Rumor has it that your brand’s content must be dryer than sand to attract interested readers.

But is that your high school English teacher whispering in your ear?

Well, it’s time we free our minds and liberate our pens.

Because the truth is that our content is a conversation with our readers.

As Donald M. Murray once said, “Effective writing should be conversational.”

That said, let’s talk.

But first, please remember that what follows are tips, not rules. Use them as appropriate and ignore them when not.

1. Pose engaging questions

How do you describe the color of your eyes?

I’ll give you a second.

Most likely, you paused to reflect, then snatched an image of your irises to arrive at your answer.

In a split second, you visualized your response. I grabbed your attention just by asking a simple question that you saw long after I wrote it.

That’s the power of questions in your content. Questions engage your readers, simulating the feel of a conversation. They pull in your audience and give them a reason to care. They show you’re talking to readers, not through readers.

Questions spark what David Hoffeld calls instinctive elaboration: “When a question is posed, it takes over the brain’s thought process. And when your brain is thinking about the answer to a question, it can’t contemplate anything else.”

Essentially, questions hijack readers’ attention.

In this introduction to an article from Whole Foods Market, the author asks relatable questions – conversation starters – that pull readers into the article: