Developing a Passion Index and a Passion Platform
to Write and Assess Writing in the Digital Domain
If you don’t love what you’re doing, don’t do it.
Ray Bradbury
My exit from the field of journalism on April Fools Day in 2005 prompted a lot of reflection on writing well and assessing the quality of writing.
I’d been a journalism geek since high school. I worked on the college papers. I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism. I started my first newspaper job in the spring of 1997. Moved to a bigger paper in 2000. I wrote, I thought, consistently well, though, I discovered, as most writers do, that some pieces just work better than others. Some pieces – and it didn’t matter if they were columns, news stories, or features – simply wrote themselves; I was just lucky enough that my byline appeared at the top, because these stories were effortless. And well-received.
But I burned out. I dreaded going to work every day. I lived for weekends – starting that feeling at 10 a.m. every Monday. Quality began to slip, leading to what journalists fear as the Big Mistake. I committed one. Three years later, it still makes me ill to think about it. My error was not grave. I had the opportunity to stay at the paper, but I knew it was time to leave.
I know what happened. Ray Bradbury does, too: “If you don’t love what you’re doing, don’t do it.” My passion for journalism; the planning, the finding, – but not the writing –had gone. In the year I spent looking for another writing gig, I wrote a lot and thought a lot about writing. As I sorted through boxes of clippings, discarding the ordinary and keeping the extraordinary, I realized that passion – or the lack of it – in the writing shone, years after the stories were printed and then forgotten.
Nearly every successful writer has uttered a saying like Bradbury’s. Nearly every professional writer has had an epiphany like mine – learning through hard experience that passionate writing will show in the final product. As I progress as a writer and as an editor – one called upon to assess writing – the ability to gauge passion to communicate its importance to managers will be important as I seek to produce and assess writing that meets company goals, meets customer expectations, and emotionally satisfies the writer. I realized, too, that in those stories that worked so well, there was an element of passion that transcended the correctness we stive for in journalism. In those stories I read and re-read and enjoyed – and in those same stories on which I received the most positive comments – it was clear that I had made an empathetic connection to the subject matter and, by doing so, communicated that empathy to the reader.
This ability to gauge passion needs to combine with a common vocabulary and assessment tool as writers and editors interact with managers who may not understand the emotional writing influences many writers bring into corporate communication. As writing for business continues to move into the digital domain – a domain where writing has nearly always taken second shrift to design and functionality – building a passionate writing and assessment platform on trust and a shared vocabulary to explain it all will empower writers and editors to produce and assess better products and explain why they’re better along the way. Part of that explanation has to include demonstrating that empathy for the reader and subject matter are critical to writers looking to produce passionate writing.
Fundamentals
Passionate writing entails physical and emotional aspects. The physical meaning of passion includes:
- Factuality. The writer/assessor is aware that written text must be as correct as possible.
- Tone. The writer/assessor recognizes the words and stylistic choices are appropriate for the writing’s purpose.
- Audience awareness. The writer/assessor recognizes that documents must anticipate readers’ questions and recognize that, given the structure of digital documents and especially the World Wide Web, readers may come into documents along unexpected paths, leaving important background material out of their search as they seek the information or affirmation they desire.
- Author involvement. The writer/assessor recognizes that passionate writing transcends the mechanical writing process and enters the realm of empathy for the reader and for the subject matter and mutual trust between writers, subject matter experts and management.
The approach outlined in this essay is collaborative and brings new eyes into the process as writers and editors try their prose out on other people, people with whom they’ve built layers of trust. That trust will tell writers/assessors if their work is physically correct and indicative of the required empathy for reader and subject matter. We can discover whether we’re as passionate about writing as we’re always telling people we are.
Explaining Passion to Others
Management typically accepts the level of passionate writing the writers find acceptable. There is a caveat to this assumption: Management is not a group of dupes. They recognize poor writing: it’s full of typos, factual errors; it may not “sound right.” Management wants writing that “makes the company (and me) look good,” and a re not shy in saying writing doesn’t meet those expectations if it’s clear enough that the expectations are not met.
That management desire to have the writers make them/the company “look good” bears implicit and explicit trust in the writer to produce copy that readers can use, that is informative, that is persuasive as it needs to be and that carries the proper tone for the proper audience. That same trust is present when it comes to writers and editors assessing copy for appropriate use in the digital domain.
To maintain that trust, writers and assessors have to explain the emotional side of passion; the passion that can cause many of us to debate the relative merits of, for example, J.R.R. Tolkein’s writing versus that of Terry Brooks. To managerial eyes, one fantasy novel may resemble another in its form (a voyage of esoteric creatures on an epic quest) and function (entertainment in the realm of fantasy) without bothering overmuch to debate the emotional points (depth of character, narrative structure, et cetera) that writers find fascinating and entertaining to debate and explore.
