Put Down the Red Pen and Step Away

We have all been there, maybe even today or yesterday. Someone walks up to you at work and hands you a document and asks, “Can you proof this for me?” (Okay, maybe in today’s world that is done via email or chat, but the request is the same.) What do you do? You sit down and start reading it of course! Maybe they gave you context, maybe it is someone that reports to you, maybe they gave you no context (the worst in my opinion). Here’s my first question for you: Do you reach for the red pen, or turn on “track changes” before you ever read the first word? Or do you do that after you reach your first comment? Either way, after a few minutes, you have successfully done your job! The piece now looks like it has been murdered. Red marks, red lines and underlines are throughout the document. You send it back to the person and you feel satisfaction that you did your job. But what did you do exactly? And say the person that wrote it sent it out to 4 other people, and now they are forced to take all the comments and somehow make the piece better than it was.

I am sure if I gave you a red pen right now or allowed you to “track changes” to this blog you would find all sorts of things you want to change. But would you be making it better? Your changes may not be how I say something, or maybe I am breaking some English class rule. If I let the “internet” edit it, the blog would become less and less something I wrote and turn into something a committee of people wrote. Is that better? Luckily, for a blog that is an easy question. No! A blog (in my opinion) is supposed to be the views and words of the author. It is to sound like I (or a company) am talking to you directly about a particular subject.

You now have a glimpse into one of the great challenges of marketing, communications, or anyone trying to author something. We all want someone to review our work, mostly because we want it to be the best it can be, and we want to accomplish a particular goal when we set out to write it. But when we let people review our work, they change it. And if you have multiple people reviewing a document at once the results can be a mess. Once the author considers all the changes the document might be beautifully written from an English teacher’s perspective; however, it might have lost its soul. The writing is no longer compelling, it no longer makes the reader want to act, help the reader understand a concept, or sound like there is a particular voice.

What are we to do? This is the way I imagine most companies operate with their content review process. Here are some steps I recommend to clean up and improve the output, and this can be done by you alone in an organization, but of course larger buy-in is always better.

For the author, there is a lot you can do to improve the process, or even better if you are the line manager of the author. First, make it clear to both the author and anyone that reviews the document that the author has “creative authority.” What does that mean? As the author receives comments from reviewers they should be treated as suggestions. This is not as simple as it sounds, what if one of the reviewers is two levels higher in the organization? The author will naturally give more weight to someone higher in the company. Just because you are C-Suite does not mean you know any better than an entry level employee how to write something compelling.

Step one is to stop weighting reviewers in a hierarchy manor. Of course, someone at the top can, and should, stop something that is wrong from being written; however, when it comes down to writing styles and preferences, let the author own the work and make sure everyone knows that.

The next step for the reviewers is to tell the author what you like! Nearly all reviews I have gotten back, or even done myself, begin with “looks great, I just have a few changes.” And again, the document looks like it had been murdered. A few changes? Imagine again the author getting a bunch of comments and changes from various people and not know what to keep or change. All they see is the negative! Make sure to include comments within the document or separately of portions of the writing you liked or hit the mark. That will help the author protect what is working and prevent it from being changed.

Finally, thinking back to some of the documents you have reviewed…how many

times (if ever) have you just returned it and said, “it looks good, I would not change a thing!” Be honest! The problem here is the reviewer can be afraid to do that because it looks like you did not “do your job.” More red equals more time you spent on it. Right? But if you really think about it, if you don’t see any mistakes, and all you see is things to make it look like how you write, isn’t it okay to leave it alone? I think so! Remember before you comment, “Am I making this better or just different?”

Let’s switch sides and talk about the author and what changes they can make to improve the review process. First off, you can establish that reviewers are just making suggestions then treat their comments as such. You own the document! They are telling you they have a problem with a particular sentence or passage, but how you change it is up to you. Or maybe how you wrote it is the way you think it will work. The important piece to this solution is to remember the difference between what a suggestion is, and what is a “you can’t say that to our audience.” This is particularly important. You are not god here and there might be things you can’t or should not say.

Next, try and keep your reviewer size to a manageable number. One to two people is best, maybe three. Anymore than that and you risk creating a mess when it is time to take all their comments and merge them into a finished document. Yes, one to two people should be able to pick up all errors and any comprehension issues. Always remember to try and not get offended by their comments and thank them for their time. People that have a vested interest in your success always make the best reviewers, don’t just think of people that are good writers.

Finally, whenever possible always give your reviewers a summary of the 30,000ft level of what you have just given them. What is the goal of this piece? Who is the audience? What major points are you trying to make? Give your reviewers context. Most reviewers instantly jump right to the dotting of the “i’s” and crossing the “t’s,” but make sure they are also looking at the bigger picture. If the piece is missing something at this level it really does not matter how well it is written, it is going to miss its mark, and all the editing in the world can’t fix it.

You want to make sure you have a clean review process, such as I described above. As the author, you want to be given solid clear advice to improve your writing, and as the reviewer, you want to make sure the 15 minutes you spent reviewing someone’s work did not go to waste. The good news is this does not require a major company effort. One person on either side of the words can make a big difference, and thus, improve the writing of your team or yourself.