It’s easy to bring to mind examples of the heroic solo author, creating their masterpiece in a duel with the empty page.
Writing on your own is hard, but at least you have control – what you write and the standards you set are pretty much up to you.
Writing at work
Writing at work is often a different kind of struggle. There are lots of people to deal with.
Say your company has an exciting new thing and you need a webpage to explain it.
- There’s a topic expert who knows how the thing works.
- The expert might then explain it to a colleague (for example in sales, marketing or communications) who turns their thoughts into words.
- The colleague sends the words to a web content editor who makes them easy to read online and formats them based on a style guide.
- The web content editor runs the draft by an approver (maybe an important person in the area responsible for the topic) who makes sure it checks out and meets the organisation’s goals, approving it to publish.
- A customer/user finds the content. If everything went well it helps them decide if what you’re offering is for them. Or it doesn’t work and they give up and move on. If you’re lucky they might get in touch with some feedback to help start the whole cycle again.
It’s amazing having access to all that expertise. In fact it wouldn’t be possible for any one person to do the job on their own.
But all those steps mean there are also lots of ways it can go wrong, most of which us content wranglers won’t find solutions for in our online style guides.
My point is that putting content together like this is very much a team sport.
Creating content as a team
This has implications for the way we approach our work, the main one being that for professional content wranglers, the people side of the job can take up far more time and energy than hands-on writing, editing and creating, which we’d usually think of as the crux of our roles.
This is true of any professional situation where you need to work with many people in an organisation to create content, whether it’s for a website, intranet, blog, knowledge base, support manual, publication or something else.
Great sports teams are better than the combined talent of their individual players because they all know their roles and play in a way that makes those around them better.
Managing this process to create excellent content in an organisation is called content wrangling. The following posts will explore how we can do this successfully.