13 Getting from Draft to Final Web Pages
Your job as a web content writer isn’t over when you’ve first created the content. Whether you are a blogger, a solo author on your own web site, or part of a larger organization, you will have better and clearer content if you include editing, revising, and proofreading in your writing process. If you have colleagues and stakeholders, you may also need to give your drafts to them and then negotiate with them about what to say and how to say it.
Your attitude about reviewing and revising can go a long way to making it a smooth and productive process. Make it fun. Make it a learning experience. As Tom Brinck told me to tell you when he reviewed the first draft of this chapter:
You should delight in feedback and getting your content just right. You should enjoy the surprises and discovery when people come from a different perspective and want something you totally didn’t expect. If you’re brewing in resentment over having to suppress your supposedly good ideas, you’re going to die young of stomach ulcers. Take the opposite perspective: Share your ideas and love what you learn, not as your ideas are “shot down,” but as your ideas compete in an ecology of good ideas and improve as a result.
To help you get easily and successfully from first draft to final web pages, this chapter has six sections with lots of guidelines and tips:
Think of writing as revising drafts
Do you ever get writer’s block? Find it hard to sit down to write? Procrastinate as long as possible?
Some people find it hard to start writing because they think that whatever they put down has to be perfect on the first try. Not so!
Your first draft should not be your final draft. A good way to get over writer’s block is to remember that you can fix it later. Perfection is never achievable, but you’ll get closer to it with each revision. (And you must at some point stop revising and meet the deadline to publish!)
When you look at a book like this one, you see only the final result. You don’t see the many, many drafts it went through. If you watched me for half an hour, you would see lots of backspacing; deleting; cutting, adding, and moving of text; rewriting; starting over; staring into space; trying something and rejecting it; and so on. Writing is actually a very messy activity.
Successful writers read their own work. They read it many times. They read it, revise it, read it again, revise it again, and so on. Successful writers share their work in draft, try their writing out with relevant audiences, and revise based on what they learn from their early readers.
Review and edit your own work
You should be your own first editor. (But not your last editor. See the tips later in this chapter on getting help from others.)
Read what you wrote
If you’ve ever been embarrassed by an email you sent without reading what you wrote, you know how little things slip by. Your fingers may not have typed what you thought they did. You may have left out a word – or put in an extra one. You may have thought you were making sense and, then, on reading it, wonder what you meant.
Read while you are writing. Read when you’ve finished a section. Read when you’ve finished the draft. Ask yourself:
Check your links
If you include links in your content, click on each one to be sure it goes where you think it is going.
Check your facts
Make sure what you say is accurate. Think about where your facts came from and how reliable those sources are. How do you know the web sites you used or the books or journals are credible?
For example, Wikipedia is a great community resource – but anyone can edit it, so the facts may not be right. Search engines may find the most frequently visited sites, but that doesn’t guarantee the credibility of the information on those sites. Just because you read the same information over and over on different sites does not necessarily mean it is true. The sites could all be copying each other or the same original site.
When considering the credibility of what you read on a web site, ask questions like these:
And remember that you can check facts off the computer, too. Find a person who knows and check the facts with that person. Check in books and paper journals – but remember that just because it’s in print (paper or web), doesn’t make it true. Books – even textbooks – sometimes copy errors from each other.
Put your web draft away; don’t post it yet
Many good recipes require rest time for the food. So does good writing. When you have finished a draft and your immediate revisions, put it away. Save it and close the file.
Even for a blog, you can usually wait a bit and reread your entry before you post it. I know some bloggers who write at lunchtime and then post in the evening. Blogging software lets you put your post into draft mode before you publish it.
If you aren’t blogging or writing an emergency news item, you should be able to put your draft away for a day or two.
Why let the writing rest?
When you are too close to what you have written, you are likely to miss the problems in it.
You can, of course, fix and repost after publishing. The web has the tremendous advantage over paper that you can do a next edition immediately. However, that may annoy readers. For example, most blog software reposts articles to the RSS feed every time the article is edited. It can be really irritating to get the same article several times with just minor fixes each time. Your readers will wish you had read it carefully and fixed it before posting it in the first place.
Read this sentence:
Read it again carefully. Do you see the problem? Did you see it when you first read the sentence?
What can you do when reading it after it has rested?
When you open the file after a few hours or a few days, you’ll read it with fresh eyes. Ask yourself:
Read it out loud
Reading web content out loud may seem like a strange thing to do, but good writing has good rhythm. Good writing actually sounds good when it’s spoken. So reading what you’ve written out loud is a good way to find out if your sentences and paragraphs are short enough and if your words are clear enough. If you hesitate, stumble, or have to take too many breaths in one sentence, rewrite!
