Writing: Clean, Clear and Quick
Writing for the web should be clean (not dirtied with excess words), clear (no obscure words) and quick to hammer though. Main ideas at the top, breakout a quote, keep your title sensible (for our buddies at Google), and follow Yahoo’s eye tracking.
Every subject, whether it’s technology, art or marketing, has different, yet amazingly effective ways of completely fucking up the writing. ”Tech speak”, “art speak”, “marketing language” all mean that no one knows what the hell anyone is talking about.
How I wish we could all just cut and paste. But lo.
Below are some editorial notes:
“When we’re using information from their company’s site, we want to paraphrase so it doesn’t look like the marketing from their site. The very tone confuses our readers and makes them think it’s a paid spot.
I’ll touch on a couple concepts, we’ll start with paraphrasing:
Their copy
XYZ’s vision is to use software-based technology to improve patient care and safety while providing a platform for doctors, hospitals and suppliers to communicate and work collaboratively. Their scalable solution should steadily improve communication levels between institutions, doctors, and suppliers, which will improve levels of patient care.
XYZ’s software shifts the focus of medicine to the patient by improving the technology used in their care and by ensuring that all components of their caregivers communicate, including their physicians, hospitals, treatment centers, suppliers, sales reps and beyond.
We “flatten it” to read more like:
XYZ uses software to improve patient care and safety, and provides a platform for doctors, hospitals and suppliers to communicate and collaborate. The goal of their software is to improve communication levels between institutions, doctors, and suppliers.
So this change in language is what I call “flattening” – changing the voice to be more matter-of-fact and less spokesman-like.
Now… next level – what in hells bells does this company do? This is pretty vague. Now, my aunt had a heart machine/pacemaker thing that she would … no joke, somehow plug into the phone, then call a phone number and it would send her heart’s data through the phone. Now that sounds cool, that’s a story. So let’s try to find something specific and if we can’t… we’d have to call them.. so let’s take a look…
…Ok, I literally spent 60 seconds looking at the site. This is what I know:
They don’t do my aunt’s heart thing (this).
They do software for everything related to medical care. The software for the hospitals does things like keeping track of scheduling surgeries. The doctor’s office version coordinates billing.
When it’s dry, just keep it as short as possible. Now the question is their tag line is “Data Software for Implanted Medical Devices”. So I searched their site for “devices” and found,
There is a direct relationship between patient safety and how well a physician and a provider of implantable devices communicate with each other.
Ok, that’s too bad. I wish this was the cool story about my aunt dialing in her pacemaker data, but this is about practitioners communicating.
And that’s okay to say too. Again, we’re not their marketing firm, so we can simply state, their tag line “Data Software for Implanted Medical Devices”, refers to communication of patient data between health care providers.
