3 ms·

Neither. Find a way to restructure the sentence to use "you". It's about your audience, not yourself.

• protomyth 16y ago
  My brother when he was in college had a writing instructor that said if a student used "you" in a paper then they better buy her flowers.
  • access_denied 16y ago
    edw519 talks about website copy, your brother's writing instructor about coffee table literature. Big difference.
  • kls 16y ago
    Well that is because collage papers are supposed to be written in third person to remove biasing the user by framing them in the situation. You are also not supposed to use, I, we, or us. You should never refer to the reader, author or researcher as an entity in of personal reference. In academic papers you are providing information not framing a story to build character development. It can seem kind of steril but it is done for a reason. That said, in the real world, you generally want to bias the hell out of the reader. Patio11 made a suggestion on a article once in which he suggested flipping all the we's of the article to you. I went back and reworked some marketing material I had to reflect that suggestion and was amazed at how compelling the once boring text became. The reason was simple it framed the reader in the conversation.
• jasonkester 16y ago
  That doesn't sound like an answer to the question. Your product website is going to have ten thousand words of text on it, much of it on a blog talking about your company and the product you're building. At some point you're inevitably going to need to use the first person, and that's what this person is asking about. I use "We" for any official communication and copywriting for my products. For personal correspondence I'll often use "I", especially when talking about things I personally will be doing (ie., "I'll look into that"). For anything where more than one person is reading (site copy, forum replies, etc.,) I tend to use "We".
• maguay 16y ago
  Déjà vu ... my Business Writing class in college is actually talking about "you centric" writing right now. Only problem is, everything in the world can't be written in a "you" manner without coming across as spammy or otherwise ill intentioned.