My Own Take on Marketing Writing

I love the concept of feagueing, but have to disagree with Nat about its relationship to marketing writing. It is certainly the way most marketing writing is practiced, but it's not the highest form of the art.

The best marketing writing has more to learn from poetry: heightened language that creates a recognition of something you should have noticed, but didn't. As described in Robert Bly's book Leaping Poetry, the best poetry has a gap, across which a spark leaps from the page to the reader, igniting a moment of insight.

Unlike Nat, I love writing marketing copy. It's a challenge as a writer to craft a message that hones and compresses what's important down to its essentials, in a way that makes people sit up and take notice.

At O'Reilly, I try to encourage marketing copy that focuses on telling the truth, simply and powerfully, about why the ideas that we are passionate about are important for others to pay attention to as well.