There are plenty of ways to lose a reader in 10 seconds. Use a bunch of jargon they don’t recognize. Bury the point three pages in. Write a headline so generic it could sit on almost any document ever produced. Or spend six months creating something and assume everyone else is as interested in it as you are. The thing
You’ve spent weeks on a document. Maybe months. It’s been reviewed, rewritten and passed around the team. The comments have been dealt with. The wording has been debated. Everybody is happy with it. Then someone outside the project reads it and asks a question within the first minute. A question nobody inside the team thought to ask. Most content teams
People assume editing is mostly preference. It isn’t. If you handed the same document to five editors, they’d cut a lot of the same things. Because the same issues keep showing up. Here’s what that tends to look like. 1. The same point shows up twice You get a sentence that makes the point, followed by another that says the
Spring has sprung! The sun is out, flowers are blooming, an excessive amount of chocolate is being consumed in egg form, and it’s time for the annual spring clean. Wardrobes get sorted into keep, bin or donate. Inboxes reach zero (very, very briefly!). Your computer desktop is finally visible again. Less junk, less clutter, more space to focus on what
There’s a common assumption circulating in corporate comms that AI will reduce the need for editing. It sounds logical. If a tool can produce clean, clear copy in seconds, surely that removes some of the work around writing and reviewing it. In reality, it tends to do the opposite. Because while AI is very good at producing sentences, it’s not
In 1946, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, George Orwell set out six simple rules for clear writing. They are quoted often. Followed less often. From an editorial perspective, they read less like literary advice and more like a checklist of the things that often go wrong in corporate documents every day. Here’s what they still get right.
Editing is often treated as the final tidy-up. A quick pass before something is published. In reality, it’s one of the most important decision points in the entire process. Once a document goes out, it becomes real. It can be quoted, shared, compared with earlier statements and picked apart by people who weren’t in the room when it was written.
NEWS FLASH: AI can’t do everything! You’d be forgiven for thinking that we can all put our feet up now because AI can sort out anything important. It is categorically not the case. I heard my friend’s daughter recently talking about wanting to be a hairdresser and we all agreed that it was a good option and was futureproofed from
Editing isn’t about better wording. It’s about deciding what the reader needs—and having the confidence to remove everything else.
Most conversations about content are about writing. Writing that is more clear. More concise. More persuasive. But many problems we blame on poor writing aren’t writing problems at all. They’re reading problems. You’ve encountered them. Reports that are technically accurate but oddly tiring to get through. Updates that contain the right information but take too much effort to understand. Documents
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