RE: Write differently for women?

["Ehr, Meg" <Meg -dot- Ehr -at- smartworks -dot- com>]

Okay, dumb (or not-so-) question time: what exactly does "writ[ing]
differently if women are you[r] main audience" mean in the world of tech
comm (as opposed to marketing/advertising)? How would you target a female
audience in a technical doc, assuming you wanted to do so?

The article cited, which is from an advertising/marketing site, states:
"There are some cut-and-dried cases in which you know that the majority of
your readers are either male or female and then write accordingly."  What
would you do differently in tech comm to "write accordingly" for different
genders? 

And why would gender automatically make a difference anyway?  

Maybe I'm just so used to writing for mixed-gender audiences that it
wouldn't occur to me to make docs anything but gender-neutral...


Meg Ehr

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