Your marketing writing doesn’t need to be all sell, sell, sell.  Your writing can speak to your customers pre-sale and then post-sale.

I’ve mentioned before the differences between marketing writing and technical writing. You can use both on your web site, in your newsletters, and in various communications to customers and potential customers.

Think “Post-Sale”

After you sell your product or service to a customer—the work was performed and paid for—he still needs to hear from you.

Depending on your business, your customer needs instructions or opinion. If you sell garage door openers, provide installation and how-to-use instructions. If you sell mortgages or cosmetic dentistry, provide advice on how he should proceed with the choice he’s made:  You don’t need to “sell” the loan or the crowns to him again, but you can answer common after-sale questions and offer reassurance.

Offering instructions and advice to your paying customers helps you to:

• Solidify your relationship with your customers, which makes them more likely to remain customers—and more likely to recommend you to others.
• Lessen the phone calls and emails you need to deal with, to answer customers’ questions. I’m not saying you aren’t willing to talk to customers, but when you answer simple, common questions in an easy-to-distribute written form, you’ll free up time you can spend with customers who have pressing problems.

Think “Expertise”

Write about your business to  demonstrate your expertise.  Be a resource! Have an opinion. Give the facts.

You can provide information in various ways: As content on your Web site, as PDF files that readers can download from your Web site, as articles in your newsletter, or as blog postings.

Also, answer questions posted to groups such as on LinkedIn. That’s a great way to introduce yourself as an expert and move readers to your web site.

Think “Reader’s Need”

If your web site is all about selling, selling, selling…then it’s all about you. Maybe people will check it out when they have a specific need for your product. Maybe they won’t.

But if your web site is hospitable, readers will visit often. Consider the reader’s need. Let’s say you’re a midwife. You’ve got readers who aren’t even pregnant yet but they come to your site because they might someday need you. Solve a problem for them, for free.  Write an article about IVF, about home births, about birth control before and after pregnancy.  Again, you’re positioning yourself as the expert you are.

Readers will  bookmark your site or blog, will visit it regularly, and will remember your name.  When she’s pregnant, you’ll be at the top of her mind.  Solve her need now, pre-sale, to make the sale when she has the need.

Don’t write solely about the immediate sale. Write also about your customer’s need, and your ability to solve that need.

If you use the Web to market yourself, you probably think in terms of marketing writing. But there are ways in which technical writing has its place within your Web presence.

Today, let’s consider the definitions of,  and differences between, marketing writing and technical writing.

Pre-Sale and Post Sale

Marketing writing helps you communicate pre-sale to potential customers, to get their business.

Technical writing helps you communicate post-sale to existing customers, to reduce training time, customer support time (and avoid lawsuits).

Of course, an existing customer—let’s say she hired you to renovate her kitchen– is also a potential customer. You’d like her to hire you to renovate her bathrooms. You can offer technical writing (how to care for those granite countertops) while also offering marketing writing (all about whirlpool tubs).

Marketing Writing Informs and Persuades

Marketing writing informs and persuades. You want the reader to agree with you. You’re trying to persuade them to buy. You might be selling an actual product or service, or you might be “selling” a behavior (stop smoking), a way of thought (be green), or a candidate to support.

Marketing writing uses opinion. They are often expressed creatively, with twists and surprises to keep the reader engaged and amused, and make the message memorable.

Marketing writing aims at our emotions. Humor is the key in innumerable marketing campaigns. Marketing messages that call upon our compassion or our patriotism are also common.  Marketing messages that imply we will gain (or, horrors, lose) sexual appeal are ubiquitous.

Technical Writing Informs and Instructs

At its most basic, technical writing gives steps in order. However, technical writing is not limited to explanation of technical products; its a technique relevant to all sorts of products, services, or actions. Recipes are great examples of technical writing—you follow the steps and you end up with a yummy dinner. If you do not follow the steps—whip up the soufflé but don’t pre-heat the oven—things turn out sadly.

Just sell a new lawnmower to a new customer? Want to help the happy pet adopters introduce Rover correctly to their cat?  Does your patient need to know how to handle the big bulky cast on his broken foot? All those situations need technical writing.

