Why Your Articles Don't Resonate: 5 Steps to Create Empathy
地獄の門は突然に開く。
深夜1時、暗闇の中で「ゴッ」と
何かにぶつかった。
次の瞬間、足の小指に走る鋭い痛み。
なら声にならない叫びとともに、
その場にうずくまり小指を押さえる。
「タンスの角ぉ！」Many people can instantly recall it as their own experience.
It is not just being explained.
It is because it is replayed in the brain as one's own experience.
Even when writing on the same theme,
some articles resonate, while others are scrolled past.
The factor that creates this difference is whether or not
you can make the reader replay the experience in their mind.
In this article, I will organize the concept of "Empathy Writing,"
which evokes scenes and sensations in the reader's brain
to generate empathy.
Step 1. Replay begins with the five senses
The first step to empathy is to access the five senses
in order to trigger a re-experience.
People find it easier to recall experiences when there is sensory information
such as sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
Sight (forming the scene)
Auditory (reinforcing a sense of presence)
Tactile (recreating physical sensations)
Olfactory (strongly evoking memories)
Gustatory (supplementing sensations in a limited way)
The five senses are the starting point for recreating experiences.
Since it is difficult for experience recreation to occur with just an explanation of the situation, start by building from here.
Step 2. Aligning images
When told to "draw an apple," most people imagine a similar image.
However, what happens if you say "green apple"?
In many cases, it does not become a blue apple.
Why is that?
For many people, "green apple" is actually recognized as a term referring to a green-colored apple.
On the other hand, there are also people who interpret the word "blue" literally as the color blue.
In other words, words and images do not necessarily
correspond one-to-one.
What is important here is
"whether it is factually correct"not.
It is whether the image the writer envisions
matches the image the reader receives.
Step 3. Fix the image with specificity
Abstraction and concretization are, in other words,
adjustments of "how much imagination to leave to the reader."
The higher the level of abstraction, the more room there is for reader interpretation.
On the other hand, the higher the level of specificity, the more limited the situation,
and the reader's perception is guided.
Let's look at the granularity of perception using the example of time.
1. One winter -> ⛄ (General atmosphere only)
2. February -> The impression of the peak of cold is added
3. February 14th -> Cold + context of an event day
4. February 14th, 9:00 PM → The night of a winter event
It is concretized as an event.
5. February 14th, 9:03 PM → Concretization progresses,
creating a sense of meeting up or taking action.
6. February 14th, 9:03:50 PM →
Strong focus on a fleeting moment.
In this way, the more concretization progresses, the more the "range of interpretation"
narrows, and the "direction of meaning" strengthens.
For example,
"I am sitting alone on a bench."
If you add the timestamps from the numbers above to this,
the impression changes. What is important here is not the amount of specificity,
but the "suitability to the scene."
Appropriate specificity lies in a balance that assists the reader's imagination
without excessively restricting it.
Step 4. Translate the Unknown into the Known
Last winter, I endured a blizzard in Siberia
at minus 40 degrees.
Even if you say that, for most people,
it is full of elements they have never experienced,
making it hard to visualize.
You only know that
it must be very cold.
On the other hand,
When I inhaled the morning air in a freezing land last winter,
my head throbbed just like when I eat shaved ice.
It felt sharp.
What if you were told that?
What if you were told that?
Even if you don't know the freezing environment itself,
the sensation of "getting a brain freeze from shaved ice" is
something many people share.
Also, you can associate it with the feeling of the back of your nose hurting when you inhale cold air in winter, which intensifies and resonates in your head, making it easier to imagine more concretely.
Step 5: Empathy arises through vicarious experience
Empathy is not born from clever explanations, but
the moment you feel that you
know the same experience.
No matter how many times you are told "raising children is hard,"
it is too abstract and will not move the reader's heart.
However, the moment you are told "I stepped on a red Lego at 2 PM,"
a similar painful experience
and emotion are evoked and replayed.
At this moment, the reader makes an unconscious judgment.
"They know the same pain as I do." they think.
Specificity is not
for supplementing information.
It is a signal for the writer to show
that they are in the same world.
When that signal is received,
the reader's heart opens and empathy is born.