Business Writing: Articles, House Organs, Reports, Advertisements
S. Roland Hall, an advertising counselor and former advertising manager of Alpha Portland Cement and the Victor Talking Machine Company, wrote this McGraw-Hill textbook for people who already write good business letters and want to write the rest of what a company publishes.
What it is
S. Roland Hall, an advertising counselor and former advertising manager of Alpha Portland Cement and the Victor Talking Machine Company, wrote this McGraw-Hill textbook for people who already write good business letters and want to write the rest of what a company publishes. Six sections cover trade-magazine articles, newspaper items, house organs, reports, advertisements and plain English, and each rule comes with a named exhibit. In a staged argument, a visiting writer turns a publicity man's self-praise into a three-sentence news item built on sales and speed figures. House organs are sorted into eight types, and Kodak is shown running four of them. A Curtis Publishing Company survey of 1,054 cement dealers and contractors for Alpha shows how to tabulate a questionnaire. An advertisement must be seen, read, believed and remembered, and a bank's "Six Reasons Why You Should Make a Will" is offered as reason-why copy.
Why read it now
Three ideas hold up. First, puffery is not news: an item earns its space through facts a reader can use, which is still how trade editors judge a press release. Hall's rewrite swaps praise for numbers: 55 machines sold, 100 unfilled orders, 20 per cent faster. Second, a company publication loses readers when every page sells. His fix, keeping product argument to set advertising pages and telling customer stories elsewhere, is the rule most brand newsletters and content programs follow. Third, his warning that magazines named once in a small survey may be noise is sound sampling sense. What has dated: space prices per inch, type tables, mail questionnaires, and a reader pictured as a young man. His seen, read, believed, remembered formula reads as a sequence, but work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute suggests much advertising works by refreshing memory without close reading, so treat it as a checklist, not a funnel. Use: before sending a company announcement to a trade outlet, cut every adjective the editor would strike and keep three numbers a reader can check.
Passages worth keeping
Facts, though valued, may fail to impress if the treatment of them is dull, commonplace or cloudy.
الحقائق وحدها لا تكفي، فإذا عُرضت بأسلوب ممل أو مبتذل أو غامض فقدت أثرها في القارئ.
It will fill as much space as it is worth from a news standpoint,
يرد الكاتب على من يريد خبرًا أطول بأن الخبر يأخذ من المساحة بقدر قيمته الإخبارية فقط، أما المديح فمكانه الإعلان المدفوع.
But if every article and every page insistently presents the merits of Larro, the product of the Larrowe Milling Company, the reader may weary of this advertising and regard the magazine as a mere circular.
إذا ألحّت كل صفحة في نشرة الشركة على مزايا المنتج، ملّ القارئ وعدّها مجرد منشور دعائي، فتخسر النشرة سبب وجودها.
It will be observed that a number of publications are named only once. Were another 107 answers received to a similar questionnaire, it is possible that some of these magazines might be named four or five times.
المجلة التي ذكرها مجيب واحد قد تُذكر مرات أكثر لو زاد عدد الردود، أي أن الأعداد الصغيرة لا يُبنى عليها حكم.
A simple formula for good advertising is that, to be effective, an advertisement: 1. Must be seen. 2. Must be read. 3. Must be believed. 4. Must be remembered.
قاعدة من أربعة شروط: أن يُرى الإعلان ويُقرأ ويُصدَّق ويُتذكَّر، ويقرّ هول بعدها بأن هذه الخطوات قد تجتمع في جملة واحدة.
What it teaches best
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