary school answer to the university-level site, Blackboard.


Final Thoughts.

Audiences are the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins. Since we breathe and pump blood on reflex, we often forget how critical these systems are to our survival until they are threatened. Consider your audience carefully or risk throttling your efforts before they have a chance to thrive.

Engaging your Audience – Part Four – The Closing

Engaging your Audience – Part Four – The Closing

Conflict #3: How do I close strong?

The ending is the most important part of any story. The audience will forgive a sagging middle and a less-than-amazing start as long as the end leaves them breathless.

Strong endings don’t NEED surprise plot twists.
Strong endings don’t NEED huge explosions.
Strong endings don’t NEED an amazing reveal.
Strong endings don’t NEED to claim the life of your favorite character.

In fact, if any of these things happen without good reason, then they’d be meaningless by definition and possibly confusing to your audience.

Strong endings need to be strong. Loose ends need to be tied up neatly. Characters need to reach the end of their change. Activities need to be apparently relevant to the objective. The story needs to end logically and completely. Series episodes need to be resolved.

This theory works similarly to the way human memory functions. When remembering a series of happenings, people will generally remember the last event most clearly, the first event not as clearly, and the middle event(s) least clearly. This is called Serial Position Effect.

If your audience read or sat through your entire work, it is only right that they leave with the satisfaction that it was for something meaningful. If not, you’ll find it harder to hook them the next time.

Writers and teachers should plan solely with their end objective in mind and target every ounce of effort to that end without distraction.

Continued in Engaging Your Audience – Part Five – Keeping and Growing Your Audience

For writers: Nancy Kress wrote “How to Write Successful Endings” for the Writers’ Digest website.

For teachers: Claudia Pesce wrote a post, titled “7 Best Ways to End a Lesson,” in which she reviews a few short methods. “Strategies for Effective Lesson Planning” on the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching site is another great resource. Brenda Power wrote “Make Kids' Writing Shine: Using Beginnings and Endings to Teach Craft,” a great way to help students write stronger endings.

Engaging your Audience – Part Three – The Middle

Engaging your Audience – Part Three – The Middle

Conflict #2: How do I keep this audience engaged?

The part that often drags the most is the middle of any lesson or piece of writing. It is where all the technical information has to be conveyed to the audience. This is where, even if you have a solid opening, you risk losing people.

When delivering content, it is important to: keep it short, make it clear, and get the audience involved.

Keep it short.

Students and readers lose interest quickly. The difference is when a reader loses interest, they can move on. Students aren’t afforded that freedom, so you are left with a possible disruption. Keeping instruction and exposition short is important, but not nearly as much as clarity and audience involvement.

Make it clear.

Few things disengage an audience faster than being confused. It halts the flow of the narrative and forces the teacher or writer to spend more time explaining. This doesn’t mean that a mystery writer has to give away all of the information up front. Nor does it mean that a teacher can’t place unexpected surprises in her lesson along the way. Clarity only refers to the audience’s ease of understanding the given situation at the time. Without it, even the most ingenious twists and turns won’t make any sense.


Get the audience involved.

This is your ticket to get away with not making it short. As long as the audience is physically or emotionally active, they will tolerate a much larger dose of explanation. When writing, have your characters involved in something physical while talking. When teaching, keep instruction-to-engagement ratios low. Use techniques such as call-backs and break-out sessions.


In Practice.

My favorite example of the use of all three of these techniques in film is in the original Terminator movie, in which the entire back-story is given during a car chase. The characters and audience are emotionally tense. It takes the writers about five minutes to explain nearly forty years of history before resuming the intense action. (Explicit Language/Gun Violence)  

Structure and planning are the solution to any problems a teacher or writer may have with the middle of their product. It is always best to have your objective or your ending in mind before you begin. This way, you can be sure that all of your efforts are aimed to that end.


Continued in Engaging Your Audience – Part Four – The Closing


Further Resources

For teachers: Yen Yen Woo posted “How Experienced Teachers Incorporate Kinesthetic Learning into Academic Lessons” on the NYTeachers Blog.

For writers: Glen C. Strathy wrote a great post title, "Sagging Middle Syndrome: How to Rescue Your Novel from Its Fatal Effect."  The Script Lab posted "Writing Exposition: 5 Helpful Techniques." 

Engaging your Audience – Part Two – The Opening

Engaging your Audience – Part Two – The Opening

Conflict #1: How do I attract an audience?

Teachers and writers face the same problem when they have something to say: they need to attract and interest their audience.

When they fail, the consequences are obvious. Writers lose sales and teachers are faced with a disengaged mob of adolescents who are unable to leave. It’s not pretty.

In order to resolve this problem, we’ll look at some common wisdom and review some field tests from the front lines.