Tech writing relies on facts, not opinions. The lawnmower’s moving blades will hack off your fingers. I’m not going to write a document to persuade a new owner to leave the blades alone. I’m just going to tell him.

Technical writing is dispassionate. The reader has already purchased the product or service—or encountered the situation—so the “how to” information needn’t get all emotional about the wonderfulness of the product or their wisdom in purchasing it (or their foolishness in breaking their foot). They need information to help get the best use of the product, service, association or situation.

Next week, we’ll look further at how to use each type of writing.

I belong to a few groups on LinkedIn. This last week, I’ve been amazed to see group members pose questions written using initial capital letters. Here are a couple of examples, altered slightly to avoid too explicit finger-pointing:

What’s A Reasonable Hourly Rate For…..?

Best Service for Access to On Line Publications?

Not only are initial capitals incorrect within a sentence, they are not easy to read. And (not that there are correct places to write incorrectly), this was on LinkedIn, where a professional should want to appear at her or his best!

So let’s review the rules for capitalization.

Sentences

A question is a sentence, not a title. Just as a sentence begins with a capital letter, so does a question. Write all other words in lower case letters, unless there is a reason to capitalize any.

• What’s a reasonable hourly rate for…..?
• Best service for access to online publications?

Titles of Works

Titles, chapters and section headings are written with initial capitals, such as A Tale of Two Cities and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Notice that articles (the, a, an), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor) and prepositions are left in lowercase.

Take a moment to think of the titles of books, movies, or blogs you enjoy. They use few words. A lengthy string of words written with initial capital letters, even when it is correct to do so, is simply hard on the reader’s eye.

Titles of Persons

Do not capitalize a title when referring to the office alone. Capitalize the title when referring to its occupant by name. It’s just president, chief justice or prime minister unless you’re referring to someone specifically, such as President Lincoln, Chief Justice Warren or Prime Minister Churchill. Also:

• The company’s president reported to the board of directors.
• The CEO will take charge of finance until we hire a new director of finance.
• Captain Kirk took the ship into battle.
• The captain issued a tot of rum to all hands.

Yes, CEO is in capitals, but that’s because it is an acronym, which by definition is written in all capital letters. If the term were spelled out, it would read, “The chief executive officer will take charge….”

ALL CAPS

You do know that this is considered rude in email messages or social media postings? It is viewed as shouting, so use it when you need to shout. Or, calm down first, and then express yourself more appropriately.

ALL CAPS, AS YOU CAN SEE HERE, ARE ALSO DIFFICULT TO READ. People often stop reading well before the end of the message, so keep that in mind before turning on your Caps Lock.

Breaking the Rules

When you know the rules and follow the rules, you can then break the rules. Occasionally switching up the use of capitals can be either pithy or amusing or both.

• The Powers That Be denied my request for a raise.
• Keri got her shots for her trip to the Amazon, and now her arm is One Big Ouch.

The trick to breaking the rules is to do so without looking like you didn’t know better.

Yes, I’m a professional writer. Nonetheless, there are words and constructions that still confuse me. Fortunately, I remain aware that I goof up when using some of them—so I turn to my trusty Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words for guidance.  I bought it brand new in 1984 but it hasn’t let me down yet.  And I always get a chuckle out the cover, which considers variations on this famous split infinitive:

Boldly to go

To boldy go

To go boldly

Troublesome Words

Let’s look at three word pairs that confuse me—because I’m sure I’m not alone in my puzzlement.

Affect, effect

Affect, as a verb, means to influence (Smoking may affect your health) or adopt a pose (He affected indifference).

Effect, as a noun, means to accomplish (The prisoners effected their escape), to produce an impression (She bats those eyelashes to great effect), or achieve results (The loss had a predictable effect on the team morale).  If only I could consistently remember  to use effect when describing something that was caused or brought about!

Affect, by its lonesome, is a bland verb. Notice that The cacophony of vuvzelas affected his play gives no hint as to how he played. Better than average? Horrendously? Leaping tall buildings in a single bound? Therefore, if I use affect, I must remember to qualify it, or decide not to use it at all.

Lie, lay

Lay means to put or to place. Lay is a transitive verb, so it requires a direct object. In practical terms, a transitive verb is something you do to something else.  So, in I lay the book down on the table,  what you do is lay (the verb) and what you do it to is the book (the direct object).

