The Blue Notebook

A few years ago I interviewed for a job writing internal documentation in the hardware division of a high-tech company. Without giving me any other information, the program manager handed me a small piece of plastic and said “How would you document this?”

The first thing I asked him was “who’s the audience, and what do they need to accomplish?” I had a lot of other questions too of course but none of them made sense (to me at least) without first finding out what the whole point of the exercise was to begin with.

Now I’m reading Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andresen, and on the first page of the first chapter, “The Heart of Robin Hood Marketing,” she says “the key to marketing is to focus on our audiences” and “marketers set goals according to what they want people to do.” Sounds a lot like technical writing to me!

Of course, helping a manufacturer build an electronic device correctly is very different from convincing my Uncle Leroy to help out with global warming. However, I might be able to get him to agree to plant a few trees or try out carbonfootprint.com. Which is exactly what Andresen says: “We don’t need to strive for a shared world view; we need to have people take a specific action that advances our mission.”

This last might be controversial for some people. I myself once thought that everybody should have values similar to mine because if they didn’t what did that imply about what I believed? But I guarantee you, trying to make my Uncle Leroy look at the world through the eyes of a conservationist is a total lost cause, and one I would take on only if I enjoyed beating my head against a brick wall, and didn’t want to get any real work done.

 So. So far Robin Hood Marketing sounds familiar, useful, practical, doable. I think I’m going to like this field.

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