Use dictionaries, handbooks, and a style guide
Don’t mislead, misinform, or annoy your readers by misspelling words or using words incorrectly. Lots of help is available – online or on your bookshelf. Use it.
Keep a dictionary (or dictionary site) handy
Check not only for spelling but to be sure you are using words correctly.
Get a grammar handbook if you aren’t comfortable with grammar
For a book about punctuation that is fun to read, get Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss.
Note that the author is British. Some of the rules she gives are not the same as U. S. standards.
If you aren’t comfortable as a writer and wish you knew more about making sure you are writing grammatically correct sentences, go to your nearest bookstore and buy yourself a handbook of grammar. You can get used ones inexpensively, and grammar rules change slowly. Pick one where the presentation appeals to you. They say pretty much the same thing – at least for each variety of English (U. S., Canadian, British, etc.).
Don’t overuse a thesaurus – stay with a consistent set of words
A thesaurus (a compilation of synonyms) may be useful if you are looking for just the right word to express a thought. But for business, technical, scientific, or legal writing, do not use a thesaurus to find several ways of saying the same thing. Once you call a “widget” a “widget,” don’t change part way through to “gadget.” You’ll confuse your readers. You’ll make it harder to translate your content. And if you are writing a legal document, a judge may assume you are talking about two different things.
Also, make sure that you fully understand the meaning of the words you choose. Even if a thesaurus lists two words as synonyms, you often can’t just substitute one for the other. Check words that are new to you in a dictionary. Play it safe; use the short, simple plain English words you know.
If your organization has a style guide, use it
A style guide can tell you whether your organization writes “email” or “e-mail,” “data base” or “database.” Remember that site visitors are likely to see your content and content written by others in the organization in the same visit to your web site.
See the Interlude immediately after this chapter on Creating an Organic Style Guide.
Run the spell checker but don’t rely on it
You know that the spell checker on your computer is only checking each word against its internal dictionaries.
Read this sentence out loud:
Eye kin knot sea ewe bee four to daze meeting.
Spell checkers would say it is fine, but, of course, it isn’t.
Blindly accepting the spell checker’s suggestions can be very embarrassing. Even if you agree with the spell checker that you spelled a word wrong, don’t just click on the spell checker’s first suggestion. Look at all the suggestions carefully to find the one you meant to write.
It can be equally embarrassing to assume that the spell checker caught all the errors in your web writing. A good hint is to know your own typical typing problems. What do you typically misspell? What typically happens when you are typing quickly? I’m a fast typist, and I often end up with “the” when I meant to type “they” or “them.” The spell checker doesn’t catch those errors, so I have to be particularly diligent in looking for them. The spell checker doesn’t catch punctuation errors, so if you sometimes put an apostrophe in a plural where it doesn’t belong, you have to watch out for those stray apostrophes in your own writing.
(Similarly, you can run the grammar checker – but don’t rely on it. Use it to show you when you’ve written a passive sentence or an overly long sentence. But don’t blindly follow its advice. It can’t read your meaning, and its algorithms too often lead to erroneous reports.)
Ask colleagues and others to read and comment
Your goal is to communicate. Start by sharing with a few others to be sure you are communicating well.
Ask a few people what your key message is
Find a few people who are part of the audience you want to reach. This may be your spouse, partner, roommate, children, mother-in-law, neighbor, friend who knows a lot about the topic, friend who knows very little about the topic ...
Ask them to read your web content and tell you what they think your key message is. Don’t just ask for their reaction. Ask them what they think you are saying.
Have someone else read it out loud to you
Ask at least one or two people to read it out loud. Where they hesitate, stumble, or reread: rewrite!
When you have people read your draft out loud and tell you what they think you’ve said, you are doing a type of usability edit. For more on that and other types of usability testing, see www.usability.gov and this book’s web site at www.redish.net/writingfortheweb.
Share partial drafts
If you are writing a lot of web content, don’t wait until you have it all ready. Share one article or part of an article to see if you are on the right track with level of detail, tone, organization, writing style, and so on. That could save you lots of time and grief. The earlier you learn what to change, the less effort it takes to make the changes.
Get feedback online
In addition to traditional ways of sharing drafts (for example, emailing the draft or a link to the draft to people or distributing the draft to an internal group through your content management system), consider how the Internet can help you get feedback on your content. You can have contact us options, email to the webmaster, private feedback to the author, reviews, public comments that are really an open conversation among your readers, and so on. These may be moderated or not; threaded and searchable or not; expecting an answer back or not.
