If you haven’t already read “The Writer’s Voice,” zip down to that and check it out first. This article is a continuation of that piece.

Writing for experts is a very lucrative field because not many people do it at all and of that elite group, very few do it well. This is the sort of writing that goes on in scientific journals or at medical meetings. Whether it’s engineers talking to other engineers or speech pathologists writing for other speech pathologists or whatever, expert-to-expert writing is in a class by itself. Hardly anyone even talks about this.

Here are my 10 rules about expert-to-expert writing.

1. When writing for experts, particularly if you’re doing copywriting or persuasive texts, realize that experts do not need to be sold on “benefits.” Experts know benefits, experts only want to talk features. (Now a lot of writers will urge you to only talk benefits…but expert-to-expert writing is different!) Let me give you an example. We are all more or less “experts” when it comes to buying a car. We know what cars do and why we want them and what we like in them. To market a car with a convertible top and automatic transmission, you just need to state the features. Why? We’re expert enough to know the “benefits” of both of these–and the potential drawbacks–and we can make a decision based on just knowing the feature. If you tried to advertise a car by saying, “Imagine driving down the road by the beach and feeling the wind in your hair?” to sell a convertible top? Or how about writing, “Why bother with tedious shifting when you can let the car do the work with automatic transmission?” How stupid. Well, that’s how experts feel when you start to trot out benefits to them. Just talk features.
2. Use jargon. Kill the inner English teacher that misled you into thinking jargon was bad. Jargon is good–if used correctly. The correct use of jargon is as a cool way of talking among a select group of insiders. If you don’t use jargon in expert-to-expert writing, you identify yourself as an outsider…and an outsider cannot be trusted.
3. Know what keeps your readers awake at night. You have to know their innermost insecurities. Why? Because it will let you empathize with your audience. For instance, self-employed individuals usually have two overriding concerns: making money and not getting in trouble with taxes and other governmental obligations. If you don’t know those inner anxieties, it’s hard to relate to them. Use these fears to be a way to focus your writing. (For instance, most self-employed people want to know more about making money or avoiding tax trouble…so you can often interest them in what you’re writing by framing it as a way to do one or the other or both.)
4. Don’t patronize but don’t be afraid to go back to the basics, either. Most articles in medical journals start out with “background” that generally describes the problem or condition (like basic facts about hypertension). It’s not condescending to fill in facts that way. Many writers are so fearful to patronize an expert that they omit the basics.
5. If you use footnotes, make sure your references include the “big dogs,” the major papers and authors in the field. It’s OK to include obscure references, too, providing your expert readers know that you recognize and give a tip of the hat to the established big shots in the field.
6. Provide great content. A lot of people would have you believe that people don’t want to read and content should be minimalist. That may apply to some types of writing–but when you’re writing as an expert to other experts, you have to give them meat. Steak. These guys already know the bulk of the content that is “out there.” They’re hungry for new information, new insights, new products, and new angles. You may not love a long article on pressure valves for oil pipelines, but there is an entire group of people out there that does–and wants to know the latest and greatest. Make sure your content is new, compelling, and accurate.
7. Give them lots of content. This goes along with #6. Just because a lot of website writing is done in “chunks” and most cell-phone chattering teenagers have limited attention spans is no reason to think that experts on forensic science want short bullet points and a lot of cool graphics as well. Experts love their field. They buy books on their field. They want content. Don’t let anybody tell you that short is better. Short is not good in this area. I once heard that for experts, the drop-off point (where normal reader fatigue sets in) is 2000 words. Reader fatigue for an interested layperson occurs at about 500 words, and reader fatigue for most teenagers is probably reached in 15 words.
8. For some reason–and I’ve never totally understood this–most expert writing is better and more convincing and powerful if it’s ugly. I don’t mean ugly words. I mean ugly layout. Don’t deliberately set out to create an ugly article or ugly book, but don’t get into some high design mode. Keep it basic and simple. I’ve seen experts go nuts over PowerPoint slides that were hideously busy–but what they saw was tons of excellent content, not jam-packed hard-to-read slides. If the same presentation could be created in a slick, very professional way–well, some of the experts would yawn and not take it seriously. Why? Because experts value content above cosmetics and they instinctively distrust anything that is “too produced.”
9. De-fluff your writing. Fluff has its place–but it’s not in expert-to-expert writing. Even a whiff of fluff can send your readers running. Experts are earnest people. They probably have a sense of humor, but not when it comes to their area of expertise.
10. Try as hard as you can to “keep up” with your experts. Even small groups of experts probably has consensus opinions on the best methods of doing certain things, the most respected members of their field, the biggest issues, and the main controversies. For example, if you are writing for Internet marketers, you have to realize that most of them recognize and use Google pay-per-click AdWords advertising. Love it or hate it, most Internet marketers consider it a standard in the industry. If you write for that market and don’t know that or try to promote pay-per-click as some “new idea” or “great new gimmick,” then you’ll expose yourself as a non-expert. You don’t necessarily have to be an expert to write for the expert-to-expert market, but you have to at least not sound like a non-expert.

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