Overlay
Let's talk
Emotive Brand
Get in touch: [email protected] 510-496-8888

Hello!

Tag: Writing

Brand Writing Trends for 2019

Posted on by Chris Ames

There’s a good reason why it’s said we consume content. Because content, like other treasured objects of consumption, can make you queasy if not served properly. Continuing our preview of 2019, today we’re examining the crucial content trends your brand needs to master heading into the new year. If you’re looking to overcome challenges, build a stronger employer brand, or disrupt your visual design, you can start there.

Authenticity Over Everything

Whenever we discuss how a brand expresses itself, we must always ground ourselves in embracing authenticity. Trust is the yardstick by which all other brand expressions are measured. If you can’t reasonably own what you’re saying or how you’re saying it, you probably shouldn’t be speaking at all.

Especially in our hyper-polarized era of fake news, people are seeking meaning and authenticity in every facet of their lives. Eighty-six percent of consumers say that authenticity is a key differentiator that leads to a purchasing decision, while 73% of consumers say they would pay more for a product if the company behind it promises transparency. Brands like Toms, Everlane, and Bombas already know and capitalize on this fact.

Whether it’s blogs, podcasts, or speaking engagements, authentic content is one of the best tools your brand has for earning trust, building your brand, generating traffic, and attracting qualified leads.

Content Is King (But Strategy Is Emperor)

We all know content is king – but a king is only as good as his strategy. Following a four-year growth spurt, the content marketing industry is set to be worth $412 billion by 2021. As the market continues to mature, brands are viewing their content less as a cure-all and more as a unique prescription. That means strategy is more important than ever.

Every brand is unique. Nike’s content strategy wouldn’t work for Allbirds, and vice versa. That being said, universal goals like lead generation, SEO, and thought leadership are great places to start. From there, brands can craft specific strategies for whatever is most important to them. And thanks to increased technological advances in content personalization and interactivity, brands can get very specific about exactly who they are trying to reach.

One-Size-Fits-All Is Dead

Today, people are totally in control of their own customer journeys. The proliferation of content marketing has shifted the challenge from, “How do I create interesting content?” to “How can I steer my content through the tidal wave of digital noise?” Brands must reach customers precisely where they consume content, in the way they want, and targeted directly to their needs.

As Michael Brenner, from Marketing Insider Group, says, “Attention has become the currency of the digital, social, and mobile web. And the only way to attract a customer’s attention today is through the production of high-quality content that is relevant and personalized to the reader.”

Seventy-eight percent of consumers say that personally-relevant content is a determining factor in their purchasing decisions. It’s something that leads to enhanced engagement, fosters an increased sense of credibility, and enables brands to differentiate themselves from their competitors. With the surplus of data available at our fingertips, there should be no such thing as a blanket email or a one-size-fits-all approach to communications.

Flip the Funnel

In the past, the sales funnel worked a little like this: accept any and everyone, filter through a qualification process, keep the gold, ditch the dirt, rinse and repeat. It was an aggressive and linear path, with companies treating customers as gate keepers to wallets rather than relationships to nurture.

When you have a library of high-quality and personalized content, the customer journey transforms into something much more forgiving for both parties. The funnel today is more like a flat circle – one that privileges continuous engagement over quick-fire, transactional relationships. Brands can use an individual’s data to serve up location-based results, related products, and experience-specific follow up emails. This shift in communication, especially post-sale, makes customers more likely to stay with you, buy again, or recommend you to a friend.

As Forbes contributer John Hall says, “To be honest, someone else in your space can almost always come in and undercut you on price. But when you continuously engage your clients, build lasting trust, and form genuine partnerships, you’ll have much greater staying power.”

Save Your One-Liners for Twitter

There was a minute there where the internet felt like it was thinning out. Almost all content seemed like it was in bullet points, list form, or screen-shots from social media. But contrary to popular belief, long-form content is still the bedrock of viral content.

A recent analysis by BuzzSumo of over 100 million articles revealed that long-form content tends to get more social shares than short-form content. Long-form content will continue to dominate next year, as search engines reward lengthier posts in results rankings, and readers are increasingly seeking more trustworthy sources.

