Re: Marketing email - VENT

Subject: Re: Marketing email - VENT
From: "Chuck Martin" <cm -at- writeforyou -dot- com>
To: techwr-l
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 14:02:35 -0700

"Cheryl Wallace" <cwallace -at- costlink -dot- com> wrote in message
news:209987 -at- techwr-l -dot- -dot- -dot-
>
> Would I really spend the afterlife chased by a guy in a little red suit
> poking me with a pitchfork if I chose to return an *edited* email to the
> salesdood that sent it to me considering that part of this company's
market
> is techinical writers?

No.

But if it were me, I might be tempted to post the "before" and "after"
versions on my own web site (because posting here might be considered either
off topic or breaking the rules) to:

- Let people draw their own conclusions about the quality of the product.
- Showcase my editing skills.

To me, the quality of sales messages reflects the potential quality (or lack
thereof) of the product, the produc testing, the product design, the
documentation, perhaps even the management decisions. Posting such a
comparison, as oposed to just wanting to, would probably depend on how
b**chy I was feeling that particular day.

I don't suffer fools gladly.

I actually did something similar on a resume post recently, which may have
been a factor in my getting an interview and my current gig. (I tend to post
more of a cover-letter-type content and provide a link to my resume.) A few
years back, the documentation I created was lauded in some magazine product
reviews. I kept those quotes. A few months back, a local company, which
makes a highly-regarded Internet product advertised for a Sr. Technical
Writer, a job for which I matched the qualifiations and applied. (I never
got called for an interview. Their loss.) Just after they posted the job,
their latest release was reviewed. While the review was generally positive,
the reviewer lambasted the product documentation.

In my post, one of the things I did was something along these lines:

A review recently said this about a new product: <the review quote>. Or you
can have reviewers say this about your product, where I created the
documentation: <quotes from the reviews of my docs>.

I also pulled a couple of quotes from gereral articles, captions, and ads,
and for each explained that I knew what was wrong, grammatically,
usage-wise, or otherwise, in each because I am good at my craft.

Chuck Martin


> ---
> Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
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>
>
P.S. Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by the encroaching and ever larger
"signatures" appended to outgoing emails by corporate computer systems? This
one isn't actually that long--but it's an ad. Spam, if you prefer. (I do.)
Frequently it's 8-10 lines appended at the behest of a corporate legal
department, adding a not insignificant amount to mail server load. Not to
meantion that it gobbles up your own disk space (when the messages are not
deleted) and adds to visual clutter.

/rant






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