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March 30, 2006
Writing for Busy People
(Filed under: Writing & Editing)by Cory Piña, Guest Blogger
After reading the Church Marketing Sucks guidelines for guest blogging, I came across this post from lead Firefox engineer, Ben Goodger. Ben writes: "It's great when people make contributions in the form of ideas and proposals, but it's even better when they're written for busy people."
Here are some of Ben's tips for writing for busy people:
- Make important points up front.
- Clear taxonomy of headings, and lots of them.
- Write clearly and succinctly.
- No long, unbroken paragraphs or tracts of text.
- Prefer bulleted lists with clear points to paragraphs.
- Use of emphasis in formatting to make important things clear.
As someone who is trying to learn what types of promotional materials to create for our camp, I'm finding that I would rather read a list of highlights than a few long paragraphs in a brochure. I read recently, "Don't tell them you're surrounded by a beautiful forest. Show them."
I'm beginning to believe that the less on our promotional materials, newsletters, etc., the better. With a web site packed with the information everyone needs (written with Ben's tips in mind, of course), I want to point them online. The other promotional materials, I believe, may just need to catch their attention. Let the web site do the rest.
Posted by Guest Blogger at March 30, 2006 11:56 AM
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Comments
As a proof of this concept, you might enjoy knowing that I first read the bullet points of this post. Then, after deciding it was interesting, I read the remainder of the post.
Great job! :)
Posted by: Nathan Colgate at March 30, 2006 5:58 PM
Although sometimes I am a guilty culprit of long writing...I love and strive for keeping it simple and not-over-wording it.
I love your point your bring up.
(And yet the challenge I fight is creating tone at the same time...I like to read things were you can hear them being spoken to you.)
--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
Posted by: RC of strangeculture at March 31, 2006 6:05 AM
I am actually starting to…
• Think in bullet points
• Talk in bullet points
• Subscribe solutions in bullet points…
http://pastorphill.typepad.com/phillip_longmire/
Posted by: phill Longmire at March 31, 2006 4:07 PM
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