Voice Search and Chatbots

As we’ve discussed before, the role of new technologies like voice search and chatbots will add new flavors to content production in the new year. A 2017 report by NPR and Edison Research revealed that 42% of Americans called vocal assistants “essential,” and their popularity is only continuing to rise. This year’s version of the same report concluded that 81% of smart speaker owners are open to experiencing new skills and audio features created by brands.

These tools are becoming ubiquitous to our daily lives, and with that shift comes dramatic changes to consumer behavior. Not only should brands tailor their SEO strategy to respond to voice search, but they should also explore how their offering could be accessed or streamlined through a vocal assistant.

In addition, improvements in machine learning and AI means that chatbot features are becoming, dare we say, more human? Nowadays, a quality chatbot can intelligently respond to open-ended questions and use natural language processing to locate the best answer. Unlike humans, however, chatbots maintain an impeccable level of customer service 24/7 when programmed correctly. As we enter the brave new world of 2019, brands should investigate which content or services can be automated through a chatbot.

Even More of the Same

2019 will double-down on all of the brand writing trends we have seen developing over the last few years: more content, more personalization, more ways to access information, and even more of a hunger for authenticity and continuous engagement.

To learn more about how your brand can utilize content in the new year, contact Founding Partner Tracy Lloyd at  [email protected].

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in San Francisco.

Mastering the Art of Emotive Writing

Posted on by Carol Emert

Emotive branding works because it connects with people on a very real and personal level. But brands have multiple target audiences who are often very different from each other. They may be easily relatable, or they may not. So how does a brand speak in a way that truly resonates with each diverse audience? From an agency point of view, how do we at Emotive Brand approach emotive writing?

This question relates mostly to messaging – communications aimed at key stakeholders who are very different people with different relationships to the brand. A typical audience mix might include employees, investors and prospective customers with widely varying styles and needs, like Fortune 500 companies and SMBs, or Millennial and Boomer fashion shoppers.

In this post, we’re lifting the lid on Emotive Brand’s approach to emotive writing. All of our ideas are designed to maximize empathy with target audiences because – here’s Tip #1 – you can’t talk to them meaningfully if you don’t care. Effective writing requires that you get out of your own head and into a place of true, heart-felt empathy with the audience.

Emotive Writing Starts with Emotional Insight

To connect with each audience, you need to truly understand them – not just intellectually, but emotionally. What are their greatest fears and highest aspirations that relate to your brand? What are their met and unmet emotional needs in your category?

Audience interviews are ideal for getting the emotional juice flowing and helping brands start feeling into their audiences. When that’s not possible, interviews with clients who interact directly with each audience can be a good substitute. Often we talk to successful sales people who really connect with their customers and help solve their problems.

The key is to ask questions that get their emotions going. What makes their day truly great when they’re helping a potential customer? What’s the biggest difference they’ve ever made for a customer?

Then ask emotionally-geared questions about the customers: What are their greatest challenges and opportunities? Ask for stories about specific favorite customers to help put a face on the customer audience. Get a sense for their history, their career or life trajectory, their passions.

As interviewees start to emote, it’s time to flex your empathy muscle and feel in. Notice what language they use, their cadence of speech, the “feeling tone” of the experience. Record the interview, if possible, to remind yourself of the emotions at play when you sit down to write.

Feel Into the Emotional Impact on Your Target Audience

When feeling into your target audience, it’s useful to have a lens into the key emotion your brand wants to stimulate within them. Is the ideal end result of the brand interaction a feeling of support, relief, empowerment, enlightenment, freedom, abundance, joy or something else entirely?

At Emotive Brand, we identify an Emotional Impact for each of our brand’s key target audiences. It provides clarity and focus, so when we (or a client) are crafting communications for that audience, it’s easy to feel into that emotion and let the words flow.

Stimulate the Flow

Sometimes the act of sitting down to write and facing a blank page can be enervating – the opposite of emotive. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to stimulate your way into emotive gear.

If you are working towards creating joy in your target audience, listen to music that brings you joy.

If your brand has a clever edge, listen to a standup comedian or read an author who has a similar tone.

B2B audiences may be less represented in pop culture, but there are plenty of interviews and panel discussions online that can help a writer get into the right emotional space.

