CONTENT THERAPY

To write is to rewrite

Some people may not think editing is a skill. But it bloody is.

Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

Who in their right mind writes a piece straight off, and that’s it — done?

No one, that’s who.

That’s because revising/editing/refining what you’ve done — however, you want to describe it — is at the very heart of it all.

Ernest Hemingway once said, “the only kind of writing is rewriting.”

If you imagine a piece of content to be like a block of raw material a sculptor might work on — that raw material needs to be chipped away at and ‘shaped’, until it looks right. I think there’s a similar principle behind the art of writing.

There’s an assumption made by some though, (typically senior executives without any kind of marketing background) that most content can just be ‘banged out’ really quickly, doesn’t need any editing, and despite that, will be fantastic and totally fit-for-purpose.

You know the kind of people I mean. Those people who sort of ‘belittle’ your craft by saying something…