When writing for a postcard all you need to do is write a few short lines without going into very much depth. A poster is often just has a large,
single quote or sentence and nothing else. A flyer gives some brief details about something and that’s about it.
None of these require that much writing, and because of it, with all of them it is easy to stay on topic and keep your tone right when you’re writing.
But what about when you need to write some brochures? Brochure printing naturally requires a lot more writing to be effective than other kinds of advertising. You have a lot of space to fill and so you need a lot of words to fill that space up.
This is where problems can sometimes occur, because the more you write about something, the easier it becomes to forget who it is that you’re writing for.
Each industry has certain details that are very specific to just that industry, things that you wouldn’t really know about if you weren’t working in it. This might be certain technical jargon that the general public is unaware of or other aspects of the industry that just don’t need to be known if you don’t work in it.
What happens is that a person is told to write a brochure meant to educate people about some specific products or services that a company offers. Because they’re explaining what these things are, they have a habit of slipping into language that most people wouldn’t really know. Suddenly the brochure starts to become confusing to anyone who isn’t in your industry, and fails to do the job it was designed for.
Someone obviously needs to understand what you’re saying to learn about a service. If you stray too much into territory they wouldn’t understand than you won’t be able to accomplish anything with your brochure printing.
This isn’t as easy to avoid as it would appear, either, because often you don’t realize what you’re doing until it’s too late and you’ve already written something too confusing for most to understand.
The best thing to do is have someone else read through what you’ve written before you turn your writing into an actual brochure. Find someone you know wouldn’t be as well versed in your industry and ask them if they understand what your brochure is trying to say.
Every brochure should go through a test like this to ensure they can always be understood.
It’s just too easy to forget about who you’re writing to when you have to write something longer. You can easily slip into wording and information that is commonplace to you but foreign to others, and you’ll never be able to stop yourself from doing it all the time. But with the right safe guards, such as a person to read through what you wrote, you’ll never have to worry about handing your actual customers something they can’t understand.