Art, music, film, lectures, fiction, non-fiction – any of these can get you in gear for heartfelt emotive writing.

Checking In: One Month of Strategic Writing at Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Chris Ames has now officially been with Emotive Brand for one month – who knew he’d make it this long?– and as a new writer in the branding world, we wanted to see what he’s learned thus far. In this post, Chris talks about the importance of strategic writing and shares some advice that he’d give to other young creatives looking to break through in marketing and branding.

What has been your biggest surprise so far?

The sheer amount of strategy, planning, and forethought that takes place before even a single external word is written has been impressive and humbling. As a writer, I tend to create a giant block of content and slowly chip away until it’s refined, but it’s fascinating to see the inverse process: creating target audiences, customer journeys, language guidelines, mood boards, manifestos, rallying cries, narratives…and then beginning to write.

Until I worked here, I never realized the importance and power of internal documents for brands. Most of the work I’ve created so far is inward-facing. And though the initial audience might be small, it has the potential to act as a microphone for how brands not only articulate themselves in the marketplace but how employees communicate with each other on a personal level.

Any challenges?

I think an early decision writers must make with clients is choosing what your biggest strength is going to be: voice or versatility. When you hire me, is it because you want your copy to sound like me, or because I can sound like whatever you need? Especially when you’re working with tech companies or startups that have a jargon-heavy lexicon, it can be a game of linguistic tug-of-war. In a perfect world, you can meet the tone of the client and still retain that undercurrent of charm. Knowing when to mute your own voice is a good life skill in general, and I’m sure I still have a long way to go.

How does this writing differ from your previous job at a creative studio?

At my previous job, it was a volume game: how much content can I possibly create for you in the shortest amount of time? I worked very much in a silo, and the only real editor was the deadline. Here, everything is much more deliberate, collaborative, and there is an economy of words. Instead of chasing word counts, it’s more like: can you create one perfect, muscular sentence that’s strong enough to carry an entire campaign? Which, at first, seems easier. But it’s totally that Mark Twain– “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”– kind of thing. Simple is hard. Short takes a long time.

What advice would you give to young creatives entering the field of branding and marketing?

Reading books, especially written by people from a different background or perspective than your own, makes you a more empathetic person, and empathy is probably the strongest tool to wield in the workplace. Yes, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another will make you a better brander, but it will also just make you a better human being.

I’d also add, don’t waste your time in toxic work environments. There are tons of businesses looking for young creatives to drive into the ground because they don’t know any better. You might think that because you don’t have a ton of experience, you need to put yourself through hell as a rite of passage. The truth is your fresh eyes are actually a huge advantage. The whole reason brands hire outside agencies in the first place is because they’re seeking an outside perspective. Find an agency that’s excited about your new ideas and willing to embrace a fresh perspective, instead of looking to punish you for not having 10 years of experience under your belt.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

Writing: When Do You Just Start Over?

Posted on by Tim Peters

Step #1 to writing better: Chuck your first draft.

Step #2 to writing better: Start over.

The next time you write something, at that exact moment when give yourself a figurative pat on the back for “finishing” a first draft, close the document, drag it to the trash bin, and empty the trash.

Seriously.

Then take a much-deserved break and forget about that piece of writing for awhile.

When you’re ready to try again, open a new document with its proverbial clean slate. And start anew: rewrite from scratch.

You will soon notice this reality: You won’t be rewriting from scratch. The document may be empty, but the slate is anything but clean. You’re not struggling with what to write – surely one of the most intense cognitive loads – the content is in your head. You don’t have to create the storyline – you have already created a workable structure, even if it was loosely organized or badly conceived. You’re not articulating (which is hard); you’re re-articulating (which is comparatively easy). As you have surely experienced in conversation, the second time you say anything, it comes out more easily, more elegantly, and more powerfully.

The fact is that rewriting is fundamentally easier than writing, which is why you should be willing to trash your first draft. Now you can focus less on what you want or need to say and more on how to say it with grace and power – and on the critical challenge of making your piece “on brand.”

Perhaps most important, your familiarity with the material will be dramatically higher – you’ll be writing smarter, which is always a recipe for success. This phenomenon is something we all experienced in high school or college.

