Think about the commitment someone is making when they choose to read something you give them. It’s substantial. The act of reading is the act of giving your time and attention to someone else’s ideas, and we’d argue that time and attention are the two most valuable pieces of yourself you can offer up, precisely because you can’t put a price on it.
What’s more, giving your time and attention means you’re not only receptive, but also willing to share if it’s compelling enough to do so. The concept of sharing information is the power behind social media, and it’s the precursor to achieving “cred” — the more people speak about you, the more people know you, what you do and why they should care.
A good writer is keenly aware of these facts and makes for damn sure that whatever their reader is committing to is going to offer value in some way. Every scribe has their own way of measuring this. For us it’s the dinner party test.
“So listen to this…”
We love when dinner party conversations start this way because we know we’re about to learn something new. And illumination’s a great feeling, especially when it comes at an unexpected place like dinner with friends. In every piece we write we try to include something worth breaking out at a dinner party — an argument, a fact in support of an argument or a perspective that chops an argument down. Either way, we do the digging and wordsmithing to work it in. To us, that’s the ultimate value-add: something a reader can take away and use at a later date for their own purposes, in this case, to add to (or improve) a dinner party conversation.
The three qualities of dinner-parrty worthiness
Well-researched. Clearly articulated. Surprisingly different. It’s that simple. And it’s category agnostic. Whether we’re writing about sports gambling, investing in cultural programs, building circuit boards or chicken caesar pitas (FYI: we wrote about all of these this month), we go the extra mile to give our readers something they can break out at a dinner party. It makes our clients happy because people are talking about them. It makes our readers happy because it gives them something to talk about. And it makes the dinner party host happy because at a good dinner party, the conversation flows as freely as the wine.