You probably think of these as post-publication feedback; and, indeed, some of these feedback mechanisms become available only after your web content has been posted. But think of how to use them or variations of them for pre-publication feedback as well.
Depending on how much you want to limit (or not) the audience for your drafts, you might set up
Pay attention to the feedback
Take advantage of all the feedback you get, both before and after you publish. I’m focusing in this chapter on feedback before you publish your web content. But what you learn about your content, your style, your level of detail, and so on, after you publish can help you do a better job of the next web content you write.
Work with colleagues to get a uniform style and tone
Many writers are part of an organization where the web site represents the organization and not the individual writers. If you are in that situation, you have to make sure that you – and all your fellow writers in the organization – are writing the same way. Readers should not be able to tell who wrote what on the web site.
Put your ego in the drawer – cheerfully
Did you bristle at that last paragraph where I said that readers should not be able to tell who wrote what on the web site? If you are writing poetry, or fiction, or your own blog, your voice as author is a large part of what you are projecting through your web site or your blog. That’s fine. But if you are writing in an organizational setting, it’s not about you as author. It’s about communicating clearly so that the people who come to the web site can find what they need and understand what they find.
Of course, you should take pride in your work. That pride can be in working as a team with colleagues to have a web site that has a consistent writing style, a consistent tone, a consistent vocabulary, and a consistent message.
Don’t get into arguments about what “I” like or what another “I” likes. Put your “I” away. Make everyone else put their “I” away. Get out your personas (see Chapter 2). Talk about the conversation that your site visitors come to have with you and what information, style, tone, and vocabulary will work best as your (collective) conversational response.
Also put your ego in the drawer when you get reviews and feedback. Listen with an open mind. Don’t get defensive about your writing. That doesn’t mean you have to take every suggestion a reader or editor or reviewer gives you. It just means you have to consider it carefully. (More on this in the section later in this chapter on working with reviewers.)
Work with a writing specialist or editor
In addition to your own reading, reviewing, editing, proofreading – and trying out your writing with colleagues and your audience – you may also benefit from working with a writing specialist or an editor.
Editors do many tasks, from coordinating projects to checking facts to getting manuscripts ready for publication (in print or online). Rather than focus on those aspects of an editor’s job, however, I want to talk about two specific ways in which writing specialists and editors can help you as a writer:
You may want different people as your “big picture” editor and as your copy editor. Although some people can do both well, the two tasks require different skills. Certainly, the two types of edit require separate passes through the material.
Have someone focus on the big picture with you
The big picture editor focuses on audience, appropriateness of the content, overall organization, and coherence throughout the writing. A big picture editor should start by asking:
With the answers to those questions, the big picture editor should read and comment on how well you have
Professional writers always have editors to help them.
A big picture editor should be able to help you improve all those aspects of your writing. In fact, a big picture editor should be working with you from the beginning of your project and you should be sharing outlines and drafts throughout the project.
Have someone copy edit for you
Copy editing, on the other hand, is looking at the “little picture” – the nitty-gritty details of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The best copy editors are very detail-oriented. They read the words and sentences very carefully.
Great copy editors are good spellers. They know the conventions of grammar and punctuation. If they are part of an organization, they are familiar with the organization’s style.
Copy editors can save you lots of embarrassment and greatly improve your work. They may catch the typos that you just haven’t seen no matter how many times you have read what you wrote. They check consistency of style. They make sure that a sentence with a plural subject has a plural verb. They may suggest changing a long run-on sentence into two shorter, clearer sentences.
If you can possibly get the time of both a big picture editor and a copy editor, you will find both very helpful. Learn from them. Consider it mentoring, not just a chore to be passed off to someone else.
An editor should work with you. Editing should not be something that is “thrown over the wall” and then “thrown back again.” Especially in web writing, you and the editors must agree on what conventions you are following and which, if any, you are purposefully not following. You and the editors have to be in agreement on whether fragments are okay, on whether you can start a sentence with “But ...” and end a sentence with a preposition, on whether questions make great headings, and so on.
All the hints in the next section about working well with reviewers apply to working well with editors, too.
Make reviews work for you and your web site visitors
In organizations, putting together a successful web site requires teamwork. And some members of that team may be reviewers of your web content. Your web content may have to go through review with
Of course, not all content goes through all those reviews. And you may, yourself, fill one of the positions in that list.
How can you make working with reviewers (and reviewees) be a positive experience rather than a nerve-wracking and frustrating one? Let’s talk about reviewing in three stages:
Setting up good reviews
Good reviews start at the beginning of a web writing project – not at the end. When you know you have an assignment to write web content, find out who will be reviewing what you write.