Think back to any math or science class you might have taken. You probably recall a day when the textbook made no sense, when the lecture was difficult to follow, and when the problem set was challenging if not impossible. But the next day, the material seems crystal-clear; the problem set is infinitely more manageable. What happened?

Your subconscious is what happened. It was churning away at the difficult material, creating new neural pathways to connect the dots, to generate the aha! moment, to give you the insight and understanding that means you’ve incorporated new knowledge and strategies into your brain. Seemingly by magic, the opaque and the difficult have become transparent and easy.

The same phenomenon happens when you are writing. You wrestle your way to a first draft. You fight less hard on the next first draft. And that draft will be better. (Note that this requires the active work of that first draft; you can’t just sleep on a project and expect it to solve itself.)

There is one caveat to the draft/trash/rewrite method: Rewriting is not retyping. You must be open to new possibilities – in terms of content, structure, and style – as you write your “new” first draft. But by letting go of your true first draft and letting your unconscious mind do some of the heavy lifting – you should find the writing process easier and more effective.

Will you have to trash your first draft every time? Of course not. There will be plenty of projects in which you can easily treat the first draft like, well, a first draft (i.e., revise, edit, proofread, done). But for challenging new content – like when you’re called upon to write about an innovative technology or articulate a new market opportunity or strategy – or when you’re given projects that don’t have a readily identifiable template or genre, the trash-and-rewrite approach can pay huge dividends. A bonus: Every time you use it, you will build your confidence in your capabilities as a writer.

So if you’re learning to write or if you’re just flat out stuck on something, start over. I guarantee you will surprise yourself at how effective it can be to trash your first draft.

Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Writing Feedback

Posted on by Tim Peters

Everyone’s a Writing Critic: Dealing with Comments and Corrections when Receiving Writing Feedback

Writing a solid first draft of something is genuinely difficult. It’s a herculean triumph of creativity and endurance over self-doubt (and procrastination – though the strategies I set forth in the first two posts in this series can make it easier to start writing and plow through to the first draft).

Unfortunately, “a solid first draft” is not the same as a finished, publishable piece. You have bosses, reviewers, and editors to deal with before your ultimate audience reads your deathless prose. These folks are going to read your “solid first draft” and give you comments.

Most comments are valuable and easy to fix: You wrote “millions” when you meant to write “billions.” It’s the “Wealth Management division,” not the “Wealth Management department.” Maybe you missed a subject/verb agreement or failed to catch a dangling modifier. Of course you welcome these comments; you’re glad to have the extra set of eyes on your work before it makes it way into the world.

And at least some of the comments you receive will be compliments: “Nice work” is manna from heaven for any writer. (Note to reviewers: No matter how much you hate a draft, find something to praise in it, or at least thank the writer for his or her efforts.)

But if all the comments you get fall into the categories of easy to fix or compliments, you are either a phenomenally gifted writer or no one cares enough to tell you the truth. The reality is that a serious writing project will probably come back to you in the form of a Word document peppered with tracked changes. It will be riddled with marginal notes. It will be accompanied by another set of ideas in the covering email that could just be boiled down to one two-word phrase: “Needs work.”

As the original writer, you will feel that all is lost, that your hard work has been for naught, perhaps even that your decision to become a writer was doomed from the get-go. There are dozens of things that can sap a writer’s confidence, but Word’s “Track Changes” feature may be among the worst.

Take a deep breath. All is not lost. Take comfort from the fact that you have a strategy for working through comments and rewriting your piece.

Step 1: Look at the Macro Comments First

Before you dive into the details, you want the 30,000-foot view – just as you do when you’re editing yourself. Read through the editor’s covering email and the marked-up copy to see if wholesale rewriting or restructuring is required. I like to recast the macro-level changes in notes to myself; it puts them top of mind and makes them easy to access. If a macro-change in tone is called for (“Make this more conversational…”), you’re going to have rework this line by line. But if a reviewer says something like “Perhaps the order of these sections could be improved,” then move paragraphs and sections around without rewriting (yet). The objective is to begin rewriting from a position of structural soundness.

