Know-How Exchange : Copywriting

Rachel,
Are you marketing this to retail clients or intitutional clients?

I'll assume that it's retail as you're looking to simplify the content.

I would give these suggestions to your in-house experts:

1. Refrain from using industry jargon, acronyms and terms that are only used by professionals.

2. Look at creating a style guide for the company which can be distributed to anyone who is asked to write content (I think there were some articles on style guides on MP).

3. Break up the content into bite size readable paragraphs. What happens most often is that they end up writing these huge blocks of text that just make people go blind or not want to read the content at tall.

4. Ensure they break up blocks of content using bullet points, bold sub-headlines and write good headlines for the articles. (ask them to be more creative than just saying "New Update to Law XYZ"

5. Tie these updates into how the changes or laws affect their situation. This may entail some segmentation and more work but I'm sure your clients will be tremendously greatful.

6. Don't use big words to show off their expertise in using a dictionary. Simple, simple, simple.

7. Try keeping it to a conversational tone rather than a formal tone where your readers may end up scratching their heads and having to read it over and over again to get the meaning.

8. The less words it takes to get the idea across the better.

Hope that helps somewhat

I agree with much of what WaynePo offers.

As someone who eeks great content out of non-professional writers all the time on this very Web site, here's my quick and dirty advice. It's easy to overwhelm authors with too many "rules." In my view, it's easier for a writer to follow a few very instructive guidelines:

1. Give readers your main idea or point in the first paragraph, and expound on the idea from there. One article = one idea or point. Keep it brief and readable. Around 750 words gives you enough room to explain but not to drone on.

2. Use lots of bullet points. This not only makes the content more easily digestible for readers, but it helps the writer to organize his or her thoughts.

3. Encourage conversational writing. Ask authors to write as they speak to a friend or associate....not as they'd write a research paper. Many writers think they sound more intelligent or competent if they adopt a formal tone. But if the text is dense and obtuse, an audience won't take the time to discern the message!

Best of luck,

Ann Handley