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Keep Your Language Straight Forward

What are most booklets about: various technical details. This is why people make booklets because they want to talk about things that aren’t a normal fit for the other forms of advertising.

Booklet printing is geared towards the lengthy description. It’s meant for those who have a lot to say and need the time to say it. A common use for booklets is to market to other companies by detailing what you can do and how you could help out their business should they use your services.

This can lead to some very specific examples and to things that can get confusing for anyone who isn’t already well versed in the field. Take the idea of a tax expert creating a booklet to send to a variety of companies he wants to do business with.

In this booklet he describes his knowledge of the tax code, and gives some descriptions of ways he thinks he could save the company money based on a variety of different things within the tax code he would do differently than they’re doing right now.

Anyone who doesn’t already know a lot about taxes is likely to find their mind wandering or just being confused at any description like this. Just looking at my tax information each spring can be confusing enough, so how is someone supposed to understand the specific details of taxes in a booklet?

No matter what the subject you need to keep your language simple and to the point. Make sure that each point you made is well set up and has a lot of lead up to it so people can easily follow you. Remember the audience and the limits of what they will know about the subject matter.

These booklets aren’t being written for you and they aren’t being written for people with a strong understanding of your field of expertise. If it took you ten years or more to become an expert in your field, don’t expect someone who has never worked in it at all to quickly understand the finer points of it when laid out in a booklet. That will only happen if you’ve written it to be as open and friendly as possible.

It is very easy to lapse into language and details that the everyday person doesn’t know as much about. Whenever I’m talking about anything I know a lot about and I’m particularly passionate about I have my own problems with dropping quickly into a language most don’t understand.

If you do that than your booklet won’t do much to help anyone, and it especially won’t help you at all. If you make sure that right from the beginning you always keep your audience close to you in your mind, you’ll be able to write in a way that appeals to them, and gets your message across.