How to make your writing deliciously moreish

Sometimes reading is like wading through congealing porridge. If you really need to get to the point the author is trying to make you’ll persevere. But more often than not you’ll just give up and stop.

At other times it just dances along easily, one tasty sentence after another. Just like devouring a bag of salty crunchy crisps, or savouring a bowl of smooth vanilla ice cream. Every mouthful is delicious, and you can’t help yourself going back for more.

How do you make your writing tastier so that people keep on reading?

The food and eating analogy is useful because reading is a sensory experience. Words spark pictures and connections in our minds, and it’s as though we’re seeing, hearing or even tasting what we’re reading on the page. (Hands up if you enjoy reading cookery books, even when you’re not cooking anything!)

Food writers like Nigella Lawson or Nigel Slater do this brilliantly. Their writing is sensory, evoking the scents, sounds and textures of their recipes as surely as they do the quantities and instructions. 

You might think that it’s not too tricky to make a piece of writing about chocolate or melted cheese mouthwateringly good - although it’s easily as skilful as any other genre of writing. But what about if you’re writing about human resources or IT? How do you make content about business development or recruitment more tasty?

How do you make subjects that are a bit dry, not only palatable, but downright delicious?

Spice up your writing

If you’d like to make your writing more compelling, and like the idea of getting more creative, try spicing up your copy like this.

Ready salted crisps writing

Who can resist crisps? They’re so easy to consume. You don’t need a knife and fork or a plate to enjoy them. They’re instantly gratifying. And it’s almost impossible to eat only one of them, you have to keep going. It’s the combination of saltiness and thin crunchiness that makes them so irresistibly moreish. 

Mouthfeel is a word the food industry uses to describe the way a food feels in the mouth, as distinct to the taste. And we’re talking about the feel of the writing here, not the content. What emotions do you want to evoke through your writing? How do you want your reader to feel as they make their way through your copy? You can emulate the mouthfeel you’re after through your choice of words and the way you construct them into sentences.

If you want your reader to keep reading without having to think about it too much, make your sentences crunchy, like crisps.  Keep them short and spiky. Think of the sound of the words you’re using. Some words give a satisfying crunch, consider juxtaposing words that clash. Think of the endings of the words you use, and rubbing them up against the start of the next word. 

We’re getting into the realms of writing poetry here, but if you want to make your writing more moreish, it’s worth looking at the way poets do it. Brilliant poems capture meaning and distill feelings in the shortest space possible. You can learn a lot by pulling apart a poem to see exactly how it’s been put together, and playing around with what you’ve learnt. 

A big part of the satisfaction of eating crunchy food is the sound it makes. And crunchy writing appeals to the ears as well as the eyes. Read what you’ve written out loud. If it’s working it should sound lively and full of energy.

But what if you’re not after crunchy writing? What if you don’t want your reader to feel invigorated? What if you want them to feel soothed and reassured? If that’s the case, try some vanilla ice cream writing.

Vanilla ice cream writing

Vanilla is seriously underrated and much maligned. It’s become a shorthand for ‘boring’ when it’s actually a beautiful warm and complex flavour. Flavour ice cream with it, so that warm flavour is matched with cool smooth creaminess, and it’s very hard to resist.  

There’s a different moreishness to vanilla ice cream compared to crisps. You tend to eat it more slowly - the coolness slows you down - so you savour it. That’s not to say it’s boring, it’s sweet and delicious. Everyone loves it. 

When you want your writing to feel slower paced but reassuring, channel the qualities of vanilla ice cream into your writing.

Swap spiky staccato sentences for longer ones that unfurl and wind round and back again. Choose words without jagged edges that sit comfortably next to each other. And where you’re looking for clashes in your spiky crisp writing, here you’re aiming for comfortable smoothness.

Writing that helps you relax and unwind. The rhythm of writing is very powerful, so think about the weight and balance of your sentences. Lots of short sentences can make the reader feel jittery, but when sentences are longer and more evenly balanced you feel like you’re in safe hands. Vanilla writing isn’t full of surprises, but it’s still irresistibly moreish.

Read it out loud and it should be well paced, with room to breathe.

When to use these techniques

To stretch this food and writing metaphor just a squeaking bit further, I’d think of this technique as a seasoning that you can add to your repertoire.

Just as a whole meal of crisps or ice cream would be ultimately unsatisfying, so a whole website written in a laid back dreamy creamy ice cream style might leave you feeling queasy, or a blog written in a sharp staccato crispy fashion could leave your senses jangling. And not in a good way.

Salty

Getting some ready salted moreishness into your introductions, social media media updates or microcopy could be a good idea.

Anywhere that you only have space for a few words to get somebody hooked, or to inspire them to take action is a great place to test out your new culinary writing superpowers!

Creamy

Places where you have more space, and you want to guide people through a longer piece of copy is a good place to channel vanilla ice cream writing.

For example, writing some warmly reassuring words to help you tell your story on your website. Some services type pages when you’re getting into the details of process can benefit from a calm and measured approach. And it definitely helps when you’re leading people through your sales emails. 

Whatever you’re writing about - data or dog training, branding or banking, you can still experiment with flavours to help your writing connect.

Start with the feeling you want to evoke in your reader, and work back from there.

Serving suggestion

If this sounds too tricky, focus on getting the basics right before you start experimenting. Start with the aim of making your writing clear and easy to read. Begin with a baseline of choosing the simplest words, stripping out any jargon, and making it conversational. Once you can do that, then start playing with flavours. (Try reading this first.)

Get the basics right, and then start cooking more elaborate dishes!