Writing, topping, formatting and fixing: 4 steps to better content
The WTFF method can improve your writing.
A former journalist and a former Cards Against Humanity writer walk into a marketing agency.
What comes out is a snarky, irreverent book about writing in a variety of forms, from writing a business email to creating a press release someone actually wants to read.
“Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing” initially started as a Substack. It will be available on Sept. 10.
PR Daily sat down with the authors, Melissa Harris (the former journalist) and Jenn Bane (the former Cards Against Humanity writer), now both working at Chicago-based agency M. Harris & Co.. The pair described their “WTFF” method – that’s writing, topping, formatting and fixing – to create better content in any medium.
Writing
Nothing else can happen until you’ve got something written down.
But when Harris and Bane talk to people struggling with writer’s block or messy, disorganized writing, they often find that people didn’t take the time to properly organize their thoughts on the front end.
Harris and Bane suggest following this framework to create clearer, easier-to-follow work:
- Who is your audience? (Who is this piece of communication for? Your answer should be more specific than “customers” or “clients.”)
- What is it? (A guide? A report? A recap?)
- What is the goal? (To persuade? To prompt action? If so, what action?)
- How is it going to achieve this objective?
- Why does it matter now? (Why are you writing it today, versus a year ago?)
The answers to these questions should give you a workable piece of writing that can then move on to the next phases.
Topping
Harris and Bane use “topping” to refer to headlines, subject lines and social media captions. The things that capture a reader’s attention and draw them into the story.
“That is the decision,” Bane said. “That’s the moment when people decide if they’re going to read or not. So if nothing else, nail the headline and the subhead.”
When she was at Cards Against Humanity, Bane says they sometimes would spend whole days brainstorming subject lines. In her current role, they’ll 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 especially strong for SEO purposes.
“We don’t advocate for clickbait,” Bane said firmly. “Clickbait is when you promise something and you click on it and you don’t get your answer, or you’re tricked in some way. But you can write a very amazing headline that people want to click on that is absolutely not clickbait. It’s completely possible.”
Formatting
Before I could even finish asking a question about formatting, Harris bursts in to share her love of the return key.
“If there’s one thing I want people to take away, it is that the enter key is the most important key on the keyboard,” she said.
Its key utility is in breaking up paragraphs into more digestible bites that are easier to read – especially when on a mobile device.
“Depending on the formatting of your screen and the email, a six-sentence paragraph could literally stretch from the top of your phone to the bottom of it,” Harris said.
“If you make people use their thumbs to read your thing, it’s not gonna happen,” Bane added.
When formatting, each sentence should have one idea and each paragraph should have one overarching theme in order to keep the copy tight and easily readable.
“The more important thing is that that when someone looks at the thing on their screen for the first time, whether that’s a phone or desktop, that they do not feel overwhelmed by the density of the paragraphs,” Harris said.
Fixing
Much of the section on fixing – or what you might call editing – focuses on writing shorter.
Bane tells their clients that their writing isn’t actually competing with other organizations.
“You’re competing for their time, for their attention span, and no one has either of those left to spare right now,” Bane said. “Your audience is not going to spend one extra second trying to discern your dense paragraph.
In their book,Bane and Harris propose the following exercise for identifying and reducing redundancies. How lean can you make this passage?
We undertook several rounds of in-depth, not-for-attribution interviews with corporate executives, financial community leaders, and key stakeholders to identify perspectives on significant issues and challenges facing the clean energy transition. The interviews sought to garner views across the range of current and potential investor types to develop an understanding of areas of consensus and divergence about why such financial actors participate—or choose not to—in solution investments.
How’d you do? Here’s how the authors chopped it down to size:
We interviewed financial leaders about why they would or would not invest in the clean energy transition.
“Jen likes to say you’ve got to use a machete, not a butter knife, and you have step away from the work a little bit and be a little bit dispassionate about your own work,” Harris said.
“Everybody Needs an Editor: The Essential Guide to Clear and Effective Writing” is available Sept. 10.
Allison Carter is editor-in-chief of PR Daily. Follow her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
