A former journalist and a former Cards Against Humanity writer walk into a marketing agency.
The result is a scathing, irreverent book about writing in all its forms, from drafting a business email to creating a press release that someone will actually want to read.
Everyone Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing initially began as Substack. It will be available on September 10.
PR Daily caught up with writers Melissa Harris (a former journalist) and Jenn Bane (a former Cards Against Humanity writer), both now at Chicago-based agency M. Harris & Co. The two described their “WTFF” method—that is, write, top, format and edit—that helps them create better content in any medium.
Write
Until you write something down, nothing else can happen.
But when Harris and Bane talk to people who suffer from writer’s block or messy, disorganized writing, they often find that they didn’t take the time to properly organize their thoughts in the beginning.
Harris and Bane suggest following this framework to produce clearer and easier to understand papers:
- Who is your audience? (Who is this message for? Your answer should be more specific than “customers” or “clients.”)
- What is this? (A guide? A report? A summary?)
- What is the goal? (To persuade? To encourage action? If so, what action?)
- How is this goal achieved?
- Why is it important now? (Why are you writing it today and not a year ago?)
The answers to these questions should provide you with a usable text that can then move on to the next phases.
Covering
Harris and Bane use the term “topping” to refer to headlines, subject lines, and social media captions—the things that grab a reader’s attention and draw them into the story.
“That’s the decision,” Bane said. “That’s the moment when people decide whether to read on or not. So if nothing else works, you have to perfect the headline and subheadline.”
When she was at Cards Against Humanity, Bane says they would sometimes spend entire days brainstorming subject lines. In her current role, they often test subject lines internally, asking the team what they would be most likely to click on.
The same general rules apply to good subject lines and good headlines: active verbs, use of colons to differentiate between ideas, words like “why” and “how”—“how to” can be particularly powerful for SEO purposes.
“We don’t advocate clickbait,” Bane said firmly. “Clickbait is when you promise something and click on it and you don’t get a response or you’re tricked in some way. But you can write a really great headline that people want to click on that is absolutely not clickbait. That’s absolutely possible.”
formatting
Before I could finish my question about formatting, Harris bursts in and tells me about her love of the Enter key.
“If there’s one thing I want people to understand, it’s that the Enter key is the most important key on the keyboard,” she said.
Its main benefit is to break paragraphs into more digestible chunks that are easier to read – especially on a mobile device.
“Depending on the formatting of your screen and the email, a six-sentence paragraph could literally stretch from the top to the bottom of your phone,” Harris said.
“If you force people to read your texts with their thumbs, that won’t happen,” Bane added.
When formatting, each sentence should have an idea and each paragraph should have an overarching theme so that the text remains concise and easy to read.
“More importantly, when someone sees something on their screen for the first time – whether it’s on a phone or a desktop – they don’t feel overwhelmed by the density of paragraphs,” Harris said.
fixing
Much of the section on proofreading – or what you might call editing – focuses on shorter texts.
Bane explains to his clients that their writing is not really in competition with other organizations.
“You’re competing for their time, for their attention span, and nobody has any of that right now,” Bane said. “Your audience isn’t going to spend another second trying to understand your dense paragraph.”
In their book, Bane and Harris suggest the following exercise to identify and reduce redundancies. How lean can you make this passage?
We conducted several rounds of in-depth, de-attributable interviews with corporate executives, financial leaders and key stakeholders to gather perspectives on key issues and challenges facing the energy transition. The goal of the interviews was to gather views from the various types of current and potential investors to develop an understanding of areas of consensus and divergence about why these financial players engage – or do not engage – in solutions investing.
How did it go? Here’s how the authors reduced it to size:
We asked leading financial experts about their reasons for investing in the energy transition – or not.
“Jen likes to say that you have to use a machete and not a butter knife and that you have to step away from the work a little and be a little less passionate about your work,” Harris said.
“Everyone Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing” will be available September 10.
Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Þjórsárden or LinkedIn.
