Can you measure your company’s writing?

Not willing to risk lousy editorial copy, a former reporter now working at Intuit created a system to measure, grade and improve everything from news stories to press releases

When did you decide that you needed a system to measure the writing in your publications? Oddly enough, this whole thing started a few years ago as a project in process excellence for all of Intuit. Now, I’m the last person in the world you want to have working with things like standard deviations, root cause analysis and stuff like that. I began my career as a reporter and instinctively stay away from math. And I don’t believe in formulaic writing. We were trying to determine what we could improve in the press release process—from creation to delivery—to increase our coverage.