TWs writing marketing copy

Subject: TWs writing marketing copy
From: Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- CHISP -dot- NET>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 16:00:02 -0700

Barry Kieffer wrote:

>Me thinks this should be a marketing issue, not a technical writer issue.
>
>As a TW, I document the stuff, not name it.
>
>Many TW (like me) are like Joe Friday - Just the facts.
>
>It would take sleep depravation and massive amounts of caffeine in order to
>turn some of the TWs I know into marketers.

I totally agree that a lot of tech writers would never be able to do this.
But a couple months ago, I was asked to try it, and I gave it a shot. (The
people who were supposed to be writing the copy were doing an abysmal job.
In two years they had never learned the product or what it's for.) I think
I did ok, and I learned some lessons that I'll bring back to tech writing.

After years of trying to express everything as literally, precisely, and
completely as possible, I managed to produce the phrase, "today's complex
mosaic of new, old, and ancient software." To come up with this, and many
similar ones in the same sheet, I drew upon all that experience with
finding the most essential point of interest to a user--with one twist. I
cannot underestimate how important the TW experience was in figuring out
what to say to reach a reader. No wonder most marketing copy is so vague:
a lot of those guys have no experience communicating just the pertinent
facts to a reader to help the reader do a job. A lot of marketing copy is
just desperate attempts to just say something to make the reader like you,
without offering anything of practical value in return for the money. The
TW experience brought something important to marketing that is usually
missing.

The twist was that the small space requires omitting nearly all facts about
the product, and whereas an overview in a technical document fills in the
missing information by telling you where to find it, marketing copy gets
the reader's *imagination* to fill it in. A lot of marketing copy, even
the cynical kind, does not even do this. It omits by being abstract--which
is fine in an overview, but terrible in marketing copy. The only way to
speak to the imagination is by being concrete. You can choose either
literal details, like examples that stimulate the reader to infer the
capabilities of the product, or concrete metaphors, which stimulate the
reader to think about things in a new way--a way that makes the need for
the product evident.

The word "mosaic" is visual enough to speak to the imagination. Its
purpose was to get readers--IT managers at telephone companies--to take
notice of the chaos of their situation, juggling huge 1970s flat-file
databases written in COBOL with the super-fancy object-relational crazy
stuff that's coming out now. The "mosaic" metaphor gets readers to see the
need that the product fills, and it also builds credibility by showing that
we understand their situation. If I had said, "1970s flat-file databases
written in COBOL communicating with modern object-relational databases",
eyes would have glazed over. That does not speak to the imagination, at
least not as much. "We provide a comprehensive data-sharing solution"
omits detail by being abstract, and therefore does little to get the reader
to imagine ways to use our product.

The lesson I am bringing back to technical writing is better awareness of a
mental faculty of the reader's that we usually neglect: the imagination.
I'll still use metaphors only very rarely in technical writing, but it's
good to be in tune with this. The reader's imagination is one more
capability that you can draw upon to steer him toward getting the job done
and doing it right, even though technical writing can only address the
imagination in very subtle ways.

Also, the imagination is very important to appeal to if you want people to
*want* to read the document and *want* to operate the software. This is a
much-neglected aspect of technical writing. It's why many manuals go
forever unread and many useful software capabilities go forever unexercised.

--
Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- chisp -dot- net>
Author, _Practical Software Requirements: A Manual of Content & Style_
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1884777597/002-3618777-1904817
http://www.manning.com/Kovitz

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