For fiction fans there's the novel, but not likely to be any additional ones;
for commercial clients, products come in two flavors:
for commercial clients, products come in two flavors:
®
Documents you inform, instruct, and win business with; and
®
Written stuff you sell with.
There’s crossover between the two of course, but basically –
the first takes in things like manuals, white papers, trade
journal articles, new business proposals – it’s technical writing. The second is more overtly sales-intentioned
material: brochures, newsletters, direct mail, news releases, things like that. I do both.
How I do it is by gathering information about your product: through document review when that’s available, but mostly through interview. I ask a lot of dumb questions. Probably 95% of that will go nowhere, but once in a while, the bored guy assigned to humor me drops some bit of information – maybe something so basic he’s forgotten he knows it, or the question comes at him from an angle he hasn’t thought about -- and that turns out to be the key.
I isolate and correlate the pertinent points; organize the story coherently; and present the result in appropriate form.
What's "appropriate" then depends on the assignment: the writing might be concise and logical, for a report or proposal; persuasive, in an ad; instructive, for a manual; entertaining, for an article; maybe even interesting, for an employee newsletter; challenging, exploiting a competitor's misstep, or diplomatic, explaining your own; humorous....
I’ll take on annual reports, brochures, catalogs, direct mail, editorial features, ghostwritten books, hardware manuals, installation guides, job aids, kiosk placards...a zoology text some day, maybe.
A few of those things will be sampled here eventually. But if you need something written you’d probably rather talk about your own project. Take a look -- when ready, samples will be divided into categories – and contact me.
How I do it is by gathering information about your product: through document review when that’s available, but mostly through interview. I ask a lot of dumb questions. Probably 95% of that will go nowhere, but once in a while, the bored guy assigned to humor me drops some bit of information – maybe something so basic he’s forgotten he knows it, or the question comes at him from an angle he hasn’t thought about -- and that turns out to be the key.
I isolate and correlate the pertinent points; organize the story coherently; and present the result in appropriate form.
What's "appropriate" then depends on the assignment: the writing might be concise and logical, for a report or proposal; persuasive, in an ad; instructive, for a manual; entertaining, for an article; maybe even interesting, for an employee newsletter; challenging, exploiting a competitor's misstep, or diplomatic, explaining your own; humorous....
I’ll take on annual reports, brochures, catalogs, direct mail, editorial features, ghostwritten books, hardware manuals, installation guides, job aids, kiosk placards...a zoology text some day, maybe.
A few of those things will be sampled here eventually. But if you need something written you’d probably rather talk about your own project. Take a look -- when ready, samples will be divided into categories – and contact me.