Remember: We’re examining these methods in the context of a writer’s drafting of a single piece and a teacher’s delivery of a single lesson or unit.

The irrefutable truth is that the opening statement or action must attract and hold the audience’s attention.

There are several methods and they all hinge on the immediacy of the first few moments.

1. Surprise/Shock – Teachers are limited in the amount of shock they can use in the classroom. They can’t have explosions or gunshots at the start of a lesson. Writers aren’t so tightly bound. Try to give your audience something that they wouldn’t expect. 
2. Quotations – Using a quote that is relevant to your lesson is a great way to introduce the content without being obvious or boring. This term takes on a different meaning for writers, since the quote can come from one of the characters you are introducing. Quotes bring life, voice, and perspective. 
3. Poetic – These lines take time to create. Think of them as less of a poetic structure and more of the intent of poetry, which is to evoke strong feelings. The powerful images set tone quickly and save you precious time when introducing ideas. 
4. Humor – The best advice I ever got was: “If you are not funny, don’t try to be.” Writing humor, just like comedic acting, is far more difficult than drama. Humor is topical, personal, and requires timing that not everyone has. If you feel comfortable starting with a joke or a witty observation, keep it short and relevant. 
5. Question – Rhetorical questions are common literary techniques because they lead the audience into a sense of urgency. This is different than the standard “Do Now” that teachers often write on the board and have students answer quietly at their seats while attendance is taken. These questions can’t be answered quickly and should challenge the audience’s natural state of apathy. 

There are other methods in the resources I have linked below, but these are the five that I use in my teaching and writing.

Using one of these approaches will help you attract your audience and hold their attention… for at least the first five minutes. Keeping their focus is a completely different story.

Continued in Engaging your Audience – Part Three – The Middle

Resources:

For Writers: Christopher Jackson wrote a great post, titled "The Most Important Sentence: How to Write a Killer Opening," in which he bullets four musts in opening lines.

For Teachers: Education Week Teacher posted “The ‘Do Now’ or ‘Do Never’?” as a commentary on standard approach. Iowa State University posted a “101 Ideas for a Great Start.” (Basics)

Engaging your Audience – Part One – The Conflict

Engaging your Audience – Part One – The Conflict

Audiences are fickle. Students and readers have infinite opportunities for entertaining and meaningless distraction. The question for a teacher or a writer becomes: How do I get them to pay attention to my material?

Teachers have a slight advantage. Even though the audience is divided into smaller chunks, students are placed in your care and told to listen to you. That doesn’t mean they have to like it, but the audience is there nonetheless. Teachers have an authority and an opportunity that writers don’t have when they are starting out.

When it comes to finding and engaging an audience, writers have a challenge similar to street performers in New York City. Thousands of people could stop and watch you at any given moment, but they are all busily hurrying along with their own plans. Writers need to make themselves an authority or at least someone worth watching for a few minutes.

Although there are differences, the problems are the same.

1. How do I attract an audience? 
2. How do I keep this audience engaged? 
3. How do I close strong? 
4. How do I keep them coming back? 

We’ll approach problems 1-3 as a direct correlation between the writer’s actions of writing a piece and the teacher’s actions of teaching a lesson. Question four has more to do with your approach outside of the classroom and beyond the keyboard.

Over the next few posts, I’ll go over each of these ideas in more detail.

Part Two - The Opening
Part Three - The Middle
Part Four - The Closing
Part Five - Growing your audience.

Content and Purpose in Writing

When it comes to teaching writing, we've all done it wrong before.

Everybody, including you and especially me, has failed at one point or another.

An opinion piece, by Dean Shareski, points out the problems with the lack of authenticity in the way writing is taught. Jay Mathews wrote an article about a return to context and content in the face of what may be considered the mass outsourcing of a writing teacher's job to grading software. These two writers make a critical observation. We have a problem with meaning, both in the purpose of a piece and the subject matter written. 

Many of the writing assignments we give to students have no meaning to them, yet we continue to hand them work that they couldn't care less about.

So, how do we put purpose and meaning into our students' writing? I'm experimenting with a twist on an old letter-writing assignment idea in the personal narrative unit I'm doing now.

The Assignment: Students are to write a personal narrative based on a positive experience they have had with a staff member in the school building. Principals and teachers, as well as professionals from the guidance, custodial, secretarial, and cafeteria departments are all acceptable options. The staff member involved in the experience that generated this personal narrative will be given a copy of the final draft to read.

By tying the students' options of topics for their personal narratives to real people in the school building, I hope to achieve a few goals:

1. The experience will be real, or at least far harder to fake.
2. Students will reflect on a learning experience that happened in their school building, giving them a greater sense of ownership where they learn.
3. Students will be motivated to perform at a higher level knowing that the person who is a participant in the positive experience will be reading the final product.

