By Kim Potter

On April 25, 1999 Gordon Graham presented a full-day course on how to write various marketing materials. Twenty people had signed up.

Gordon began by introducing the concepts of marcom to the participants, the majority of whom were technical writers whose tasks were expanding to include marketing documentation.

Throughout the day, we referred to elements of writing style that technical writers already understood: tone, length, emotion, etc. This link to the familiar took the mystery out of technical vs. marketing communication.

Nine Classic Documents

For the greatest part of the day, Gordon introduced the nine classic marketing documents and when and why they were used. He distributed many real-world examples to show us the differences in both the "look and feel" and the content.

We had the chance to try our hand at writing a press release, as well as planning a success story illustrating a client's problem and the solution provided by a vendor. We spent the last part of the day discussing the differences between traditional marketing literature and Web content.

Being a marketing person and not a technical writer, I went to this seminar because I was curious to find out (a) if Gordon & Gordon are effective in teaching marketing communication to technical writers and (b) if technical writers have any creativity.

Before this course, I had perceived technical writers as the writing geeks of the world, closer to software engineers than writers. After all, they used long sentences, flat tone, multi-syllabic words and incomprehensible terminology just like engineers, the only differences being that technical writers made some sense of it for the rest of us!

I am only too happy to report that I think Gordon & Gordon did an excellent job. I am now a convert. Technical communicators not only know their grammar and vocabulary, they hide a spark of creativity that is just waiting to happen!

All in all, I consider the seminar a huge success. I highly recommend that those technical writers who have a latent itch to use an adjective or emotional phrase every once in a while take the course.

This article originally appeared in Connections, the newsletter of the STC Montreal chapter.

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