Transcription:

Katie: What’s on your mind today?

Isla: Editing.

Katie: Okay.  What kind of editing?  SEO editing or –

Isla: No, just editing in general, because I think we spend a lot of time talking about content –

Katie: Mm-hmm.

Isla: – and making good content, but what we don’t spend enough time talking about is how good content is made.  And I don’t mean writing it; I mean editing it, because editing is just as important as writing, and a lot of people just don’t spend enough time on it or leave time for it at the end like they should.

Katie: Do you have any tips for what would sort of – what i, what is a checklist of what you should look, look for when editing something?

Isla: Well, one, I think you need to get some distance from the piece when you’re editing.  Um, so [laughter] you take –

Katie: Yes.

Isla: – some – if you can, like if you’re working, say, in an agency, and you write a bunch of different stuff, let it sit for a day before you come back and rewrite it.  Also, if you have an editing buddy, that’s really fantastic, because they’ll have a perspective on the work, and they’ll get to know your writing and your tics, and they will call you on it.  If they don’t call you on your tics, they’re not a good editing buddy.

Um, so things that I like to look for are – obviously, you wanna do a copyedit.  Concision is important.  You know, if you find the piece that’s repeating itself over and over again – readers don’t have a lot of time.  We know that.  We know they’re gonna scan the content anyway, so you may as well make it short for them to read if you can, but make sure it still has all the information in there they need.

Um, what else?  I have notes.  Should I look at my notes?

Katie: Sure.

Isla: Um, oh, tension.  One of the things that – this is – so I’m a fiction writer, and one of the things that’s really important in fiction, even in literary fiction, which I write, is tension as the thing’s writing.  And so one of the things – when you’re reading your piece or when you’re reading somebody else’s piece, you start to notice when you get bored, because that’s where anybody else’s is gonna get bored, and it’s really important at that moment to just make a note, figure out what’s going wrong with it.  And on the Internet, a blog post may be about 400 to 800 words.  There should be no room to get bored, and there so often is, so think about that.

Think about your audience when you’re writing and when you’re editing, because you may think that what you’re writing is genius but the person that you’re – who’s your intended audience – may not even know what you’re talking about.  So that’s something really important, and that’s where getting that day-of perspective can be very helpful, too, when you come back to edit.  One thing I like to do when I really have time and when I’m really concerned about the wording of something is to read it aloud, because you will find things in there that will surprise you and it’s great.

The other things are the blank sheet of paper test, and you can always – what that means is that – Ian talks about this – but your title, your headings, your paragraphs should all be able to pass the blank sheet of paper test.  They should be able to fully explain themselves, what they are, without too much, um, external stuff.  So one of the things that can help with that is a reverse outline.  So if you’re going through a piece and you’re like, “I don’t really know where this went wrong,” go down and write in one or two words what every paragraph is about, and if there are sentences in there not about that, they go away.  That helps with concision.

Style guides can be really helpful.  Grammar – like, everybody’s got their own grammar and I don’t really care what you decide you like about the Oxford comma or not the Oxford comma, but I love it when people are consistent.  [Laughter]  And the other thing is just get to know yourself as a writer and call yourself on your stuff,  because if you don’t have that editing buddy – you know, like, for example, I know that I use the word “amazing” a lot, and there are so many other adjectives [laughter] –

Katie: Cool.

Isla:  – that makes writing more interesting.  Is that…

Katie: Yeah, that’s good.  Say goodbye, Isla.

Isla: Goodbye, Isla.

The post Portent Pop Quiz: Isla McKetta on Why Editing is Just as Important As Writing appeared first on Portent.

Some writer-editor relationships are legendary. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe had Maxwell Perkins (rumor has it the Wolfe-Perkins collaboration is about to be dramatized in a film starring Colin Firth and Michael Fassbender). John Cheever and John Updike had William Maxwell. Here’s how to be a good editor—how you can protect and enhance the creative voice to become your copywriter’s best creative partner. Even if your name isn’t Maxwell.

Step 1. Do an initial read-through

Read over the entire document to get a sense of the writer’s style and the approach he or she has taken. Pay attention to the effect the writing is having on you. Make a note anywhere your attention wanders or you are confused. This is your time to get to know the document. Heavy edits will come later.

Step 2. Edit for grammar, spelling and punctuation

An editor should have no qualms about editing for general grammar, punctuation and spelling. Some quirks like the Oxford comma (that comma before the “and” that I did not use in the previous sentence) or American versus British spellings are editing no-brainers and should conform to the style guide or brand identity rather than the copywriter’s usual style.

British clothier Boden plays up its Briticisms for the US market. Customers are asked to “befriend” the company on Facebook.

Step 3. Perform a thorough edit

This is the tricky bit. You are going to have a lot of ideas about how you would have written the copy. The more you can put that feeling in a drawer, the better the final result will be. You are working with the writer to create a seamless document in his or her voice. Your fingerprints should be invisible.

“Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” – Neil Gaiman

Here are three places where it is easy to accidentally edit out creative solutions:

Word choice

Marketers prefer feeling words to thinking words and editors often prefer words with Anglo Saxon roots to those from Latin. Ask yourself what the effect of the word choice is on the sentence. “Juxtaposing” two ideas does have a different sense than “weighing” them against one another.

If you notice the writer using stilted vocabulary, ask why.

Sentence structure

When writing a sentence, some writers use dependent clauses up front. As in the previous sentence (and this one), dependent clauses placed at the beginning ease the reader into a topic. While starting sentences with dependent clauses can be a stylistic tic that is easily overdone, it is also a great way to suggest something without being too aggressive.

Dependent clauses are only one example. Also read for compound sentences and overall sentence length. Ideally, the writer is using a variety of sentence types to achieve the desired effect. Are they?

Rhetorical devices

“Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead. Buff was dead. Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead.” – Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

Many editors would be tempted to clean up the redundancy in this passage. But Tim O’Brien is deliberately using epistrophe (the repetition of a phrase at the end of a clause). Here’s how that passage could be destroyed by removing his rhetorical device:

“Pederson was dead and Rudy Chassler was dead had died. Someone shot Buff was dead. A grenade got Ready Mix was dead. They were all among the dead casualties.” – Tragic butchering of Tim O’Brien

Rhetorical devices are more than just beautiful language. In the hands of a skilled copywriter, they are powerful influencers of tone. Pay attention to areas where your writer is under or overusing any of these elements. Other rhetorical devices include:

• Alliteration – Repetition of initial consonant sounds
• Delayed sentence – A sentence that holds the main idea for the end
• Ellipsis – Omission of words that are easily understood
• Hyperbole – Grand exaggeration
• Motif – Recurring element, theme or situation
• Parallelism – Balance of words or phrases

A Matter of Trust

You are your copywriter’s partner in creativity. Nothing makes a writer feel more frustrated or lose confidence more quickly than to be arbitrarily rewritten. It’s like falling in love with someone for who they are and then trying to change them. Once you’ve hired the right copywriter, work with his or her strengths to help develop that unique voice and your audience will follow.

Has your work ever been edited to oblivion? We’d love to hear your story about that and other copywriting nightmares in the comments.

The post Editing for Creativity: How to Enhance the Writer’s Voice appeared first on Portent.

Don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this.

Today I hauled my excessively-jiggly butt up Avalon Way, then got into the left-turn lane for some blessed rest time. Alas. An oncoming driver in a mini-van swerved into the lane, heading straight for me at 20-25 mph while mouthing something that looked a lot like “You fudge sing mediate”. He missed. Don’t worry. It was close, though. For a second, Ian-as-really-lumpy-hood-ornament and Ian-as-sarcastic-writer co-existed. In that flash, two thoughts went through my sweaty brain:

I am pretty damned tired. This way the ambulance can take me the rest of the way home.

and

I’ll die while everyone still thinks I’m an SEO.

I was sad. Because I’m not an SEO. I’m a marketer. And as a marketer, I obsess about content.

For some reason, though, every time I talk about content, folks assume I’m talking about SEO.

I’m not.

Content strategy is one discipline. It’s one tactic.

SEO is another.

Do they help each other? Sure. But content drives all marketing. If you’re still paying $10/article for stuff that wouldn’t get a ‘C’ in elementary school… Well, I was going to say “You’re behind the times,” but the truth is that great content has driven great marketing since we lost most of our fur and started coherently grunting.

You can’t do social media without a content strategy. If you do, you end up being the vaguely creepy person who walks up to a group, interrupts a conversation with a totally unrelated remark, and then just stands there, smiling blankly.

You can’t do a PPC campaign without a content strategy. You need to be on-brand, on-message and clear. Otherwise, folks give up.

And yeah, SEO needs content, too. Good content. If you’re still asking questions like “How unique does my content have to be?,” you’ve totally missed the point.

Content isn’t a thing. You don’t buy it. It doesn’t spring forth, all at once, so that you can paste it all up on your web site and then go back to pretending it’s 1995 and the internet is just a fad. Content is the sum of all communications with your audience: Videos, blog posts, comments, reviews, Tweets, Facebook posts, your replies to Facebook posts. Everything you say becomes part of your ‘content’.

I love SEO. But content is the heart of all good marketing. So please, if you remember nothing else about me after some idiot makes me into a pothole repair kit, remember that SEO is not content, and content is not SEO. They complement each other. But they’re separate.

Did you know that Monday’s my birthday? You didn’t? Well, I’ll forgive you if you donate just a teeny sum to http://mycharitywater.org/portentint.

The post On cycling, near-death experiences and content appeared first on Portent.