Lie means to recline. It also means to tell a falsehood. I lie down on the sofa means, obviously, that I reclined on the couch, not that I fibbed.

Lie is an intransitive verb: It is capable of expressing itself alone and has no need of a direct object. In other words, if someone says I lay… one must ask, “Lay what? Lay it where?”  whereas I lie is a complete sentence, meaning  I recline. You can garnish it up, elaborating on when the reclining was done and on what, but you don’t have to.  (Yes, I lie can also mean I’m not telling the truth. Let context be your guide.)

Things get stickier (for me, at least) when I have to use lie and lay in other than present tense. I still have to look them up.  For that, I put down my Dictionary and turn to Professor Gibson’s Wonderful World of Editing.

Who, whom

My Dictionary of Troublesome Words tells me to use whom when it is the object of a preposition (to whom it may concern), object of a verb (the nurse whom Theodore interviewed) or the subject of a complimentary infinitive (the guy whom we took to be Shaquille).  Who is used on all other occasions.

Gee, that clears things up.

I try to check my work by replacing who/whom with he/him.  Supposed I’ve written  Alfonzo, whom the police believed was  involved…. Uh, maybe that should be Alfonzo, who… Let’s check: Would I say the police believed he was involved… or the police believe him was involved… I would indeed say he was involved.  Therefore, I need to use who in the sentence, thus: Alfonzo, who the police believed was  involved….

I’ll never memorize it all!

English is a mighty odd language. Some words sound the same. Some words are spelled the same. Change the tense, and dissimilar words become indistinguishable. I can’t memorize every rule.  Even though I am a reliable resource for others (writing is my profession!) I still know I need to find—and use—good resources. You’re welcome to borrow mine. Please, let me know yours.

Football. The word is universally understood. Even in the States, to see the word spelled futbol,  is to see a little soccer video in one’s mind’s eye.

The Stanley Cup games finished up last week, so I turned to the FIFA World Cup for new sports action. I love a good game!  I don’t know much about soccer—obviously, the basics are easy to grasp—but two years ago, I didn’t know much about hockey. I relied on sports-savvy fans to tutor me in the finer points of the sport.

Even when we speak different languages, we speak. We humans are extraordinarily equipped to express ourselves, through language, in subtle and specific ways. From Scripture to Cicero to Shakespeare to the Gettysburg Address, we have a genius for using language to convey ideas and emotion, to connect, and to influence.

We don’t always need words. Everyone, regardless of native language, seems to make similar sounds situations.  We express emotion in universally understood ways, beyond language.

This brings great joy and cohesion to sports fans. Watch any sporting event, regardless of the language used by the announcers. The crowd says it all: Cheering for a superb play, groaning for the missed chanced, booing a bad play or bad call, roaring for victory. Even the slump-shouldered silence of the defeated speaks.

The crowd, as a community, can be as significant to success as a team member. Home team advantage isn’t just about the field.  During the Stanley Cup playoffs, did you watch any of the San Jose/Denver games?  Avalanche goalie Craig Anderson had such a stellar game 3 that the Denver crowd happily chanted “Andy! Andy! Andy!” in appreciation. Just days later, in San Jose, as the Sharks trounced the Avs, San Jose fans chanted “An-dee” in a different, taunting tone. Same words, different message.

Back to futbol. For the FIFA World Cup, we do not have crowd noise. We have vuvuzelas. The nasty bee-buzzing noises you hear throughout the matches come from wretched plastic horns blown by the hundreds of South African futbol fans. The horn sounds one note only (B flat) with limited modulation—never soft, never loud. Just incessant. No change in tone, in pitch, in volume.

I’ve been watching games during my lunch hour. I’m not especially concerned about which teams are playing. I don’t know any of them yet, so I watch to learn, to enjoy and to become more involved as competition evolves.

Except how involved do I want to get, since I must suffer the obnoxious vuvuzela? I can hear the commentators, but I can’t hear the people in the stadium. When a team scores, I have to believe the sportscaster who tells me that fans are cheering. Indeed, the camera shows fans who appear to be cheering, but I cannot hear them above the bee hum. Each game is deprived of expressing any personality, because all comments from the community of fans—cheers, groans, chants, boos, and applause—are silenced.

