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> Besides, tornados wiping out a complete town horrifies me. Ethnic
> cleansing horifies me. Mass cult suicides horrifies me. The movie
> "Village of the Damned" horrifies me. I find it pretty tough to be
> horified by a misplaced period. Let's not loose perspective.
I fear that big fat Michelin tire guy is going to go berzerk and frag my entire
office. I mean, what is he so damn happy about? Did another Ford Explorer tip
over? I also don't like ants.
Although this is a fascinating thread I have only one thing to add.
Technical Writing does not equal marketing writing. They have fundamentally
different goals. Tech writing is about effective communication of information.
Marketing is persuasion. You have to convince the reader that whatever it is
you have is great and they need to buy it now!
Personally, I think marketing writing is considerably harder. It isn't as cut
and dry as tech writing. I've had numerous talented tech writer burn out their
brain stems trying to write marketing documents. The input carrier wave was
incompatible with their wetware.
The same rules that apply to tech docs do not apply to marketing docs. Most
advertising and marketing materials are not standard English, so don't even
bother trying to apply the same punctuation rules. Also, marketing materials
are a strange mixture of lecture and conversation. You have to write much more
gracefully in marketing than in tech docs. In tech docs you can just drop stuff
on the reader and move along. With marketing you have to suck them in slower
and get to know them. Its not as simple.
It never is.
Andrew Plato
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