Content philosophy

This whole thing started when I was at the chiropractor, and she was describing how the spine works. She probably learned it during her first week of Chiropractor school and it was clear she had said it a thousand times. She sounded rote. At first I was miffed. How dare she roll our her ‘tried and tested, this is how I explain the basics of my job to everyone’ speech to me. I was special, and my spine was special. Plus the way she was talking made me not listen. As a professional communicator, my inclination was to tell her the error of her ways, but she wasn’t paying me (indeed it was the other way around) so I pretended I was listening, while she pretended that this was the first time she’d ever explained the spine to a client.

And then, as I walked to work with my heavy bags undoing all of my chiropractor’s good work, I thought about it. At some stage, all of us need to explain the basics of our job to others, for us to do our job. That goes for plumbers, chiropractors and insurance claim helper people.

Sounding robotic when talking about your content

So what are the basics of my job and how was I going about explaining it to others? At many of the jobs I have performed, I have written and given plenty of ‘Beginner’s writing for the web’ courses, so I have explained the basics approximately a million times. And do I sound like a rote content robot?

Probably.

When I run the above-mentioned courses, I tell the bored-looking participants:

• people don’t read digital content, they scan
• no-one came to your website to revel in your beautiful prose
  • use the short version of a word even when long clever-sounding word exists
  • present information in bullet lists
  • start with the most important information first
  • make sure your headings match the content in the paragraphs

And there my thinking faltered. I was lost in the problem of the fact that we all go around talking like robots, when my user researcher colleague showed me the light. She was talking a user research participant through their privacy rights (what we’d do with the findings of the research and who’d have access to them) when she said (out loud, with words):

“Now I’ve already said this several times today, so forgive me if I sound a little robotic …”

Mind blown. There’s the solution. Call it out. If you’ve said something a thousand times to the point where you’re worried that you might sound robotic, then say so.

How I call out the robotics now

And so now it looks a bit like this:

None of what I’m going to tell you is rocket science, it’s pretty obvious, and I’ve said it a million times, so forgive me if it sounds a little robotic or rote, but

• people don’t read digital content, they scan
• no-one came to your website to revel in your beautiful prose
  • use the short version of a word even when long clever-sounding word exists
  • present information in bullet lists
  • start with the most important information first
  • make sure your headings match the content in the paragraphs

I’ve said it again, because it’s important, and the more people that know the basics, the quicker we can get to the meaty stuff.

You’ve been had

There is of course, another way that you can tell people about the basics of your job, so that you can get on with the meatier parts of your job. You can write a blog post that pertains to be about helping other people communicate the basics of their job, whilst actually teaching them the basics of good web content. I hope you got it, ‘cos I have said it that many times, to the point where I sound like a robot.