How writing for others keeps your pencil sharp

There are so many different ways to write.

I’m reminded of that this week as each of my current client projects demands its own style. Writing for others forces a writer to test new techniques. It challenges you to try on styles that you normally avoid. Sometimes they even fit. It keeps you creative, fresh and sharp, and for that I’m grateful for each project - whatever style it asks for.

Here are this week’s examples:

 

• Writing pithy App content for a client’s long business reports. This is about surfacing the pertinent content, devising headings that make people want to click further, and writing short benefits-focused descriptions. Writing for people that read on devices takes ruthless editing! 

• Translating a client’s product brochure from Swedish to English. Translations are more than translations for a communications specialist. Good sentence structure and correct meaning is not good enough. If there’s a play-on-words, you find an equivalent. If there’s a cultural reference you transpose it. If your client wants to sound big, small, formal, friendly, you find that tone.  It’s marketing copy and it still has to sing – even in English. 

• Improving the English of a scientific research report for publication submission. This is a different style again driven by the purpose of the document. The scientific research process has to be replicable if needed, so the research paper needs to be specific about the process that led to the findings. The language then is factual and without flourish. It still has to be correct though and the story still has to be crystal clear. Lots of passive voice is used for the processes, and a whole bunch of technical terms. These are two things we usually try to avoid in creative business writing. For scientific matters it works though as the subject matter is super-specialist and the audience is too. 

 

The really cool thing about writing though? You get to learn loads of stuff!