12 July, 2018 | less than a minute read

Harvard Business Review's excellent advice to technical authors

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Tom Elgar

Co-founder

Get in touch

Tom Elgar

Co-founder

If you are an expert and you want a primer in how to write for your non-technical audience, please take 5 minutes to read this.

The full article is worth a read but the advice can be summarised with two points.

1. Plain, clear writing is not dumbing your ideas down - make your writing easily readable, you might lose some nuance but your readers will get more from the piece.

2. Keep it simple. Build your narrative one idea at a time. Do not try to write a piece that covers your entire subject end to end. Small, easily digestible content is king.

Don’t believe that plain, clear writing is dumbing your ideas down. Jargon clutters your message and confuses the reader. That’s why tech leaders need to understand their target audience. The language you use in white papers and research papers, which are crafted for peers or senior stakeholders, cannot be easily transferred to other marketing documents.

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