Step 2: The Low-Hanging Fruit

This is a bit counterintuitive, but the next things to fix are the truly trivial ones: the missing commas or other minor grammatical issues, missing words, word choices, incorrect nomenclature, and errors of fact. For these, “Accept and move to next” (the next tracked change) is invaluable. But if a change requires any substantial thought or rewriting, don’t address it on this pass. Your real goal here is to start getting the document into shape for editing and rewriting.

Step 3: Clarifying the Opaque

After the first two editing steps, you should have a reasonably sound structure and a lot of the small things repaired, perhaps even most of them. Now you have to deal with the hard stuff: the most difficult and most opaque comments:

??? [with no clarification!]

Not sure about this…

Can you say this better? 

When I was a young writer, I hated these kind of comments with a vengeance. I wanted more transparency, more explicitness, more specificity. I wanted editors and reviewers to tell me what to fix and how to fix it.

I wanted, in other words, for them to do my job for me.

A writer should be so lucky. When your editor/boss/client says “???”, he or she is really saying, “I’m not wild about this word or sentence or paragraph, but I have no good idea about why, nor do I have any good suggestions about how to fix it.”

And that is perfectly fine. Their job is to tell you their reaction. Your job is to decipher that reaction and fix it.

So how do you do that?

First, accept the notion that your crystalline prose might be a bit opaque, or overwritten, or tone deaf, or just plain wrong. You’ve lived with the prose and the ideas behind it for hours, probably days, and perhaps weeks. You’re used to it, comfortable with it, invested in it. Which means you are no longer objective about your own writing. The reactions of other can be invaluable. Welcome them.

Second, don’t fix. Rewrite. Fixing is harder than rewriting. You don’t need to understand exactly why someone comments “???”. All you need to know is that something’s wrong in the prose: the rhythm or flow is off, the tone is out of sync from the rest of the piece, or this chunk feels out of place. (Let’s face it: If the change was trivial and factual – “the beta will be out in Q2, not Q3” – then your reviewer would just say that.)

Here’s how I rewrite at this stage:

  • I leave the original text in place (with the comments visible for reference).
  • I skip a line and start writing the paragraph again. Maybe I’ll frame it differently. Move thoughts or sentences around. Recast clauses. Strike an idea or passage entirely. I will sometimes parse every sentence in a paragraph (make that every clause) and see what the logical flow of the information should be, and start anew. My goal is simple: Make it different; make it clearer; make it better.
  • Then I strike-through the original text (with the strike-through formatting button, not the “delete” command) and leave both in place for further perusal. That’s my visual reminder to look at the old versus the new.

Generally, making something different will make it better. You always want specific feedback and pointed comments, but you won’t always get them. Rewriting will make your work better, stronger, more supple, and more communicative.

Step 4: Edit for Flow and Copyedit for Perfection

By now, you’ve made the structural changes, fixed the minor comments, and rewritten the difficult or obtuse sections. Now’s the time to make your copy beautiful just as you did in the latter stages of editing your first draft: make it flow and make it perfect.

This falls into the category of tinkering. It requires thought and care, but the work isn’t difficult (and if it is difficult, it means you probably still have major work to do). A great strategy, especially as you’re learning to edit and rewrite, is to read the document aloud and use your phone to record your voice, then listen to the playback. Your voice and your ear will detect problems of flow, of clarity, of structure. Whenever you hear a too-long pause or you lose the audible flow, there’s probably an issue with the prose. If it’s awkward aurally, it will be awkward on paper too.

Your last stage is copyediting. Now you want to accept changes left and right until they are done and the document is as clean as a whistle. Then print it and review it line by line and word by word and make it perfect.

Dealing with the Unreasonable

Sometimes, you’ll get comments that are (a) wrong or ill-advised in terms of grammar or usage or (b) monumentally stupid with respect to the material or the goals of the piece. These comments will test your mettle as a writer – and as a diplomat.

As an example of the former: A client wants to use the word “actionable” to mean “capable of being acted on,” as in “the meeting generated several actionable ideas.” This meaning does have currency, but the true meaning of the word is its legal one: “giving a reason to bring an action or a lawsuit against someone.”

I’m old school on this one and won’t use the word in its more contemporary parlance. But I won’t categorically overrule someone for this. I’ll either recast the sentence to avoid the word entirely or explain that “actionable” is primarily a word with negative connotations: You don’t want a reader to think that “the meeting generated several ideas that could lead to lawsuits.”

