The B2B writer’s #1 imperative: honor your audience.

I have mixed feelings when people refer to ‘the Velocity voice’.

I love that we have a distinctive, even recognisable way of writing and that people seem to respond to it.

But I wouldn’t want people to think that the way we write for ourselves is the same as the way we write for any (or, God forbid, every) client.

The last thing we want to do is make every client sound the same.

But there are some things that are shared by all our writing across all clients and all circumstances. And one of the most important of these is having respect for the audience. (Harry wrote about this in his post Only Fools and Prospects and I touch on it in The 15 B2B Copywriters I Don’t Want To Be).

Lazy, cliché-studded, patronising or paper-thin writing insults the audience. Audiences don’t like that.

Two of our writers posted videos about this on our #copy channel on Slack last week.

Instead of paraphrasing two of the world’s greatest writers (or giving you all a log-in to our Slack), I thought I’d just share them here.

First, Harry posted this interview with Christopher Hitchens (I grieved when he died in 2011 but I feel it even more today, when we so desperately need his voice). Here he is on respecting his readers (the first two-ish minutes are relevant here — but if you want to keep on watching, don’t let me stop you):

“Talk to everybody as you would talk to your smartest or wittiest pal. And the great discovery you make is that that’s how people quite like to be talked to.”

Boom.

Then Adam posted this one by George Saunders (also one of my favourite writers — check out Tenth of December for some absolutely wonderful short stories):

“Err on the side of honouring the reader’s intelligence.”

Bam.

If you commission writers for B2B audiences, you could do worse than asking them to watch these two videos as a standard part of your brief.