I’m not the only one who detests the sound of the vuvuzelas. (Type in “I hate vuvuzela” at Google and see what you get.)  But Joseph Blatter, president of FIFA has said that the South African fans should not be deprived of their traditional sporting habits in their own home towns.

Why not? FIFA wants us to consider soccer to be “a  unifying force whose virtues can make an important contribution to society.”  Does shutting out the cheering fans from real participation at the World Cup stadiums promote that mission?  The Republic of South Africa has spent how many millions of dollars to host the World Cup, to draw tourist interest and dollars into South Africa, and to promote their country as a modern, hospitable nation. Does making people want to turn off the soccer game help them to achieve their goal?

No. That’s a universally understood word, too.

For generations, English speakers used he, him and his as the unnamed agent in written examples.

No longer. We strive for gender neutrality.

Please don’t strive too hard.

He? or She? Pick one.

Do not shy away from using he when it helps you  make your point.  That said, do not shy away from using she, if that helps you make your point.

(I once worked for a company that gave conferences for nurses, at which 98% of registrants were women. Yet when I drafted instructions such as Hand the registrant her name badge … my boss would correct it to Hand the registrant his name badge... because he was “standard.” I would sigh, and then change it back to she.)

When I write instructions that apply to either men or women, I alternate between he and she.  I use he when giving an example, and then—being clear that I am giving another example—I use she.

What about using both, together?

You can, but it’s a sure fire way to annoy your reader, to say nothing of too much work on your part. Consider the inanity of these phrases:

After lunch, he or she can visit the spa. He or she might opt for a massage or he or she might prefer a soak in the hot tub.

Ask him or her if he or she would like an upgrade.

My advice has always been:  Don’t make your reader work hard. By using a string of he and shes, you risk frustrating or sidetracking your reader.  Not to mention, you’re telling your reader you think he is too dumb to figure out that the situation applies to both sexes. (Who thinks that last sentence only applies to men, just because I used he?)

S/he? Horrors!

Abomination! S/he shrieks “I’m now being gender neutral!” and completely disrupts the flow of the sentence. Use it only when your goal is to be conspicuous for the PC-ness of your writing, and when you are not concerned that your reader grasp anything else you might be saying.

Use names.

There are plenty of gender-neutral names you can assign to your faceless, sexless examples: Chris, Jamie, Mallory, Casey, Alex, Jordan, Quinn and more.  (Granted, these are English names—if you want to encompass multiple cultures in your examples, you can’t take this route.) Using names works well if you are giving one or two short examples.

While you don’t want your reader to work too hard to grasp your meaning,  remember that your reader is smart enough to discern when he refers also to she, or vice versa.

Here is a writing tip:  Don’t rely on your cell phone in an emergency. Write down phone numbers and carry them with you.

I was in a car accident two weeks ago. Crunchy, smashy 6-car pile up on 101-south bound near SFO.  It was just like in the movies—tires squealing, horns blaring, horrible metal-on-metal bang and clang—except that, unlike the movies, I was actually in one of the cars.

After the thudding and praying stopped, and my traveling companion and I realized neither of us were badly hurt, we reached for our phones.  When I called another friend to come help us, I saw that my phone would soon need to be re-charged.

Soon I was in the ER with a phone running out juice—and all of my phone numbers were in the phone.  I powered up the phone real quick to access the phone numbers I needed, borrowed a pen, and wrote down the numbers on a piece of paper.  I was soon allowed to use a land line phone to call my friend again to arrange for her to come get us.

• Write down essential phone numbers on a piece of paper and keep it in your wallet.
• Carry business cards, on your person on in your car’s glove box.
• Carry a good old fashioned address book.

In an emergency, your phone might be lost, or damaged, or powerless. Write down essential phone numbers and keep them with you. As much as I hope you never need to use that piece of paper, I hope you will carry it with you.

If you’ve read The Gold Mine over the months, you know that we believe that it is possible to use Powerpoint well.  Earlier this month, I used Powerpoint to enhance a talk I gave to a group of colleagues in my professional network.  Valuable lessons were learned—by me.  And now, I share them with you.

Get Ready

I mapped out the overall message, and the component sections, of my talk. Then, I got it ready on Powerpoint. That part was so much fun! Too much fun! What a monstrous time suck!