Much more serious is the second category of bad comments, when a reviewer makes a suggestion that is just plain dumb. Examples might include inserting a really bad or inappropriate or reference. Sometimes, a non-writer will recommend using a cliché or a cheesy call to action that will make the person or company look bad. It’s your job to explain why something is inappropriate or unwise.

It helps if you have defined things like voice and tone (“our firm will always sound confident but never sound arrogant”). Then you can easily demonstrate why a suggestion is at odds with that voice and tone. But if not, you must convincingly (and diplomatically) push back:

This is at odds with the spirit and purpose of this project.

I worry that our clients would feel we’re being condescending here.

This whitepaper is overly promotional; this isn’t the vehicle for a hard sell.

You earn your salary by writing well; you earn stature and respect by thinking and behaving as a strategist.

Ultimately, learning to deal with comments and criticism is an issue of mindset. Learn to enthusiastically embrace editing and rewriting as key components of the writing/approval/publishing process. You want the best possible product, and good reviewers can very much help you get there. In fact, they will help you get there faster than you could on your own.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Editing Your First Draft: How To

Posted on by Tim Peters

Time For Editing

In an earlier post, I wrote about the anxiety that can accompany writing and how you can overcome it with some simple steps designed to jump start your drafting. In this post, I’ll tell you how to get from the first draft to the finish line. The key to this: editing.

So you’ve got a first draft. Congratulations. A first draft, no matter how rough, is cause for a minor celebration (coffee, maybe, not Cristal). A break helps you make the mental transition from writing mode to editing mode.

Editing is how you get your rough draft to the finish line. Your mileage will vary here, but I’d say a typical first draft is somewhere between 40 percent and 50 percent of the total effort required to make something publication-ready, blog-worthy, or boss-approved.

Editing does not mean using the spell check or grammar check functions in Word. Proper editing involves restructuring, rethinking, rewriting, and reworking – all of which require critical taste and judgment – followed by some rigorous copy-editing. It’s intellectually challenging and creatively stimulating, but comfort yourself with this thought: The heavy lifting of your first draft is done.

Step 1: Climb the Mountain

Editing does not begin with polishing words. It begins with structure. You want to climb the mountain and get the big picture view. So start by reading through the piece as a whole without making any changes whatsoever.

This is harder than it sounds. I usually can’t resist the temptation to rework something on this first editing pass, but it’s better when you don’t. Your soul goal now is to determine if your piece is structurally sound – with the right flow and level of detail – before you dive into the details and polishing. Are the pieces you’ve assembled in roughly the right order? Are there obvious holes in terms of content or transition? Does the piece mirror your expectations in terms of content and length?

It’s useful to remind yourself of the broad-brush goals you outlined before you started on Draft 1:

What am I trying to do with this piece?

What do I want the reader to do or feel?

What’s the best vehicle for accomplishing this?

If you’re lucky, you’ll still feel that your original answers are largely correct. But even the last question, about the structure or genre of your project, may need revising in light of what you’ve written.

Think of your piece as a series of steppingstones that can take a reader across a river without getting wet. The reader can get from A to B to C, but not from from A to C in one jump. So you make decisions, informed by the whole of the piece:

This paragraph doesn’t go here.

This section needs to be higher in the document.

This chunk really isn’t that relevant to this project.

So you move things around to get the structure right. There’s no need yet to make the transitions fluid. When this step is completed, you’ll have a new rough draft – and it’s possibly even rougher now than when you completed your first draft.

This is not a sign of failure.

Au contraire: A better, rougher draft is the definition of progress. And now you can edit to make those rough edges smooth; to make it flow.

Step 2: Make it Flow

What is the essence of writing? One word leading to the next. One sentence leading to another. One paragraph leading to another paragraph and so on.

Writing is about flow that creates the illusion of connectedness.

When you edit for structure – when you are moving ideas, paragraphs, or whole sections – you are changing the flow of your piece. When you edit for style – when you edit line by line and word by word – you are improving the flow.

