Before my most recent copywriting class, a prospective student sent me this email:
“Can you please let me know how applicable the course content will be to writing technical press releases, magazine articles, editorials and advertisements. I am an engineer who recently moved into product marketing and am interested in improving my writing skills, but I’m not going to be doing any direct marketing campaigns.”
My response:
“Fair question… One of the principles I teach is that persuasive writing applies to any situation because you always need to convince people to do something. In some cases that “something” is simply getting them to read what you’ve written… So you want to translate described features into why this is important, and write in a way that’s easy for people to follow. I’ve had a number of people who don’t actually work in marketing take the course and no complaints that the material wasn’t relevant enough to invest a day in it. Also, it may help you to know that since we’re in San Jose many of the attendees work in tech and want to discuss tech writing challenges and I myself have a lot of tech writing experience. (Though the ones I share in the course are tech direct marketing, not straight technical writing.)”
She did end up registering, and I followed up and asked this morning how she liked it. She said:
“Yes thanks I really enjoyed the day. There are techniques I will be able to apply to my press releases. Also, it reconfirmed some of my personal beliefs about writing styles and what works. It’s good to learn what are the proven methods to capture an audience.”