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Then you do yourself and your employer a disservice. Marketing is full of
people who write crappy stuff, so is tech comm. Blind allegiance to the
rules produces as much disastrous material as total ignorance.
Understanding the rules, knowing when and how to break them is part of the
fun of the process, and it separates professional writers from wannabes.
I'm as anal retentive with one as the other, because otherwise I'm not doing
my job. The resulting copy is as different as night and day in approach,
tone and content. But it ain't crap!
Connie Giordano
-----Original Message-----
From: Lurker writer [mailto:lurker_writer -at- hotmail -dot- com]
Sent: Friday, June 01, 2001 12:05 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: Questions about marketing copy
Well, there are rules, and then there are "rules." Marketing communications
copy is hype-driven, sometimes replete with half-truths, and contain
marginally subtantiated claims that legal calls "trade puffery." You can't
apply the same rules in tech comm to the same depth in marcomm. You've got
two different audiences,so why wouldn't your "rules" be different? You're
appealing to a different mindset, people who think differently than the
folks who read the tech docs; people who need to be persuaded to respond
versus people who don't.
I've written and edited highly technical documentation and highly "puffed"
marketing documents. But when I work with marcom, I take off my
anal-retentive writer/editor hat.
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