Meet with the reviewers when you start the project
Discuss and agree on
Practice the doctrine of no surprise
The surest way to get a negative reaction is to shock your reviewers by showing them something that they do not expect and to which they can exclaim, “That’s not the way we write here!” Never shock your reviewers. Always work with them before you deliver a draft so that they know what to expect. Deal with any concerns they have about overall style or content issues before you give them material to review.
Doctrine of no surprise: Work with reviewers before giving them a draft so that they know what to expect.
Help your reviewers understand good web writing
In discussing your plans for the content, work with the reviewers so that they understand
If your reviewers are not familiar with personas and scenarios, this might be a great time to introduce the concepts and to introduce your specific personas and their scenarios.
If your reviewers are likely to expect a different writing style than you plan to use, work with them so that they realize the importance of an audience-focused, key-message-first, simple-language style. Show them samples of good writing on similar topics from other web sites. If examples from this book will help you and your reviewers, use a few (with credit, please). Create a “before” and “after” for even a small piece of your web content to show reviewers what you will be doing. Get them to express their concerns so that you can discuss those concerns and allay their fears.
Getting useful information from reviewers
Stay in touch with your reviewers, without overdoing it.
Tell reviewers when the schedule changes
Schedules change. If a change affects when you will get material to your reviewers, let them know. Negotiate with them on new dates. Don’t just assume they can accommodate every slip in the schedule.
Give reviewers a “heads up” a few days in advance
Everyone on your web team is overly busy, including your reviewers. Remind them when you are about to send a draft.
Make your expectations clear
It’s frustrating to expect a technical review and then get your copy back with nothing more than a few commas changed – incorrectly. You can improve your chances of getting what you need if you make your expectations clear.
Deliver your drafts for review with individual cover emails. Tell each reviewer
And remind reviewers politely that you expect them to comment and suggest, not to rewrite. Writing the content is your job.
If you have specific needs, let reviewers know
In your cover email, you may be reminding each reviewer of that reviewer’s role. In addition, you may have specific questions for different reviewers within your material. Develop a way of asking that makes it obvious you have a question and who the question is for. I often use square brackets, [], put the reviewer’s name in bold, and use a bright color so that it stands out on the screen, as in this example:
[Jim: Please tell me who is responsible for approving travel requests. I want to turn the passive sentence in the original into an active sentence here. Please fill in the blank for me at the beginning of my sentence. Thanks.]
Making good use of reviews
When you get reviews back, read them carefully and with an open mind.
Don’t let your ego get in the way
Reading reviews is another good time to put your ego in the drawer – cheerfully. Don’t get defensive about your writing. Be open to reviewers’ comments. You don’t have to agree with all of them. You may not have to – or be able to – make all the changes every reviewer wants. But you must read and consider them all.
Don’t automatically accept changes
If you are not sure that a change a reviewer recommends is correct, find out more. Do the research to find out what is correct.
Reviewers may give you conflicting suggestions. If their facts differ, you need to find out which facts are correct. If their conflicts are about style, work to resolve the differences – or to convince them of the style you are using.
If you think a reviewer’s change is not in the best interests of your web users or will hurt rather than improve your writing, think about why the reviewer made the suggestion. Don’t just dismiss the comment. Think carefully before deciding what to do. For different reviews and different relationships between you and specific reviewers, what you do may be any of the next four suggestions.
Rewrite to avoid misunderstandings
If a reviewer misunderstood something you wrote, you may not have stated it as clearly as you could. Try again. And, then, if possible, run that piece by the reviewer again.
Persuade, if you can
If the reviews that trouble you are based on different perceptions of purpose, audience, scenarios, or appropriate style, you may need to evangelize clear writing. Within the constraints of your corporate culture, push for clear web writing even for legal and technical information. Your web users need you to do this for them. I hope the examples and the rationales in this book not only persuade and mentor you but also prove useful to you in persuading and mentoring others.
Negotiate, if necessary
The teamwork that successful web sites require often involves compromises and negotiations. Don’t make reviews confrontational situations. Work with reviewers to put accurate, reliable, and clear information on your web site. Remember that even legal information can be legally accurate, legally sufficient, and also clear and easy to understand.
See the Interlude titled Legal Information Can Be Understandable, Too.
Let reviewers know what you did and did not do
Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! Reviewers who feel that you ignored their comments in one round of review are less likely to give your materials a thorough review in the next round. Keep a summary of the changes you made and did not make, especially for technical, legal, and policy reviewers. If you have several rounds of review, include the summary from the previous round with each new round.
SUMMARIZING CHAPTER 13
Here are key messages from Chapter 13: