Some good points on wordsmithing and the writing process

I like this article on writing by Scott Kubie

Source: How to make someone hate writing for you | GatherContent | Scott Kubie, July 2015

“In business, a writer is a designer who solves communication problems with words.”

Word Smithing

Kubie shines a light on the challenge and problems with wordsmithing

“Asking for wordsmithing presupposes that the only thing wrong with the content is superficial — change a few words, tighten a few sentences, and there we have it! It elevates your contribution and diminishes the contribution of the person you’re asking for help. It also leaves the writer boxed in, unable to ask meaningful questions about why the content exists or how it got to be so bland in the first place. ”

This is one of the challenges with writing in large organisations. If there is no way to ask questions and clarify the intent of the writing and no ability to change it in meaningful ways then your written content will not improve

The invisible parts of content writing

“Going from a finished draft to a finished writing assignment can involve a great deal of stuff that most people don’t think of as writing — adding styling and formatting, inserting links and tracking codes, appropriate tagging and categorization, image descriptions, proofreading, localization, SEO tweaks, updating content inventories and sitemaps, and so on.

Yeeeeeeees. Finally someone acknowledges the authoring process does involve a lot of styling and formatting. It often gets too much attention if the writing is hard or locked down and ‘approved’. Providing clear guidance with your digital governance will make things progress much more smoothly here.