Today's Tech Writing Mostly Sucks
After reading a couple thousand PowerPoints, business plans, and comms (especially white papers, blogs and websites), I’ve found that most of us in this industry have essentially built our own language. We all have the habit of relying on tech-specific terms, acronyms, expressions, or buzzwords in everything that we do, internally and externally.
But it’s time to break these habits. With this language, I’ve found it’s best to use these terms judiciously, because while it may be set in the employee vocabulary, it may just risk alienating investors, prospects, and actual customers. If this term is generally explained and understood clearly, or lively and capable of injecting real meaning into a sentence… then use it. Otherwise, skip it — your work will likely be fine without it.
This shift in language requires more focus — startups and later stage companies alike have trouble clearly communicating their vision, even when it comes down to product descriptions. Here’s why:
Many employees have never taken a creative writing, journalism or English class — instead taking engineering and technical business classes in their education. While written homework and papers are required in all majors, bad grammar and second rate writing often get a pass as long as the algorithm or financial model checks out.
Your new idea doesn’t automatically come with a handy cheat sheet to help you explain it to a third grader.
Marketing is often crowd-sourced from well-meaning friends of the company, (advisors, board members, founders, executive officers, or even lawyers) who have written patent language from both inside and outside the company.
An event is the driver behind the creation of a document but it has not been considered in a larger context.
For competitive reasons, founders use deliberately obscure language related to technology, strategy, customers, user cases, etc.
To create this document, it takes an iterative process that founders simply don’t prioritize over other work.
Solutions to tombs, word lettuce and generally poorly written documents can be:
Hiring a professional freelance or full-time copywriter.
Designate the founder or teammate with the strongest writing skills to lead the written expression and proof everything that goes out externally.
Have key members of your team take an online or in-person professional writing course (UPenn has a very good one) or certification program.
Hire full time executives and senior managers with strong writing skills, or leverage board members of advisors.
Task your product managers to test product positioning statements and other messaging with customers.
Schedule six month and annual reviews with the comms or marketing teams to review the website and key documents, and implement edits accordingly.
Hire an branding/strategic agency to help with a mission/values book to reference
Without sharing trade or technology secrets, find a one sentence line that you can use to differentiate yourself from the competition, solve customer problems and offer the market a compelling solution.
Founders and early-stage company executives are going to use justifications and rationalizations to avoid this subject. You may think you don’t need to spend money on writing — but just ask my editor who worked on this piece. Successful companies typically lead the way with clear, concise communication, without being boring. There is a strong relationship between great writing, revenues, strong customer relationships and company growth.
What’s fascinating is that this practice of “techifying” biz writing is often seen as the sign of a polished or refined effort and simple documents are summarily revised. I believe it often reveals a lack of confidence in the core product — the misguided need to make it sound punchier.