You-Yes-You! Content

To hear Ran Walker of Writer’s Digest tell it, our content writing would be much more effective when couched in second person. With first person writing, Walker observes, the reader is passive; with second person, the reader is an active participant in the story. With “you” writing, the reader can be either a character on the receiving end of the narrator’s energies or the protagonist of the story. Either way, the person reading the story is connected to the plot at all times.

Still, in more than 90% of his conversations with writers, Walker laments, their point of view revolves around only first person (“I” telling the story) or third person (narrator telling the story about someone else).

William Cane in Writer’s Digest disagrees, expressing the thought that third person narratives mimic the “beige voice” of a reporter. First person blog content writing (using the pronouns “I” and “we”) allows the writer to be intimate, unique, and conversational Cane thinks.

As content writers at Say It For You, we realize that different posts and articles are designed to serve different purposes. Second person (“you”, “your”) is a good fit for how-to blog posts, while third person (“he”, “she”, “they”) may be a choice for news items. In general content marketing, though, I stress first person writing because of its one enormous advantage – it shows the people behind the posts, revealing the personality of the business owner, practitioner, or the team standing ready to serve customers.

While it’s important to remember that all marketing content is actually “second person”-focused and needs to be about and for the target readers, I prefer first and second person (I-you) writing in business blog posts over third person “reporting”. I think people tend to buy when they see themselves in the picture and when can they relate emotionally to the person bringing them the message.