Greetings! Prepare to have your intellect offended with this passage:

When writing for Business-to-Business (B2B) or “blogging”(blogging refers to publishing content on the Internet), it is important to know what will make your readers roll their eyes. As was said by Steve Jobs, who died in 2011 after co-founding Apple Inc., “Be a yardstick of quality.” Remember: B2B marketing is just like print marketing, but through a different medium – computers.

Are you still there?

In the paragraph above, I have included three surefire ways to offend your reader’s intelligence, and probably get your paper tossed instantly:

1. Defining obvious acronyms and terms
2. Giving historical background on a common knowledge event
3. Offering an oversimplified or faulty explanation

Sound like common sense? It can get tricky. See if it sounds so obvious in this narrative, written for federal agency directors:

When the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued its report in 2011, federal agencies started to reduce their spending. Improper payments, including overpayments to contractors, were reigned in.

You probably didn’t detect them, but there are five eye-rolling mistakes in those two sentences for its intended audience (scroll to end of post to see them*). This segment is actually more ridiculous than the first example above.

Bells should be going off whenever you spell out an acronym, define a term, give background info, or put something into your own words. Tread carefully; remember that your audience is narrow. Try to find sources where experts are writing about the subject matter to other experts, and compare your writing.

Are there any other deal-breakers you can add?

(*Eye-rolling mistakes from paragraph above: GAO is obvious, all directors know the report was issued in 2011, no duh that the agencies started to reduce spending, of course improper payments include overpayments to contractors, and “spending was reigned in? You don’t say!”)