ARE PEOPLE MISSING YOUR POINT?
If you find that your clients or bosses aren’t getting what you have to say, it may be because you are starting your communications in the middle.
When I was working as a journalist, sometimes my editor would tell me that I was “burying the lead.”
What that meant was that the most newsworthy, most relevant information was not in the first paragraph but further down in the fourth and fifth and no one was going to read that far.
In business communication, people bury the lead all the time, putting background information first before getting to the why this matters.
As you craft your communication, think about the point you want to make and how that point is useful or important to your audience.
What might their questions be? For this post it might be, how can I get people to pay attention to what I say or write?
In today’s attention fragmented world, you have got to give people a reason to read or listen to what you have to say.
That means stimulating curiosity and interest right upfront. Sounds pretty basic, right? But none of us does this enough.
By framing your communications this way, you have a better chance of getting heard.
Please share some examples you see of communication that buries the lead.
