The difference between academic writing and marketing

It was in my first year of undergrad when I first heard my Teaching Assistant (TA) say that to the class. For many of us, it was our first attempt at writing an academic paper.

All throughout my undergrad — my classes in Communication studies, Cinema studies, and even Politics had a clear structure on how to write papers.

But in an internship over the Summer, I quickly learned that this wasn’t the case. Over the Summer, I landed an internship in a marketing agency. I was tasked to conduct a lot of social media marketing research and generate reports on my findings. Some other tasks often included reading other reports and summarizing them so that we could understand them easier.

But when I sent my first report over to my boss, I was called into her office just minutes later to talk about the report.

But when I got to her desk, she pointed to the paragraphs of data I was citing from the report and said:

From what should have taken me 15 minutes to produce, I ended up taking 3 hours just to make sure that the report was structured and appropriately explained.

But then she explained that in the world of advertising, people want things short and simple. I completely forgot that in order to write something good, I first needed to make sure that I am keeping the reader engaged.

For the first time ever, it wasn’t about the word count, it wasn’t about the argument and subject matter. It was about making your writing interesting enough that would make readers want to read until the end. I completely forgot that the rules for writing outside an academic setting were completely different.

Ever since then, I’ve been trying to get better at writing.

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