You must start at the beginning of your document to “make it flow.” Your lead is, by definition, steppingstone #1, and it’s essential to establish a firm launching point to ensure your reader can get from the first stone to the second in the journey across the river. Too big a gap, and the reader could lose your train of thought. Too small a gap, and the reader could get bored.

You improve flow by bridging thoughts and ideas with the connective tissue that will enable the reader to discern your meaning. This means adding sentences (or subtracting ones), or linking clauses with “ands” or “buts” or punctuation (the colon is your friend).

Make it clearer. Simplicity and clarity are always worth pursuing when it comes to writing. You can get away with being difficult if you’re writing a novel; you can’t if you’re writing for a company or an institution or your own blog.

Here’s where rewriting is such a critical component of editing: If you encounter a difficult, opaque sentence or paragraph in your draft, your very first response should be to rewrite it. Don’t even bother trying to fix it, because most problem sentences are doomed. Start anew.

It’s easier to rewrite something than to fix it. Your thinking during the rewriting phase will be more refined. And writing something a second, third, or fourth time almost always makes it more fluid, more clear, and more succinct.

I rewrite like this: I skip a line and just start retyping the sentence or paragraph again. If the problem is density and opacity, I’ll unpack the ideas into their simplest components, making each idea into its own sentence. Then I rewrite. It feels like alchemy sometimes. All I’ve done is rewrite something, often without much more thought than “this needs clarity.” But it works. Don’t fix. Just do it again.

In fact, if you really want to be a writer, try this sometime: Write the first draft of whatever you need to write and trash the document. Start over completely. Your new first draft will take far less time than your actual first draft, and the product will be substantially better.

Make it more powerful: When you are in this stage of editing, you should always be looking to mine the rhetorical power of your prose. Ask yourself:

Is this expressed strongly enough?

Will the reader grasp its importance?

Have I missed an opportunity to strengthen or add insight?

The search for power is always helped by rewriting. Try saying the same exact thought in a different way, with a different structure or using a different example. You’ll nearly always have a sense of which is better. Rewriting for power is a mental muscle that responds well to exercise, and you’ll also discover that your original drafts get more powerful as you gain experience.

You might need to “rinse and repeat” with this stage of editing one or more times. If you get stuck, just take a break and start at the top. Progress begets progress. Engagement generates benefits. Writing is iterative.

Step 3: Get Into the Weeds

At some point, either because you believe fervently your draft is ready, or because someone is very eager to see it, or because you can’t bear to spend one more second with it, your work is still not quite done. You need to copy edit and proofread your project. This is getting into the weeds, but it is essential for anyone who wants to be taken seriously as a writer.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have a copy editor and perhaps even a proofreader to help you with this step. But even so, that doesn’t preclude your needing to understand how to perform these tasks. Done well, copy editing and proofreading add professionalism to any document, and reflect well on the creator of that document.

If you doubt this for more than a second, wait until you give a boss or (worse) a client a 10-page document that you’ve slaved on for a week only to hear, “You misspelled ‘its’ on page three.” Ten solid pages, a couple of thousand well-chosen words, and many hours of your working life have just been reduced to a missing apostrophe. You will make mistakes in writing, of course, as in life, but avoiding these kind of trivial mistakes should be a no-brainer, particularly when the stakes are even the least bit high.

It’s beyond the scope of this piece to provide a complete guide to copy editing, but you are looking for:

The right words (particularly the ones spellcheck won’t flag)

Correct punctuation

Proper references to titles, company names, and organizational nomenclature

Thoughtful attention to language that might be offensive to some readers

Of course, you may not be a natural copy editor, especially if your writing experience is limited. So start making yourself one (this skill is always welcome in any setting). If you are the least bit unsure of something, flag it and look it up. If you make mistakes repeatedly, keep a file that contains them so you will know to look for them and you’ll start learning how not to make them. (If it’s v. its is your personal bugaboo, then search your document for both before submitting it to your boss or client.) Better yet, start your own personal style guide.

But all this effort is worth it because – at last! – you have a first draft. Off it goes, and then, about 9:30 p.m., you get pinged:

This is perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing.

This. Never. Happens.

But that’s OK. If you hear back, “Good first draft. We can work with this,” you’ve nailed it. Next we’ll talk about how to deal with comments, criticism, and changes.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy firm.