Steve Jobs was an inspiring speaker and one of the greatest marketing minds of our generation, but what most people overlook is that Steve Jobs’ principles and strategies can be applied to writing. If you’re a writer, you can stand to learn a few lessons from Steve Jobs himself even if you’re not planning on writing for the tech sector. These lessons include:
Take advantage of the headline
If you pay attention to Steve Jobs’ presentations, you can see that every time a product is featured on a slide, he includes a short, catchy headline. It’s not really needed because he’s already talking about the product, but it catches people’s attentions. People have been trained to pay attention to headlines, so if you have something important to say or want to attract people’s attention, use a headline in your text.
Treat your ideas like architecture
If you look at some of Steve Jobs’ news posts or essays at the Apple website, such as his thoughts on Adobe Flash, you’ll see that he had a habit of layering ideas and building on each one. In his defense of Apple’s decision to remove Flash, he had a main point (removing Flash was good for the end users) but used several related ideas to prop up and support the said point (Flash is unsecure, closed source, and unoptimized). In his writing, Jobs’ didn’t just present a single idea. He presented multiple layers of thoughts and used them to build and support a main one. As a writer, you can adopt this approach and create strong, solid text with ideas that are supported and well reasoned.
Give people something to rally against
Well, saying that Jobs inspired hate is grossly inaccurate as we’re sure Jobs wasn’t asking people to knock Microsoft or Google’s headquarters down, but the main reason Apple’s users are so loyal is because Jobs had a knack for giving people something or someone to rally against. Doing so positioned Apple as the alternative against other tech companies and in effect gave its users a shared enemy of sorts. Writers can take this to heart if they want to write something that will turn people into evangelists or loyal followers – give them something to band against.
Educate and entertain at the same time
This is one of the reasons why Steve Jobs is heralded as a genius while other marketers who are probably just as good still languish in obscurity: Jobs understood that people get bored easily, even if what you’re telling them is an extremely important matter. So, he presented information while entertaining the audience through humor, or he peppered his information with demos of the products and slightly related anecdotes. This is something a writer should never forget: your job is to present information or express ideas, but you also need to keep the reader engaged enough for them to finish reading. So, try to throw them a bone every once in a while. Insert a humorous but related anecdote, pepper your text with witty asides, and try to add flavor to your writings whenever applicable.
Image credit: segagman on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/hv1.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Hiten Vyas is the Founder and Managing Editor of eBooks India. He is also a prolific eBook writer with over 25 titles to his name.[/author_info] [/author]