Marketing to scientists requires a careful balance. Marketing people tend to come in too hot, thinking that clever graphics and sales pitches will bring in sales, while scientists believe that cold data is enough to win business. Both of these extremes have significant limitations and can even hurt your brand if you aren’t careful.
How do you find the “Goldilocks” middle of these two approaches?
Medium writers love to write about writing.
In fact, writing is one of the most popular subjects on the platform. There are hundreds of thousands of posts on Medium with the “Writing” tag. I devour these articles, even though they can be repetitive. I find it comforting. They can be a writing coach whispering gentle reminders, or a cheerleader hyping me up.
With so much written on the topic, I decided to do a deep-dive on the subject. First, I found 50 articles which met the following criteria:
From there, I summarized the advice, and found 9 themes that emerged as the most important and the most often repeated. Here is what I found.
When you’re writing for the internet, you should be aiming for a 6th-grade reading level. This isn’t just personal advice. It has been documented again and again that simple writing gets read more than complex writing.
Why is simply writing so important? Is it necessary if I’m not aiming for a mass audience? Let’s take a moment to examine why.
Want to upgrade your writing process? Try using “trash drafts.” As the name implies, these are drafts of your article that are meant for the trash bin. While it may sound like a waste, these greatly simplify your actual writing process. To show how this works, I will include the trash draft of this article below. It has not been edited beyond Word’s autocorrect feature. It isn’t a great read, but many of the ideas in this article can be found there. Here are three reasons why trash drafts improve your writing.