Being a content specialist, the word ‘writer’ often sits as part of my job title. I’ve been a web writer, a UX writer, a copywriter.

I usually work for the government and usually on websites. Part of any job description that I look at says that I need to be able to ‘write for the web’. But if that’s as far as the job description goes, they’re not going to get the right person for the role.

The writing is the easy part of my job.

I can whip up a web page in no time, without even breaking a sweat.

It’s the part that comes next that is the struggle.

Getting approvals

This can be an incredibly convoluted process. One way that the process becomes convoluted, is that everybody who needs to see the piece before it’s published, feels they must be the last person to see it before it goes live.

So say the piece you’ve just written goes across 3 business areas. You’ll need 3 people to approve a piece of content. So the first person person looks at it, makes their changes, and approves it with their changes. The second approver looks at it and makes their changes and approves it with their changes. Then the third person does the same, but by then the piece is starting to look completely different and the first approver hasn’t seen it now.

Add to that the fact that each of the approvers is probably busy and takes a while to do their review.

So now your piece is late and looks nothing like what you wrote, the first approver is cross because they’ve heard that they haven’t seen that latest version.

Sounds frustrating, doesn’t it…and this is why the writing is not the hardest part.

What’s the solution? A good content strategy, which includes a workflow.

This will dictate who sees the piece when and what they’re approving for. For example, at a particular point, the approver might be responsible for checking for reputational risk but the instructions dictate that they should not edit for style.

The plain English argument

Yes, I hear many arguments for and against plain English. As a content specialist, I am firmly for plain English and many people far smarter than me have devoted whole websites in support of plain English. I have had the plain English conversation so many times, I’ve considered writing it out and having the paper laminated.

These are counterpoints that I have heard to my plain English mandate:

My colleague: The content on the rest of the website may well be in plain English, but our content is different.

Me: All content is different and your audience needs yours to be in plain English too.

My colleague: Our audience is different. They expect us to be the experts and if we dumb it down, we’re reducing our stature.

Me (picking up the pieces of my broken dreams because they’ve referred to what I do as ‘dumbing down’): I’m sure your audience are incredibly smart, but they’re also probably incredibly busy and they’d really prefer to read clear content that’s been crafted for busy people.

This version’s imaginary, but never-the-less true.

My colleague: You have to publish this convoluted version that my director approved because I don’t understand it well enough to write it in plain English.

Me: If you don’t understand it … how do you expect our readers to?

My colleague: Any random argument against plain English

Me: Here’s this organisation’s content strategy. It was signed off by our executive. It’s says that all content published by this organisation must be in plain English. If you want to publish content that’s not in plain English, please y’all go on ahead and take it up with our executive.

Getting people to go back to work they thought was finished

‘It’s been approved by our director, we’re not prepared to back to him or her and tell them that we need to do more work on it. Just publish it!’

I know you think it was finished and you were just going to throw it over the fence to the publishers, but if it doesn’t meet the needs of the users, isn’t written appropriately for the web and isn’t accessible to people who use assistive technologies to access the web, then it needs more work.

I’m going to mention a content strategy again. This time, it’s more about communicating the content strategy. If you talk about your organisation’s content strategy across the organistaion then you’ll be more likely to get your colleagues to consult with you before they embark on any content work.

Deleting content

This is actually a way more important part of my role than writing. And earlier I talked about how getting approvals to publish is tough. Even tougher than that is getting approvals to have content unpublished.

Your organisation’s content strategy is your best friend here too. Part of any governance should predict content’s end of life. Is this a news article that will only be relevant for a couple of months? In that case, the content strategy should dictate that news articles are unpublished after a couple of months.

Your best friend — a content strategy

You may have noticed a theme here. A good content strategy can get you out of some tricky conversations. A content strategy takes the personal out of an organisation’s content and supports everyone to write and approve content in the organisation’s best interests. The conversation is no longer between 2 people whose personal writing style might differ.

You can point to a document and show that your colleague isn’t arguing with you — they’re arguing with whoever signed off the strategy. Given that anyone who’s in a position to sign off a content strategy will be way above your colleague’s paygrade, that should do the trick.

If you’ve never created a content strategy before, there are heaps of resources out there to help you, including usability.gov’s Content Strategy Basics.