Northeastern University

Adapting Your Copy

Understanding your audience helps you adapt different parts of your Web site for different audiences. Imagine you are the content provider for the Biotechnology Initiative Web site, and you have to write news content on a newly designed home page. You are charged with keeping your site up to date and you need to take into consideration your site’s diverse audience:

The researchers may want to read specific information written in scientific language, while the rest of your audience needs information in lay terms.
The students may want to learn what is appealing about a career in Biotech.
The parents may want to find out about the program’s academic reputation, and the university development officers may want to discover if the research is innovative enough to be appealing to donors.

Only the researchers need scientific language, but even they probably don’t want to read dry text. The following are strategies to convert dry copy to interesting copy that satisfies audience expectations.

  1. Personalize
    Personalizing is as simple as making your written words sound conversational. This doesn’t mean your writing has to be chatty, or use slang. Conversational writing can still be professional and serious. But by addressing the actual person on the site as you and writing in the second person, you make your text instantly more approachable.

    Let’s take that same text from the College X site that was written for faculty members. It wasn’t bad as it was, but it has a different feel now by the simple decision to change a couple of words and put it in the active voice.

    Read through the Primer for more tips.

    BEFORE:
      Government-funded grants increasingly require investigators to preserve and share research results electronically. Providing quality metadata that organizes and describes research results can be essential to increasing the likelihood of securing funding and satisfying grant requirements. College X now offers an on-campus solution for metadata design and production.

    AFTER:
      Government-funded grants increasingly require investigators to preserve and share research results electronically. You can increase your likelihood of securing funding and satisfying your grant requirements with quality metadata that organizes and describes research results. College X now offers an on-campus solution for metadata design and production.

    The repetition of you lets the reader know that the copy (and the responsibility) is aimed directly at the researcher population.

  2. Personalize without you
    If your department does not like you to use second person (you), you can personalize the text by naming the audience group you are targeting.

    For example:
      Government-funded grants require research faculty to . . . or
      Parents of incoming students will . . .
      Declared biology majors . . .

    Using the direct appeal lets the reader know she is in the right place.

  3. Tighten wording
    If your site is set up so that there is only one set of copy for all audiences, tighten wording. Tightening wording so that you have only the essentials allows the busy reader to retrieve information quickly and isolates no one. Consider the following:

      BEFORE:
        Welcome to the University X Procurement Credit Card Program. The procurement credit card is a procurement tool which offers an alternative to the existing University procurement processes and provides an extremely efficient and effective method of purchasing and paying for goods and services with a value of less than $3,000.

      AFTER:
        The University Procurement Credit Card Program offers an efficient alternative to purchasing goods and services costing less than $3,000.

      The second version captures the essential information in one sentence.

Exercise

Adapting Your Copy: Personalizing Your Text

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Next: Striking the Right Tone >>