RE: Great piece on marketing collateral

[Rose -dot- Wilcox -at- aps -dot- com]

<<

I too have worked in marcomm on occasion, and have even been known to
use a sentence fragment. Or two. In ad copy.

This is different. Published articles about writing for writers ought to
be well-written.

-- Dan Goldstein>>

And you define well-written by grammar, rather than by ability to
communicate the ideas to the audience?

The overall audience for the magazine, BTW, is product marketers.  The
article itself seems to be addressed to those who create marcom
collateral, but their clients and bosses are reading this as well.  The
style of the overall magazine is all in the same informal voice as the
article itself.  

I would argue in context, the article is well written.

On a more meta point, I would argue that the definition "well-written"
depends on context.  My background leads me to that conclusion as I do a
lot of other types of writing besides technical*, and even in the
technical writing field, style needs vary deeply between types of
deliverables.  (See some of the discussion about the use of "the".  I
might not leave it out for a less technical audience used to seeing it,
but if the audience was mostly engineers used to *not* seeing it, I
would definitely leave it out.)

I believe the article in question is an example of a informal magazine
article style that works for many audiences.  You can find many examples
of that type of writing on the web and in print.  Reforming it into a
stiffly written "correct grammar" article would take the life out of it
and render it uninteresting.  Even if the points it were trying to make
were still made, not many in the given audience would read it, so it
wouldn't be effective in communicating.  It probably wouldn't be picked
up by the magazine in the first place.

The moral of the story is: Write for your audience, not for your peers.

Rosie
who is peerless. heh.

*An incomplete list of other types of writing I do or have done:
marketing, magazine articles (technical and non), newsletters, press
releases, flash fiction and short stories, poetry, song lyrics, long
rambling emails to Techwr-l...

Rose A. Wilcox
Center for Process Excellence, CHQ 8th Floor
602-250-3195
Rose -dot- Wilcox -at- aps -dot- com
'It was my pleasure to make the world safe for humanity again.' 
Buffy
Never Kill a Boy on the First Date 



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