Brian Mills.

Communications professional · Londonderry, NH

I write so the reader understands the first time.

That has been the job for seven years: turning specialist knowledge into plain language. Today I do product marketing at JEOL USA, where one email I write reaches 17,000 readers, from the curious first-timer to the microscopist who runs the instrument daily.

Product marketing · Technical translation · Newsletters · Process documentation

Range

The same facts, written for four readers.

One scanning electron microscope, described four times. The facts never change. The words do. Choosing them for each reader is my daily work.

01 General public No science background assumed. No units, no jargon.

A scanning electron microscope takes pictures of things far too small for any ordinary microscope to see. It can show details thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

02 Student High-school science assumed. Every term introduced before use.

An SEM forms images with electrons instead of light. The reason is resolution: visible light's wavelength stops an optical microscope near 200 nanometers. An electron beam's wavelength is far shorter.

03 Materials scientist Lab experience assumed. Definitions stop, results begin.

An SEM covers magnifications from about 10x to well past 100,000x with a depth of field no optical instrument approaches, which is why fracture surfaces and powders read so clearly.

04 Microscopist Daily expertise assumed. Terms arrive undefined, sentences compress.

A field-emission source gives the probe its brightness and stability; the condensers set probe current, the objective sets the final spot, and the scan coils raster it over the field.

Read all four versions in full

Hiring for a communications role?

I am looking for a role where I own how a message reaches its audience. I built that function once, alone, and the fifty-plus guides I wrote there are still in daily use two years after I left. I want to do that again.