Have you ever picked up a piece, idly scanned the headline and started reading, only to discover after two or three paragraphs that you were reading your own writing? Was it a pleasant surprise? Or did you cringe as you scanned down the page?
Your willingness to eat your own dog food makes a statement about the quality of your writing process. If you find your own infowriting hard to read, confusing to follow, and sleep-inducing, it will affect your readers even more negatively.
Post-Processing to Improve Flavor
Newspaper and magazine publishers use copy editors to polish stories before they go to print. For them, copy-editing is the magic that turns good copy into a great read. If you’re a solo infowriter, your writing goals are different. They’re more structured, multi-faceted, and mostly dependent on your own copy editing skills. With that in mind, I’m opening a series that tells you how to stir, mix, season, and shape your writing into tasty, nutritious dogfood that will be a hit at any kennel.
The C’s of Copy Editing for Infowriters: (C)oherent, (C)lear,
(C)ompelling, and (C)orrect.
Related Posts:
- Make It Coherent: Tips for documents that are structurally and logically coherent.
- Make It Clear: Tips for adjusting your document’s vocabulary and sentence structure to be easily understood and appropriate for the intended audience.
- Make It Compelling: How to make your document’s tone attractive and inviting.
- Make It Correct: Why you need to sweat the small stuff by re-checking spelling, grammar, and consistent use of potentially variable words and constructions.
