Are your web pages written in the style of debate or conversation?

Stephen Pinker dispels two of the myths about Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential debate performance in today’s New York Times (Everything You Heard Is Wrong). He persuasively argues that she didn’t successfully survive a trial by fire, as her supporters suggest. Nor does her accent betray naïveté, as her detractors would like to think. The column is worth a read.

Conversation and debate

But this post is not about Sarah Palin. It’s about an observation of Pinker’s on conversation versus debate.

Pinker was explaining the difference between the requirements of a debate and the requirements of a conversation. In a debate format, like last Thursday with the moderator sitting thirty feet away and the television cameras rolling, it’s acceptable to change the subject or not even answer the question. You can get by with a sentence like this one from Palin in response to Gwen Ifill’s question about the bailout package in Congress:

You know, I think a good barometer here, as we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America’s economy, is go to a kid’s soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, “How are you feeling about the economy?

Huh? What did she say? We don’t know, but somehow it worked in the debate format.

But in a conversation the sentence above would make no sense. In a conversation you are sitting directly across from the other person only a few feet away. Each of you is responding directly to the other, or the conversation dies. The response above would be baffling.

Here’s how Pinker describes it: “In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question.”

Conversational web pages

Pinker’s observation about conversation made me think of web pages, especially web pages in a site that is meant to persuade. Although pages on a persuasive website aren’t actually a conversation, we write them as though we are in an imaginary conversation with the reader. We write them by picturing a particular visitor or persona reading a sentence or paragraph, then asking a question, and then writing to respond to the question.

When this visitor reads paragraphs that are self-serving and written as though the page is from thirty feet away, the visitor quickly tunes out.

A visitor is much more likely to be drawn into a page if it is written in a way that builds sentence by sentence, that seems to be monitoring the visitor’s response, and that is aiming for relevance to the visitor’s question.

Writing conversationally

How to write pages that are conversational and persuasive?

Write to a particular person. You can imagine a real person if you want, or create a persona that represents a profile of one of your typical visitors. The Eisenberg’s have written extensively on the use personas here, here, and here.

Write to a particular set of questions. Brainstorm the questions you would expect a visitor to have about the subject on the page, then address all those questions. You want to write in a way that you are monitoring the response of your imaginary visitor, anticipating their questions or objections, and responding to them in a way that the visitor finds relevant.