Re: Slithery words and eliciting reactions

[Dan BRINEGAR <vr2link -at- VR2LINK -dot- COM>]

Beth Agnew asked us nattering nabobs of negativism:

> "What techniques do you use to give
>>your writing more precision, to elicit the reaction from the reader that you
>>want to achieve?"

Good question, Beth!

And I've got a technical answer! Woohoo!

From my time in Tech Support....

Many dialup Internet customers are really nervous and worried we're gonna
yell at them when they call (actually yelling at them when they call is a
very bad thing, and I promise not to ever do it again).  They need explicit
instructions, but they also need to know some of why they're doing a
procedure this way insteada  that way, and if it can't be fun  they should
at least be reassured they can do it.


Around the time I got over having to do a Vulcan Mind Meld to figure out
what my customers were experiencing  at the other end of the phone, I
resolved  a couple of things in my mind:

The Manual we were sending them in their startup kit; written by an
engineer-type and edited by a marketer was intimidating, impersonal, and
hard-to-navigate  (duh!)...  especially when working on *the other guy's
platform*, I wasn't helping customers much just reading the steps they
couldn't find straight out of the manual..

     1) Power on

     2) Open Start/Programs/NetZone/Eudora <yawn>

     Etc... It just made them feel stupider (that's a Net term...)

After the night I spent covering the phones all by myself and working with
*one* customer on the other platform, tho, I didn't have to read it
straight out of the book anymore, and I started adding little commentary,
adding transition words,  telling them where to look on the screen and all
those good things with future calls.  I became  able to reassure the
customer that we could do it together ...  I wasn't talking down to them by
just reading instructions.
One night, another tech peeked over his cube and said
"Hey Dan! Ya sound like a CAR MAGAZINE!"

Hey, yeah, I did...

Look at a technical article in, say, _Hot Rod_ about adjusting the
secondary-throttle-body-springrate, and you'll see that the tone of the
text is "you can do this, it's really studly, and it's fun!"

When I finally got around to working on new manuals (which was why I got
hired there in the first place), I put a little extra effort into adding
the car-magazine tone to the dry geekese that was the original.

No surprise, the sysadmin-type who ran techsupport said "No Way! This junk
is wayyy too perky! Why do you need all these screen shots and circles and
arrows and stuff?!"

<shrug> why did I expect any other reaction?

Ah, but then, glory of glories!  The WebGoddess comes bounding into the
techsupport pit and said "I *LOVE* this manual! I finally understand it!"

(This was the WebGoddess, BTW, who while still a customer  (and friend of
the owner) dealing with the original stupid manual unloaded on me with a
torrent of obscenities after waiting 45 minutes on hold for "The Mac Guy."
For the first time,  I managed to say "Ma'am, you're pushing all my
buttons," rather than yelling back and hanging up... of course  the problem
turned out to be that her capslock key was down... which produces the same
error message in Eudora whether it's on a Mac or a PC but wasn't covered
*anywhere* in the manual. Both of us now mortally embarrassed, we both
apologized for any difficulties and she came to work there two weeks later
-- we told this story to the syadmin-type and he stopped bein picky about
the manual).
<grin>

So for dialup-ISP-type customers, I try to write stuff as if it were a car
magazine....

"1) You have three items for sale at your online store: an IBM clone, a
Mac, and a technician's toolkit; here's the HTML code you need to  add to
your template for the first item:

[appropriate code]

2) It wasn't hard to chop up that one table cell [small reminder graphic of
the original template code] with the _AddButton_ tag for the first item,
now just copy the table row you just created, paste it in, and change the
names for each new item.

3) Now save the file as HWcat.htm, upload the file to your product
directory [covered exhaustively in the precious procedure], and you're done
with this part!

Now all that's left is to shop your store to make sure it works, and then
let the whole world know you're here!"

Good car magazines are able to give the beginner all the information he
needs to follow the procedure, without annoying the veteran shadetree
mechanic... It seems to work for the target audience and the clients like
it!

If I presented the steps shown above in a strictly info-mapped
Step/Action/Result table, the customers would just look at the last page
and call in for their money back.....

I couldn't get away with the same tone if my audience were corporate
network engineers, of course, but that's another thread....

>My question to spur discussion is, "What techniques do you use to give
>your writing more precision, to elicit the reaction from the reader that you
>want to achieve?"
>
>Any takers?
>
>--Beth
>
>Beth Agnew
___________________________________________________________

Uh, if you start writing 'cos it's fun, then you do it for  a few friends,
and finally you do it for pay; what does it mean when you write for free
allll night long with 2400 strangers in a dark room....

My Gawd! I'm a Technomaniac!!!!

<smirk>

-------------------------------------------------------------
Dan Brinegar   Information Developer/Research Droid/Mac Guy
http://www.vr2link.com

Who was it that said:
"I believe the only way to get the scale of change we really need is
to focus on educating citizens so they have the principles,
the framework and the tools necessary to effect change on their own."

vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com     -- CCDB Vr2Link
                                         Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.

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