The TWoP Method

For fourteen years, I wrote recaps of television shows for an audience that had already watched the episodes.

Let me state that plainly: the audience already had the information. They knew what happened. They had seen the thing with their own eyes. And they came back every week to read about it anyway.

That tells you something important about what readers actually want — something that most B2B content ignores entirely.

What They Were There For

Television Without Pity readers were not there for the plot summary. They were there for the take. For the writer’s specific interpretation of what they’d watched — what it meant, what it revealed, what was working, what was embarrassing, what the show thought it was doing versus what it was actually doing. They were there for the argument.

The information was a pretext. The reason to read was the mind doing the reading.

B2B readers are not different from TV watchers. The idea that business content requires stripping out personality and perspective in favor of comprehensiveness and balance is one of the more expensive myths in content marketing.

The Four Things That Made TWoP Work

The hook had to earn the read.

The opening paragraph of a recap had to give the reader a reason to continue reading even if they’d already seen the episode. The equivalent in business content: your opening paragraph should tell the reader something about their situation they didn’t expect you to know.

The pace had to move.

A good recap knew which scenes were load-bearing — which moments actually mattered to the argument — and treated them at length, while moving quickly through the connective tissue. Business content has load-bearing paragraphs and connective tissue too, and treating them at equal length is how you get posts that are technically comprehensive and experientially exhausting.

The writer had to be audible.

The reader had to be able to feel the writer’s relationship to the material. You could disagree with the writer’s take. You could not fail to notice that the writer had one.

The ending had to land.

Not stop, not conclude with a “stay tuned” — land. The best TWoP recaps ended with a sentence that reframed everything that came before it. Business content mostly ends with a call to action. This is fine; CTAs are fine. But the sentence before the CTA should do some work.

What This Means for Your Blog

The TWoP method, stripped of its television context, is this: write for the reader who already knows the topic. Give them not the information but the argument about the information. Make the reading worth doing even if they already knew. End on something that sticks.

This is not a revolutionary approach to content. It is, however, an increasingly rare one.

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Jacob Clifton is the principal of Clifton Creative, an editorial strategy consultancy based in Austin, Texas. He spent fourteen years as a flagship staff writer at Television Without Pity and has written for Tor.com, Vulture, BuzzFeed News, and the Austin Chronicle.

For inquiries:
jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative