Strategy
Suitability: the art of a perfect fit
No matter what you’ve written before or how many times you’ve written it, every situation has unique elements. You may be facing a new purpose, a new audience, a new medium – or possibly all three.
Follow our guidelines to determine everything from appropriate messages to tone, style and text length – and ensure that your writing is always suited to the task at hand.
Don’t just suit yourself
Your text needs to serve a specific purpose. You may have written something that sounds great, with clear, concise and engaging language. But does it realize your intended goals? Ask yourself these questions to help determine and achieve your purpose:
What is the point of this text? Are you trying to educate, motivate, persuade?
How do you want your readers to react? Do you want them to take an action, change an opinion, participate in a discussion? What impression of you or your company do you want them to have?
What other results do you want? Would you like to see increased hits on your website, better sales in your UK markets, a broader customer base?
Know your audience
Understanding who will read your text, and how they might react to it, will help you make important decisions about messages, level of detail, word choice and how best to present and organize your information. Here are the questions to consider:
- Who is your audience? Do you have more than one?
- What are their needs and motivations? What do they expect from you?
- What do they care about most? Least? What will grab and hold their attention?
- How informed is your audience on the subject you’re writing about? Which messages are relevant to them?
- How much time will they spend reading your text?
A medium fit
Finally, different media require different text. You need to ask yourself where your text is going to be seen – or heard, in some cases – and adapt your writing, including its length, to fit the context. Will it be read in a magazine, spoken in a TV commercial or be seen as a huge ad on the side of a bus?
Web text, for example, generally needs to be short, “scannable” and structured for reading on a computer screen. This means that text from your product brochure may need serious reworking for your website.
The home stretch
Your challenge is to keep all these points in mind to achieve suitability – not to mention clarity, simplicity, economy and variety, the other topics covered so far in our series on good style. But don’t fear! There’s just one topic left in our style training camp. Look for it soon in WordSpin.
Back to: Marketing Archive