Jerry Marlow, MBA, Editing of Dull Writing into Powerful Prose

Jerry Marlow, MBA Editing of Dull Writing into Powerful Prose
Just because you're smart, knowledgeable and insightful doesn't necessarily mean you can craft language and images in ways that propel readers through your story and into the course of action you advocate. If you're really smart, you recognize when your writing or your colleagues' writing doesn't do justice to the story you have to tell. If you or your colleagues have written something that falls flat, meanders or lacks pizzazz, chances are I can clean it up and pump some energy into it. I know the techniques and have the necessary fanaticism. I recognize the linguistic legacies of dot-com-bubble babble and know how to eradicate them. I know what tone is, what accounts for it and how to create the tone that has the best chance of winning over your audience. To see what a big difference a little bit of my tinkering can make, take a look at the before and after of one of my editing consultations— this one for a marketing professor.

Before Consultation ABSTRACT Based on cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, we present a framework that shows that consumers’ valuation of products differentiated with experiential (hedonic) attributes is a consequence of consumers’ modular responses to experiential environmental cues. The key aspect of the framework is the idea of mind modularity, i.e., the idea that the mind consists of specialized mental input devices that respond to specific environmental cues. We list five types of modular responses - sensory, affective, intellectual, bodily and social. We show that sensory and affective modular responses are faster than intellectual modular responses (“hierarchy-of-modules” hypothesis). We also show that this hierarchy of modules affects product evaluation if the speed of product presentation is too fast. Finally, we show that sensory and affective modular responses can be used as a choice criterion and that such choice can violate normative rationality of decision making.	After Consultation ABSTRACT Cognitive science and evolutionary psychology tell us that the mind functions in a modular fashion: Qualitatively different cues coming from a person's environment engage different, specialized mental-processing mechanisms. In three experiments we used qualitatively different marketing stimuli to engage three types of modular responses: sensory, affective and intellectual. In the first experiment, we found that subjects responded to sensory and affective stimuli faster than they did to intellectual stimuli (“hierarchy-of-modules” hypothesis). In the second experiment, the qualitative style of a stimulus engaged subjects’ intellectual modules. We showed that subjects rated a stimulus more favorably when their intellectual modules had time to complete the processing of the stimulus than they did when we presented the same stimulus too fast for intellectual modules to complete their task. However, when the style of stimulus engaged sensory and affective modules, subjects rated stimuli equally favorably regardless of the speed of presentation. In the third experiment, we showed that consumers sometimes can use their sensory and affective modular responses to choose among competing products. When they do so, their choices can violate normative rationality of decision making. We discuss the implications of our findings for product differentiation and positioning strategies.


Jerry Marlow, MBA Persuasive Writing about Complex Issues (917) 817-8659 jerrymarlow@jerrymarlow.com Home