You face another looming deadline, another subject-matter expert to interview, another blank Word doc mocking you with its blinking cursor as you try to wrest another 1,000 words from your poor, tired brain.
Writing isn’t easy, and editors get that. They expect to make some revisions and changes to your copy, but these eight serious blunders will make an editor question working with you and your agency again.
1. You don’t understand your audience . It’s not a certainty that the people who read “The Economist” aren’t also poring over “Cosmopolitan,” but it’s a safe bet. If you’re writing a byline for a specific publication’s audience, then they’re your audience, too. Think about why they would care about your topic, what they’d want to learn and why they’d take the time to read it.
2. You don’t work within the publication’s style. Take 20 minutes to skim the pub’s other digital content to get a feel for its style and preferred format, including headlines. Some pubs prefer a short, catchy headline to an SEO-friendly one; some favor bullet points, and others don’t; and some prefer a straightforward tone to anything clever or creative. Editors are experts on their own publication’s style, and they expect to touch up your content, but if they have to overhaul it, you risk rejection.
3. You make a claim in your article without backing it up . The old journalism school mantra says, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” You’re working from the other side of this principle. Don’t make any kind of sweeping generalization (“X is the fast-growing industry in the nation”) or specific claim (“X industry grew by 20 percent in 2016”) without including a link to your source—which, by the way, had better be a reliable third party and not some armchair pundit.
4. You miss a deadline at the last minute . Everyone runs into roadblocks, whether they’re because of the client approval process or because you couldn’t get your subject matter expert on the phone in time. If you foresee having trouble meeting a deadline, though, don’t wait until the eleventh hour to let the editor know. If you force an editor to scramble to fill the space (physical or digital) for which your article was slated, it can kill your agency’s relationship with that publication.
[RELATED: Learn how to infuse storytelling, simple language and great writing into all your communications at the Business Writing Summit.]
5. You ignore the publication’s guidelines . Every publication has its own requirements for contributed content. They might be as simple as a few bullet points the editor sends in an email, or as formal as a multi-page PDF. Either way, if you want your stuff published, you’d better toe the line.
6. You use too many buzzwords or grandstanding adjectives . “Unique,” “innovative,” “groundbreaking” or “disruptive.” Those are words your client loves to hear about their product or service, but if you use them in contributed content, the editor might question your credibility and/or sanity. (For the record, “unique” describes something that is not like anything else in the entire world. Is that really true about the thing you’re describing?) Stick to the facts; show, don’t tell, why something is “groundbreaking.”
7. Your headline is unrelated to the content . The headline is important, and you want to make sure yours is interesting and SEO-friendly, but it still has to relate to the body of the article. Don’t sacrifice truth for clickability with a headline that doesn’t fit the article’s theme/points.
8. You can’t take constructive feedback, or you argue over revisions . This is not to say that the editor is always right. Feel free to challenge a revision that you believe was made incorrectly. (The clarification could be instructive, or you might just catch an error.) Don’t argue for the sake of arguing, though, and learn to take constructive criticism. The editor wants your article to be the best it can be, and so should you.
Stay away from these missteps, and you’ll lay the groundwork for longstanding relationships between your agency and editors, and you’ll make editors happy to receive your clients’ content.
Mary Beth Nevulis is the content manager at Tech Image. A version of this article originally appeared on the agency’s blog.
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