I’d start searching through istockphotos.com. Let’s find photos of typewriters. Oh, goodie, they have 3,026!  By image 425 (or 25), I’d find a perfectly acceptable photo of a typewriter. But…why not look at all the rest?!  Maybe there’s a better one!

Finally, I’d pick a photo. Hmmm… maybe I should crop it this way…. or this way. Or position it off center. Maybe this should be slide 10, not slide 12. But is this really the right photo? Let’s look at more!  Shiny bits here, shiny bits there.

Lesson learned. Follow the map. Follow the clock. I’d have saved getting ready time if I had used any ol’ photo of a typewriter (or whatever photo was needed per page), as a temporary placeholder until I had the pages drafted, based on my map. Next time, I’ll build the pages first, and spend less time on the spackle and paint.

Aim

The Boy Scouts are right. Be prepared. Three weeks before my talk, I asked about the slide projection capability in the room. I’d seen Powerpoint used there before; I knew it could be done. But how? I was told “Just plug this plug into your laptop.” Piece o’ cake.

I decided to (a) be happy it was so easy and (b) not trust the information.  Once I had my slides ready:

• I saved the file on my laptop.
• I saved the file onto a flash drive, in case my laptop blew up but someone had a spare.
• I printed the slide and notes onto paper, in case the spare blew up.

I got there (early), plugged that plug into my laptop and—nada. I hailed one of my tech-savvy colleagues, who said, “Oh, sure, I can turn the projector on for you.” That was new news; no one had mentioned an On switch before. In a jiff, he had my slides projecting. Excellent!  Except I could not get Presentation View configured, even though it had worked fine at home when I rehearsed. My choices were to show in Slide View—I would not be able to see my notes—or show in Presenter View and everyone could see my notes. Because I had rehearsed, I was able to use Slide View and deliver my talk without needing my notes.

Lessons learned: Have a Plan A. Have a Plan B. Have a Plan C.  Consider every reasonable contingency for which to prepare (I used Plan E), so you’ll be ready when the curve ball comes your way. When, not if.

Fire

My presentation was to be 10 minutes long and not a tick longer. When I sat here in my office, with my stopwatch, I could deliver it, with poise and bounce, in exactly 10 minutes. But I knew that talks change in front of an audience.

Time would fly because I would:

• Talk more quickly than I ordinarily do.
• Forget to say some things, even if I had notes in front of me.

Time would get eaten when the audience would:

• Laugh at the jokes. (I always enjoy mining the humor.)
• Participate. (I had built in some quizzes, and I was speaking to a competitive bunch.)
• Comment. (At some spots, people reacted out loud. The photo of me as a 2-year old got plenty of “awww’s!”)

Lessons Learned:  If allotted 10 minutes of time, don’t prepare a 10-minute speech. I got more laughs than I’d expected—I’m not complaining, but that added seconds which I had to make up for by dropping some adjectives later on. Nor had I anticipated so many spontaneous comments. None of it was heckling or overriding my talk, so I did allowed a second or two to let the comment “reach” everyone in the audience. That added flavor to the talk, but took up time. I finished in 9.5 minutes.

The whole shebang, start to finished, entertained me! I enjoyed getting it ready, getting it going, delivering the talk—and hearing the many enthusiastic compliments afterwards.

Call them memory crutches or call them mnemonic devices, they can help you remember to turn right at Maple Street, and which planet is closest to the Sun. Don’t we all need that?!

Most mnemonics are verbal—a word, phrase or rhyme—but they can be visual, auditory or kinesthetic: I still move my right hand if I want to double-check left from right.

Why do mnemonics work?

We could just learn the order of the planets:  Mercury Venus Terra Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto.  But it was easier for me to learn them by remembering: Mother Very Thoughtfully Made Jelly Sandwiches Under No Protest.

That worked because it’s not arbitrary (silly, but not arbitrary). Our brains find it easier to grasp and store data if it makes a personal connection, if it’s funny, or surprising, or it’s, well.. memorable, which arbitrary sequence rarely is.

Of course, I learned that particular mnemonic when Pluto was a planet. Now? Try My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants.  That mnemonic won National Geographic Society’s contest for a way to remember the eleven known planets and dwarf planet Eris.