While the writing process of this assignment unfolds, I'll have the opportunity to teach the essentials of the writing process, organization, figurative language, literary techniques, dialogue, etc. The difference is that now those elements of writing are tools to an end, not the sole purpose of an assignment.

Grammar. Spelling. Punctuation. Topic Sentences. Similes. Metaphors. These are tools, no different than what is found on a carpenter's belt. They don't define writing anymore than a wrench or a hammer defines your home.

Content and purpose define writing. As long as teachers ground writing tasks in the real world, we'll end up with more meaningful experiences for our students.

Planning and Preparation in Teaching and Writing

Planning and Preparation in Teaching and Writing  

Working within the Four Domains

Even as a Language Arts teacher, I felt completely overwhelmed when I first started writing. Researching. Plotting. Drafting. Editing. Revising. Re-Editing. Re-Revising. Proofreading. Re-Re-Revising. Formatting. Self-Publishing. Marketing. It all seemed like too much. Despite having a great writing partner on my first book, Captain James Hook and the Curse of Peter Pan, many of the steps seemed so far off in the future that It felt like I'd never get there.

I am fortunate that I have a framework in place from teaching that helps define poor and best practices. Charlotte Danielson's four domains identify standards and objectives as well as establish a set guideline for administrators to assess and develop their staff. The four domains are also generic enough to apply to most professions, even writing. The new author should also recognize these steps. The similarities between the two can guide an author and help them critique their work.

Planning and Preparation (Research and Plotting)

Good teachers are great planners. Lessons and assignments are as well spaced and ordered as the timing and pacing of the classes themselves. Although students only see the presentable result of our planning, they benefit from our logical progression of forethought.

Principals, vice-principals, and supervisors focus their evaluations on preparation because most problems in the classroom can be solved in the planning phase. Even though administrators have the unfair advantage of hindsight in their corner, that doesn't make the teacher's use of forethought any less important.

Novice teachers/writers need to know the content/research, student/audience characteristics, and what resources are available. Knowledge of this domain helps teachers/writers set meaningful goals, design clear instruction/writing, and develop methods of assessing their work.

Teaching and/or Writing Resources Include: iTunes University, Outlining Sites, Mind Mapping Sites

Classroom Environment (Your Writing Space)

This domain, which creates an environment of respect, a culture for learning, and the ability to facilitate classroom procedures, carries through to writing as well.

The use of physical space is important to teachers and writers. Optimal conditions to learn or write are as varied as the learners and writers themselves. Some can perform their best in the fevered buzz of a crowded diner or park. Others need complete isolation in order to keep a thought going.

Students play an unpredictable role in the way the class unfolds. Knowing this, effective teachers minimize the impact of student behavior by using the classroom space. Likewise, writers should set up their space in a way that best suits their style and minimizes outside distractions.

Teaching and/or Writing Resources Include: Classroom Organization, Classroom Environment, Setting up a Writing Space

Instruction (Writing, Editing, Revising, and Proofreading)

Crafting delivery is key in teaching and writing. This domain is third because clear instruction or writing can only happen if the first two domains are met. Once the planning and classroom environment stages meet a basic level of proficiency, the implementing of instruction can begin. Although some teachers have a natural gift, others need to be instructed on how to communicate clearly with their students and have flexibility and responsiveness. The aspect of designing effective questioning and discussion techniques should be handled in the planning stage. Nearly all new teachers benefit from instruction on how to engage students in learning or provide constructive feedback.

Teaching and/or Writing Resources Include: Free Word Processing Software (Like OpenOffice or GoogleDocs), Glossary of Instructional Strategies, Useful Instructional Strategies

Professional Responsibilities (Developing Your Talents as a Writer and Self-Publisher)

Since new teachers are often obsessed with difficulties in classroom management or test scores, the fourth domain of professional responsibilities is often minimized. An effective mentor will emphasize the importance of teacher reflection and accurate record keeping. Parent contact should also be stressed. It is advisable for the peer mentor to sit in on guardian conferences, since that is a direct communication with the larger community. New teachers often lack an attitude of service to their school or employing district. Administrators and mentors should encourage participation in enrichment activities that establish a stronger bond between the new teacher and their environment. Peer mentors should review standards for professional development and professionalism in the teaching field.

Writers, too, need to put time into the community. Whether an author publishes traditionally or independently, they will need to work with a variety of professionals. Networking skills are critical when researching editors, marketers, and publishers. Several blogs are dedicated to finding quality professional partners.

Teaching and Writing Resources Include: Meetup Groups, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Diigo, Edmodo

Is it ever over?

Teachers and writers are never truly finished. The mistakes you make in a first year teaching are not that different than those you make writing and publishing a first book. The way to become a professional is to recognize where you went wrong and take steps to correct those errors in the future.

Because, let's face it, there will always be another class and there will always be a next book.