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Happy Birthday Edgar, Thanks for the Advice!

Edgar Allan Poe may seem an unlikely advisor in the burgeoning carnival of social media, but his visually oriented writing style is the perfect accomplice to a devilishly effective digital marketing campaign. “Visual” language is the ideal technique for a medium that doesn’t provide proper context for the non-verbal cues making up more than 70% of our communication.

Visual Language

As the French critical theorist Jacques Ellul pointed out in his book The Humiliation of the Word:

“We are dazed by sight — by an image or a vision. The word takes us to the edge…only when descriptive and painting extremely precise images.”

He quickly goes on to discuss Poe’s narrative style as an early example of the visual language that would come to define Western fiction. This visual language is a necessary component to any digital conversation since it recreates the emotional expression left off by text based communication.

Examining the Elements

Examining the elements of Poe’s prose we can find some very helpful clues for writing in an effective and actionable voice perfectly suited to the digital domain:

1. Who am “I”: Poe is famous for his use of first person narrative. In fact this is a common trope in ghost stories or as they get called in the American idiom “Weird Tales”. This technique is a simple psychological trick that forces the reader to constantly repeat “I” as they read. After the first paragraph the reader begins to visualize the story as if it were literally happening to them.
2. Where are we?: From the dim ossuaries of the Cask of Amontillado to the multi-colored pageantry that portends a decadent end in The Masque of the Red Death, Poe is a master at providing small visual clues that help the reader picture the setting. The key here is that he only focuses on a few important items, allowing the mind of the reader to create the rest of the picture. When the reader is engaged in actively participating in the “creation” of the scene it’s more easily integrated into their conscious understanding.
3. The high and low: Poe spices his stories with arcane references to Leibnitz, Persian folk tales, and Greek philosophy which give them an air of sophistication and high culture. However, his time at West Point didn’t leave him a stranger to the bowery and burned out fringes of society. Writing is about communication, and full communication is a vertical process, sticking to one end of the tax bracket or the other will leave your writing pale and empty. This goes for diction, syntax, grammar, etc. Loosen up; digital media is about conversations not the Chicago Manual of Style.
4. More with less: As one of the first practitioners of the contemporary short-story Poe was an early adopter of the ‘micro’ format that has progressed down it’s diminutive path to now include messages with no more than 140 characters of type. Living in an urban center like Boston during the industrial revolution, Poe’s style was affected by the speed of “modern” life. Writing for money meant that he had to pay attention to what his audience wanted and with the world moving faster, longer books didn’t look to be best sellers.
5. Who done it?: Another first that Poe brought to the fictional forefront was the detective genre. Readers become more engaged when their enwrapped in a mystery and if the story is published in a serial format they’re more likely to buy the next installment when they’re left on edge. Engaging clients in your company’s digital media efforts requires a similar approach. Whether they are solving a mystery or following a story, the development of your brand’s media outreach should reflect a progression that leads them deeper into the conversation.