Sing Along!

Music and rhyme, since the dawn of man, have been outstanding tools for memory. Who can’t chant along to:

Thirty Days Hath September, April, June and November. ….

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

and, if you were in my 7th grade history class, Alexander took a ride on a horse who shadow-shied.  Why I needed to know this about Alexander the Great’s horse, I cannot say, but the phrase will be with me until death.

So if you need to remember something, set it to music or make up a poem.

Acronyms and Backronyms

Acronyms abound, simply because they are easy to remember.  Why say self contained underwater breathing apparatus when you can say scuba?

Backronyms, on the other hand, are developed by determining the preferred “acronym”, and then finding words that will create it. Take, for example, the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. Its full title is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. They didn’t title it first and then suddenly realize: “Wow, how about that! The first letters spell out USA PATRIOT!”

A different species of backronym are those to which we assign meaning  even where meaning does not exist. One case is the universal distress call SOS, which many think stands for Save Our Ship. Nope. In Morse code, S and O are simply easy letters to type.

Association of Letters

My favorite way of making mnemonics is to associate letters to words, letters in alphabetic sequence, or even simply the number of letter in words. I will demonstrate, even at risk of disclosing the quirks in my memory:

• Learning the alphabet, for years I confused the sequence at R S T. Or was T before S, and R after it?  Finally, hooray, I figured out that S is the Second, T is the Third.  (I was in fact nearly 12 before I figured this out, so you can imagine what a relief it was.)

• To remember which side of the ship was starboard and which port, I realized that port and left both have four letters.  How many letters starboard has was irrelevant; it had to be on the right if port were on the left.

• When setting the dinner table, I finally figured out where to put the knife when I associated knife (a word of five letters) with right (a word of five letters).  That fork and left both have four letters is simply a bonus. I figured this out well after sorting out the starboard/port question, despite often setting the table yet never having been to sea.

What are your favorite memory crutches and mnemonic devices? Let me know—I need them!

Often enough, we use the word don’t and do not in our writing.  They’re real words, they convey clear meaning, I’ve got nothing against them.

Yet, often enough, your reader will skip over the “not” part, and think you’re saying “do.”  Here are some tips to help you say No and be sure your reader hears you.

Vocabulary choice

Replace don’t with a precise and unambiguous word. Here are just a few excellent candidates for the job of saying No: Avoid, ban, block, delete, exclude, forbid, hinder, obstruct, omit, prevent, prohibit, reject and stop.

Avoid submerging your toaster in water.    is clearer than    Do not submerge your toaster in water.

I forbid anyone to play with my alligator.a is clearer than a I do not want anyone to play with my alligator.

List Organization

If poorly organized, even quality content can be misunderstood. Notice how this list shifts back and forth:

• Don’t go beyond two pages with your resume.
• Do consider a resume design that doesn’t look like everyone else’s.
• Don’t ever lie on your resume.
• Don’t use personal pronouns (I, my, me) in a resume.
• Do include as much contact information as possible.
• Do give your resume as sharp a focus as possible.

Let’s reorganize that list to make it less choppy. One way would be re-order the points to put the three Do’s first, followed by the four Don’t. Another way is to leave their order as-is, but change the vocabulary to be crystal clear:

• Keep your resume to only two pages.
• Consider a resume design that doesn’t look like everyone else’s.
• Never lie on your resume.
• Limit use of personal pronouns (”Achieved sales goal of…” rather than “I achieved my sales goal of…”).
• Include as much contact information as possible.
• Give your resume as sharp a focus as possible.

“Please”? No thank you.

When you’re giving a direction or instruction, avoid adding please. Please implies choice, which turns an instruction into a request. If you don’t want someone else to say “No,” leave out the please.

Enter your password.

I need your time sheets by 3:00m Friday.

Turn off your cell phones before the movie starts.

None of these instructions is impolite. Such simple written statements have no tone of voice to sound bossy or snarky. And what, really, are your options but to comply?

Out loud, “Please” can soften orders, so when speaking to a specific person, or group, use the Magic Words to help maintain, at the least, a civil working relationship. In speech, tone of voice provides the clues about the speaker’s sincerity and the listener’s wealth or dearth of options.