A well-thought-out writing process can help you create impactful copy more efficiently, organize your ideas and help you remain on topic. A lack of a process guide can lead to ineffective content, grammatical or factual errors, delayed production and missed deadlines.
I’m Danilo Santos from the Office of Digital Communications, and this is my five-step process for creating quality content:
Planning and Research
- Determine the purpose of your content.
- Is it informational, persuasive or entertaining?
- Is it educating your audience about a specific topic?
- Is it answering any questions?
- Does it help your audience resolve any challenges?
- Identify your target audience.
- Understand their wants/needs.
- Establish a goal and key performance indicator (KPI) for your content.
- KPIs are unique to every project and should align with your unit's goals. There are several types of KPIs you can measure.
- Document and save your research, notes and information.
- Study your competitors and find out how to make your content stand out.
- Find keywords relating to your content.
Outlining and Prewriting
- Create an outline for your content, including the title, headings and subheadings.
- Compile any statistics and cited information you plan on using and place them in the appropriate sections of your outline.
Drafting
Once you finished planning, researching and creating the outline for your content, you can start writing your first draft. In a new document, write the title of the content first, followed by the headings and subheadings.
After adding the title, headings and subheadings to your document, write the intro for the title before writing the content for the headings and subheadings.
Compare and double-check your document with the outline you created. Writing is a long process and may require several drafts before it feels right.
Reviewing and Editing
With purposeful editing, your rough draft can become exceptional. Start revising your draft by reading it aloud while paying close attention to whether your writing sounds natural and makes sense.
Your final draft should be clear, scannable and easy for your users to understand.
What to check for:
- Be sure your content has enough headings and subheadings to break up your content and introduce keywords.
- Double-check sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, voice and tone.
- Fix all spelling errors and mistakes.
- Confirm that all statistics and information are accurate, up-to-date and from reliable sources.
- When using content that isn’t yours, link to studies, authors or source material to avoid plagiarism.
- Confirm all hyperlinks work and direct readers to the correct content.
- After making all the required edits, use a spell-check or proofreading tool to double-check your content.
Everyone needs an editor
Before submitting the final version of your content, have a second person proofread and edit your content and discuss any of their suggested changes. If you don’t have anyone to review your content, we suggest taking a 12-to-24-hour break, allowing you time to clear your mind before proofreading your work.
While it may be hard for some people to receive feedback, this part of the process will help you become a better writer.
Approval
After your work has been reviewed and edited, share it with the person approving your content. They might have some feedback or edits that require you to repeat the review process. When your work is approved, publish it to your website/page.
Make your writing guide
Writing is different for everyone. People have their unique styles, processes and audiences. What works for you might not work for someone else. You can optimize this step-by-step writing guide to meet your needs. Remove steps that feel unnecessary or add improvements that can enhance your process.
At the of the day, your writing process is specific to you and will evolve and change as you find what works best for you. Learn about other Writing for the Web best practices.