I am very excited to announce that Eric Nystrom and I have a new article that published today in Technical Communication (the journal of Society for Technical Communication). “Elements of an Emerging Style Guide for Kickstarter” is a corpus analysis piece that identifies written stylistic elements common to successful (and unsuccessful) campaigns on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. The goal is to help entrepreneurs write in ways that readers of campaigns associate with the entrepreneur’s confidence and ability to complete the campaign.
This article also has sneezing, sushi, Montana, and a classic Twitter fail in it, so that will tell you how fun it was to write.
I am grateful to Association for Business Communication for supporting this work with the C.R. Anderson Research Grant, to Eric Nystrom for building the tools and tirelessly co-authoring an article that originally had an enormous scope (with enthusiasm!), to Barbara Carradini for helping us gather the data, to the reviewers who made this article better, and to Jacob D. Rawlins for being an incredibly patient grant administrator. (We did it! We did the things the grant said it would do!)