Story one. I was invited to give a preconference workshop on concise writing. I called it "Rock Your Readers: Turn Content Coal Into Diamonds." For months, I promoted it. Others promoted it. No one signed up. What could I do? I considered staying home. Instead, I renamed my talk "Teach Your Text to Strip: Take It Off—Take It (Almost) All Off." I filled the room.
Change a title, draw a crowd.
Story two. I heard a usability professional describe a test conducted by Amazon.com. What did these technology wizards want to discover? They wanted to learn which version of a text passage their customers found more usable: the one with the semicolon or the one with the period. I don’t know whether the semicolon or the period won the day. What sticks with me is that Amazon spent hard, cold research bucks to find out.
Change a punctuation mark, improve usability.
Story three. I attended a talk by a search-engine marketer. He gave an eager audience tip after tip for improving any Web page’s conversion rate, the percentage of people who answer the call to action: buy a book, subscribe to a newsletter, make a phone call. Among other strategies, he urged us to experiment with button text. For example, see how many clicks you get when a button says "Submit" versus, well, any other phrase. The differences he described were stunning.
Change a label, increase sales.
These three stories all point to something that technical writers have always known. In business as in other realms that involve the written word, saying a thing one way rather than another matters. Language-usage decisions affect the bottom line. Text is money.
Unfortunately, basic writing skills often get edged out of the spotlight in this era of DITA, content strategy, information architecture, XML authoring, user/customer/information experience, and other topics that put the technical in technical writing. So it’s fitting that Intercom occasionally puts out an issue like this one that focuses on the writing. Sometimes even writers need the reminder.
Hire a writer, get results.
—Marcia Riefer Johnston
