Who are you writing for?

We all change our conversational styles when talking to different people—you’d speak differently in a job interview than you would going out with friends. It’s the same with writing.

News stories

For news stories and press releases, your style should be direct and informative. This is actually one place where quirkiness and witticisms aren’t needed—the goal is to convey information efficiently and gain media coverage.

Headlines

Headlines are their own special category—doing them well is really an art. It takes practice, but here are some tips.

Sometimes you just need to say what it is and summarize

• UCSC student wins second place at UC systemwide Grad Slam
• A public dedication in the name of civil rights
• Alumnus covers breaking news in Ukraine

Other times you can be playful if the story allows

• Mark Wooding: Drawing them in
• Reef madness: A coral grows at UC Santa Cruz
• Turkey tale: How the big birds have pecked their way into campus legend

Play with words

• Really special collections
• A summery summary
• Puzzling it out

Take a cue from the article itself

• Type and literature and poetry
• A visionary, a genius, and the human genome
• ‘John Lewis’s legacy will imbue all we do’

Seek common phrases to tweak

Try to think of common phrases that echo the words in the article and make a play on them. Careful not to be offensive in some way; think it through from every perspective. It’s a good idea to Google a phrase and make sure it’s not something horrible.

• Dry, dry again
• Cody Townsend: Steep thrills
• Beating crime by a hair

Play with pop culture references

• Game of genomes
• Sweet emotion
• Hidden figures

Social media

Here’s your chance to shine with smart, creative, witty posts that speak in that distinctive “UCSC voice.” Social media is, by nature, ephemeral and made for short attention spans. So short, simple, fun, and smart is best. Be genuine and heartfelt, however—snarkiness or cattiness are not appropriate for university social media platforms.

A platform such as Facebook can, by nature, consist of longer blurbs than Twitter (which, of course, are limited to 280 characters). However, you don’t want to write long on Facebook, either, and risk losing attention. Approximately 30- to 50-word posts are ideal.

To write a Tweet, dispense with articles such as “a” and “the”—and even punctuation such as periods—to trim the post down to fit, and keep it to the basics. Always hashtag it with #ucsc, plus any other relevant hashtags (#UCSCAlumniWeekend, #kzsc, #vinyl, #stewardship, #ucscnaturalreserves, for example). Hashtags can be upper- or lowercase.

Example of a tweet.

Writing for email

Getting emails right—to the right people, at the right time, and in the right voice—might look easy, but it’s not. It takes work and careful attention to detail. Just like paper mail, each email sent from UC Santa Cruz should be clear in purpose and meaningful to the person receiving it. We want people to open emails from UC Santa Cruz and feel good about hearing from us.

Please see this complete guide to writing email and navigating UC Santa Cruz external email system, iModules. For more information about email at UC Santa Cruz, see the Email section on this site.

Marketing writing

Writing for fundraising

There are best practices specific to development (fundraising) writing. Many people and organizations ask for money, and people who give get many requests. Giving is a choice.

See this complete guide on ways to inspire philanthropic support.

Writing for the web

Writing for the web is a bit different than writing for print. Essentially, web writing needs to be more concise so that website visitors can get their information as quickly as possible. Following are some tips for writing for the web.

The No. 1 problem people have with any website is that they can’t get to the content as fast as they want to get it. Help people complete the task they came there to do. People have no patience online. They will scan in a couple seconds, and if they don’t see what they came there for, they are simply going to leave. As a rule, people must connect with your page in five seconds or less. Scanability is very important.

Use subheads. They make sites scannable.

Avoid long blocks of dense text. No paragraph should be more than five lines long.

Avoid jargon. Ask yourself if the language you’re using is understandable by people not in that field. Convert jargon to words a general audience can understand.

Don’t over-glow. If you claim to be “prestigious” or the “gold standard” when you’re not, it’s not believable or credible, so it actually hurts your reputation. If you can’t substantiate the claim, take it off the site.

Keep reading levels low. Within the high school level.

Do analytics research to find out what people coming to the site most often want to do. This will help guide you on the content of the page.

Examples

Try to avoid the overly flowery—we can all fall into that trap easily! It seems like good writing needs to be verbose, formal, and elaborate—but it doesn’t. Some of the best writing is simple and direct. Have a colleague rein you in if you need editing.