Who’s Your Reader?
I was talking recently with some colleagues, one of whom is a book editor, and she was complaining of a client who refused to be edited. The client was an IT/technical writer (and one of some repute in the field) who had decided to write a novel; my colleague was editing this recent venture. “He’s impossible!” she confessed to us. “He won’t accept any stylistic changes – but his novel reads like a white paper!”
American culture is all about individualism – and, to some extent, about consistency. Other cultures (Japan, for example) are more flexible; people adapt their personalities, responses, and communication to different situations and circumstances. In so doing, they can to some people appear to be dishonest, duplicitous. They’re not: they’re simply adapting their behavior to the milieu.
That’s a fairly good description of writing. In reality, there is no such thing as “writing” – there is fiction writing, and technical writing, and marketing writing, and article writing, and a whole lot more that I’m forgetting, but you get my drift. Each has its own language, its own rules, its own conformism.
And even within each of these broad genres, there are categories. Let’s take marketing writing – you change your emails, your advertisements, depending on your clientele. Companies selling literature collections don’t write the same ad copy as those selling kitchen gadgets: not only the content, but the tone and the vocabulary will be different.
It’s a good thing to keep in mind when you feel like you’re in a bit of an epistolary rut: re-examine your readers, think about what is important to them, and modify your tone accordingly. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!
Posted in Process Matters, About Writing on April 22nd, 2007