David examines his own world of writing

Marketing writing is full of bad habits. Sentences go on for 30 words with multiple commas. Adjectives and adverbs are everywhere. Among the worst pieces of marketing writing are press releases. I know -- I’ve written hundreds of them and read thousands.

I recently found a blog entry from Don Mecoy, a business writer for the Daily Oklahoman. In it, Mecoy nominates this press release from a technology company for worst press release of 2009, citing the opening paragraph:

"____’s clustered storage and data management solutions drive unique business value for customers by maximizing the performance of their mission-critical applications, workflows, and processes. ____ enables enterprises and research organizations worldwide to manage large and rapidly growing amounts of file-based data in a highly scalable, easy-to-manage, and cost-effective way."

I’ve seen press releases that were much worse than this. In fact, this one is not that unusual. Many – perhaps most - technology press releases read like this one, and most of them are written by people with degrees in journalism.

Why are so many press releases so bad? The answer lies in the way press releases are not so much written as they are “assembled.” A technology press release is usually based at its core on a series of what are known in the industry as “value propositions.” A value proposition is a reason to buy a product. (Except you never call it a product, it’s “a solution” and if it’s a business product, it’s an “enterprise solution”.)

Value propositions are created by product managers, and product mangers try to cram as many reasons to buy the product as they can into a single sentence. It will have more impact that way, the thinking goes. Since the product needs to stand out from the competition, the product manager needs to make sure he uses lots of colorful adjectives and adverbs. The value proposition also needs to be sure to contain all the latest jargon such as “unique business value” and “mission-critical” so that everyone knows the product is on the cutting edge of technology.

This is why press releases have sentences like “____’s clustered storage and data management solutions drive unique business value for customers by maximizing the performance of their mission-critical applications, workflows, and processes.” The value proposition here is that you want to buy this product because it “maximizes the performance” – in other words, it runs faster. That’s it – a very long and tortured way of saying “it runs faster.” The next sentence takes an even longer time to say “it handles lots of data.”

So paragraphs in most technology press releases are really just a series of long sentences expressing value propositions, all crammed together. It’s not an uncommon experience to read a technology press release and then discover around the fourth paragraph, if you’re fortunate, what the product actually does and what the release is talking about.

Fortunately, technology companies are moving away from the press release -- and more to using blogs to announce news, where they are freer to engage in what I like to call “human speak.”