Your Attention Please: How to Appeal to Today's Distracted, Disinterested, Disengaged, Disenchanted, and Busy Audiences

First off, this is one of the few books that describes writing and does what they describe, from the personal tone of the book, to the little stories to help you remember the point. A really good read, with lots of tid bits of information that can be used in everyday writing and corporate America. A good read and probably one that should be included in a Writing Course for some college.

This amazingly compact book is packed with invaluable information and instruction on how to create writing that's clear, concise, and compelling. No matter what type of writing you do, it will teach you how to use words (or lack of them) to frame their intended meaning with brevity, less distraction and greater comprehension. Order it now. You won't be disappointed.

Of the hundreds of books on marketing, advertising and sales that are available, few offer the valuable insight that you will get from this book. The three chapters on "Focus on 'You'", "Tell a Story" and "Stay Short and Sweet" are worth the price of the book alone.

Unfortunately, too many people will probably think that the ideas that are presented in the book are too simple to work. Don't make that mistake! As a consultant who helps companies improve the effectiveness of their advertising and related communications, I can tell you that I have been using many of these ideas with my clients for years and they do work!

If you are in business and want to improve your advertising and communications, buy the book and read it at least three times. Then put the ideas to work. You will see a positive impact on your business!

If you're like me, you've been writing for a good long time and it's something you can handle with ease. But guess what? People don't read! Why? If Sleepless in Seattle were re-written today, the "You've got mail" voice would say "You've got more mail than you can hope to read. Ever."

Even if your message is GOOD, even if your message is IMPORTANT, even if your message is WELL WRITTEN, it's no guarantee it will even be read, much less remembered.

So, _Your Attention Please_ introduces you to "the high concept" and other techniques you can employ to create a well-crafted message (email, blog, report, presentation). There's nothing _really_ ground-breaking in terms of writing techniques in this book--focus on your audience, develop a clear message, keep it short--but it's *how* the book covers the topic that makes it so good. It walks its own talk: examples, visuals, sidebars, and anecdotes keep you flipping. I have an outlined summary of the book that I keep on my computer desktop and scan before sending out any important emails or creating presentations and trainings. Actually, to improve one more on the book, I would include a quick-reference card for those of us who want to practice the message without having to crack the book again.

And now the bad news. Did you hear the one about the writer who handed in her 600-page novel to her publisher, saying, "I was going to write a short story, but I didn't have the time"? _Designing_ a message takes a lot more effort than just writing one, which is probably why there are so many awful emails out there. Just try it once: take an idea you have and see if you can "high concept" it. You have to work harder than if you just started blathering on. So you can read the book, but you still have to wax-on and wax-off before you can be the karate kid.

One last note: I would give this book 5 stars, except that it had peppered throughout a number of anecdotes that didn't really support the point being made, and since the book was otherwise so tightly designed, they felt like pebbles in my shoe. For example, to illustrate a point about reading levels, they tell a good story about an online reading comprehension test. Great! But then they follow that with a story about visiting a website that can translate your writing into pig latin, jive, valley girl, and swedish chef. Ok, fun, but not at all relevant to the point about reading levels.

Quite simply, the most comprehensive look at the new procedures for trying to talk to prospective clients that I've read in the last couple of years. I bought 3 to hand out to past and hopefully future clients.
It's practical and short and to the point, emulating what the book tells us to do.