How I learned to trust my writing instincts (and you can too)
The worst writing advice I ever got
Bad writing advice can turn up in unexpected places. For me, the worst writing advice I’ve ever received came from an English professor from Oxford (yes, really).
It was the eve of my master’s thesis submission and the professor in question was, in fact, my supervisor—a friendly, yet imposing British woman who had the intimidating habit of reciting entire paragraphs by 18th-century luminaries from memory. (“Oh, you should reference what Samuel Johnson says about that,” she would say, as I frantically tried to scribble down enough keywords to locate the quote later.)
There was a lot at stake: My thesis would determine the majority of my grade and I had one shot to get it right. I watched with rapt attention as my professor flipped over the last page of my manuscript, then handed the stack of papers back to me. “One final thing,” she said. “I think you should delete your subheadings. Your transitions are clear enough without them.”
I felt the pit of my stomach drop out. I disagreed. But I held my tongue—obviously, my supervisor knew best. Right?
Several nerve-wracking weeks later, I got my final grades and feedback. My examiners specifically called out my lack of sub-headings in characteristic academic verbosity:
This is work that would have benefitted from sub-sectioning, thereby flagging for its reader the logic and trajectory of its argument. The boundaries between introductory material, concluding remarks, and the main body of the dissertation are marked neither overtly nor implicitly.
I was kicking myself. Why hadn’t I just trusted my own instincts?
As writers, it can be so easy to bend to other people’s expectations for a piece, even if they contradict your better judgement. In a business setting, it’s even more complicated than my experience in academia: You don’t just have to please your readers, but also your editors, managers, and executives. And beyond a certain baseline, there is no truly objective measure of writing quality. Often, it comes down to taste.
So how do you learn to trust your gut? Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT YOUR TOPIC—AND GOOD WRITING IN GENERAL—TO JUSTIFY YOUR CHOICES
Let me be clear: Getting outside perspective definitely makes writing better—so don’t discount input from your managers and colleagues. However, as the writer, you’re closest to the piece, so you understand better than anyone why you made the choices you did. If you don’t have confidence in what you’ve written, you can easily be overrun with suggestions that don’t actually work for your particular piece and make your writing worse.
Therefore, the more knowledgeable you are about your topic, your audience, and good writing practices in general, the better you’ll be able to explain your decisions to others. As early in the writing process as possible—ideally in the research phase—make sure you understand your goals for the piece, who your audience is, and the message you want to communicate to them. That way, when someone offers feedback, you’ll be able to quickly evaluate whether it’s a good idea to incorporate into your piece, or one better left on the cutting room floor.
For instance, if you’re writing an article with the goal of ranking in search, and someone asks you to add some alien-sounding longtail keywords because they have high search volume, you can gently let them know that their SEO strategy may backfire: Google rewards quality content and punishes keyword stuffing. Or if a colleague edits your piece to include a jargon-y term that you know your readers won’t be familiar with, you can explain that you’re trying to keep the tone friendly and accessible to non-experts. Being able to cite your reasoning puts you in a better position to have an informed discussion with the people editing your work.
“Being able to cite your reasoning puts you in a better position to have an informed discussion with the people editing your work. ”
Having confidence in your writing voice doesn’t mean you’ll never accept suggestions or change your mind. Rather, it means that you feel secure enough in your writing that you can explain the decisions you’ve made to others and defend your choices, while remaining open to constructive criticism.
2. HAVE A PROCESS AND ENSURE EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS THEIR ROLE
Sometimes the problem isn’t an individual writing disagreement over something like word choice, rather an unhelpful pattern of behavior among collaborators. For instance, maybe you just need an executive to give final approval on a piece of writing—but instead, they turn around and line-edit your work. At that stage in the process, it’s not helpful to you and a needless waste of their time. But misunderstandings like this can happen all too often when there isn’t a clear process, or folks don’t understand their role in it.
