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
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.
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