Fenwick’s founder, Chris Gillespie, says these problems boil down to adding or subtracting ideas to a piece of writing at the wrong time. The process of developing a piece of writing has natural expansions and contractions. At the brainstorming phase, you collect lots of ideas—but when you write an outline, you whittle them down to the most essential points. Likewise, when you write a draft, you flesh out your outline with additional research, but then when you edit, you cut anything extraneous. It looks something like this:
“The prime reason I see projects drag on is that someone tries to add or subtract ideas at the wrong time,” says Chris. “They say, ‘That’ll never work’ during ideation and ‘Hey, I just found this article, can you incorporate it?’ during revision.” Without an agreed-upon process and a clear understanding of their role in it, the people who edit and approve your work can inadvertently sabotage your writing.
Chris has written a whole article on how to establish a smooth process for writing content, but you could also establish clear team roles in your content process using a framework like DACI, which stands for “Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed.” It’s a framework companies often use to help make decisions, but you can use it in the content creation process too. Here’s how it works:
- Driver—This is the person who plays the role of project owner, whether they’re the writer themself or a dedicated project manager. Their job is to make sure all stakeholders are in the loop and action items get completed on time.
- Approvers—This refers to any people who have to give final approval on a piece of writing—such as an executive or legal team. Their job is to identify key problems before a piece goes live (i.e. “we can’t use this word to describe our product—say this instead”). They shouldn’t get too caught up in the weeds of editing, but simply look out for any deal-breakers that would prevent a piece from being published.
- Contributors—These are the project contributors—the writer(s), editor(s), and designer(s) who work together to produce a piece of writing. Depending on the project, the driver may also be a contributor.
- Informed—These are any team members who do not need to be involved in the content creation process, but need to know when it goes live, such as a social media manager who will be in charge of promotion.
Whether you choose to use our process, DACI, or invent a new process entirely, the important thing is that everyone understands their role in the process and sticks to it.
3. Accept that opinions differ and save your pushback for when it matters
When I was a kid, I competed in a piano competition. The competition was held in a local church and I remember sitting in a pew with the other nine and ten-year-old aspiring musicians, anxiously awaiting my score. Before the judge started giving out our feedback (and the coveted prizes), she said something that has stuck with me, all these years later: “Remember, this is just one person’s opinion, at one moment in time.”
Writing, like music, is largely a matter of taste. While good writers (and musicians) aim for a certain level of technical mastery, even the best artists can have wildly different viewpoints on style. And that’s okay.
Sometimes, no matter how much you disagree with the feedback you’ve received, it makes sense to just accept it and let it go. Pushing back only makes sense if you have the time to do so and you can do so in a way that won’t damage your relationship with the people editing you. My colleague and fellow writer, Riviera Lev-Aviv has created a handy flowchart to help you determine when to push back, and when to let it go.
If your post is scheduled to go out tomorrow and your executive is insistent on word choice that you don’t love but makes sense in context, it’s probably best to accept their decision. Alternatively, if you’re publishing an ebook in two weeks and your colleague thinks one of your paragraphs is unnecessary, perhaps that can be a longer discussion. It all depends on the situation you’re in and only you can determine whether it’s more beneficial to defend your writing or prioritize an important relationship. Both are valid choices.
NO BAD BLOOD
I must apologize to my supervisor for throwing her under the bus in the introduction. In addition to giving me one bad piece of writing advice, she also gave me numerous gems that helped me shape my master’s thesis into a coherent and interesting dissertation. I will forever be grateful to her for her support.
That’s the contradiction of receiving writing feedback: Most of the time, it’s incredibly useful (and necessary!). But not all feedback is created equal. Being able to recognize bad feedback is largely a matter of practice, but if you’ve been writing a while, you’ll probably know it in your gut. With time, you can learn to trust that little voice and make a conscious decision about what feedback you should accept and what to reject.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get my colleagues to give me feedback on this piece.