In other words, we can do a better job communicating the physical aspects of passion with our managers on the quality (or lack of quality) in company prose, as well as explaining why empathy for the reader and the subject matter are just as important as mechanical correctness.
Passion Inhibitors
Lack of passion takes on many forms, subtle and glaring. On the subtle end, writers often do not properly consider who a text’s audience might be, forgetting that the audience can arrive at a web-based text from any number of paths, including paths that skip contextual material. On the glaring end, the lack of passion can lead to copy that lacks factual detail, readability, audience appeal, and the like.
What stops or inhibits passionate writing in the digital domain? I contend the stoppage is caused mostly by the same inhibiting filters that cause poor writing in any writing domain. There are some filters, however, that appear more prevalent to digital document and are often difficult to surmount due to perceived time constraints and the fact that text is typically an afterthought in most Web design.
Writers assume:
- I can always re-write this. In many instances, when we know a document or a piece of copy isn’t set in stone, we satisfy ourselves with a poorer job of audience focus, of persuasiveness, of clarity, with the idea that we can go back to it later.
- Bosses only pay attention to the bells and whistles on a web page.
- Bosses only want to talk about writing when there’s something wrong.
- Writers don’t have to be passionate about everything they write, or worry that readers can tell whether that passion is missing.
- Writing that appears on the Web isn’t permanent or real.
- Any text will do, as long as the writers like it.
- Content comes last, after the forms have been built.
- Fine-tuning will be done by someone else. Often, writers assume that managers will do the fine-tuning – the final spell check, links, et cetera – while management assumes what the writers hand over is perfect.
- It’s my way or the highway.
No system, of course, is perfect. Systems can be ignored, manipulated or overwhelmed by domineering personalities used to getting their own way – the my way or the highway inhibitor is perhaps the strongest we deal with. But a savvy team that has built itself on trust and empathy can overcome this powerful inhibitor, no matter its source. An equal-footing assessment encourages compromise when holders of opposing opinions can demonstrate the relative merits of their suggestions by referring to the common standards. Honestly qualifying an opinion on an agreed-upon standard ought to carry more weight than an opinion qualified on opinion alone.
Quantifying Passion
The Passion Index explained here will appear familiar, as it is based loosely on the scoring table used by the Educational Testing Service in its Graduate Record Exam on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best. It is an application of a score to different levels of writing. Unlike the GRE, however, the Passion Index is built on a reader-centric bent, focusing on how well the writing appeases the readers’ interest in information and affirmation as they search for what they need.
It’s important that this index not be taken at face value. I offer it here as an example that writing teams can tweak and adjust to meet the common expectations and vocabulary of their individual workplaces. Building the index on the common trust held between writing teams can tweak and adjust to meet the common expectations and vocabulary of their individual workplaces. Building the index on the common trust held between writers and management, while at the same time assembling a “writing-neutral” assessment team (explained later) will increase the index’s utility in evading the writers’ own filters which are stronger, for the most part, than management’s filters.
A sample index is reproduced here.
Description/Score
- Writing represents the company well and anticipates readers’ needs and questions. The tone is appropriate. Goals and audience are easily identified. Page has meaning and context for those who come in to it from different paths. Writer is passionate in persuading the reader they’ve come to the right source for the information/affirmation they’re seeking. Writing shows clear empathy for the reader and subject matter. 5
- Writing addresses most company and reader needs, with only minimal guessing required on the part of readers for adequate context. Goals and audience are identified with only slight ambiguity. Writer passion on meeting customer information/affirmation needs is adequate. Empathy for the reader and subject matter is present. 4
- Writing meets minimum requirements in meeting company and reader needs. Goal and audience are identified, but with some ambiguity. Writer passion in meeting customer information/affirmation needs and the level of empathy shown for the reader and subject could be improved. 3
- Writing lacks basic awareness of company goals and audience expectations. Passion is mostly absent, as evident by the scarcity of facts, canned descriptions and other evidence that the piece was “phoned in;” empathy for reader and subject matter is evidently lacking. Goal and audience are not clearly defined. 2
- Writing clearly demonstrates inadequacy on many levels. 1
You may not even opt to call this a passion index, as the word passion elicits different meanings in people.
As a further exercise, the score should be accompanied with a one-sentence summation of what the assessor believes the main purpose or goal of the prose to be, in context with other accompanying elements (such as design, art, links, on a Web page). Discord between assessors on this point should lead to increased scrutiny of the prose, no matter its score. The goal summation should also be combined with a short list of suggestions that offer concrete ways to the writer on how to improve the score.
This exercise is not a matter of the writers asking the team to do the writers’ jobs, but is an effort to ensure that what is written for the company is acceptable to those outside of the writing bullpen. Such assessments need not take a long time to accomplish. Once trained, a team could accomplish an assessment of a page of written text in no more than a half hour of dedicated work.
Emphasis should also be placed on the absolute authority the scores have. Writers – or anyone from any other discipline – should be allowed to override the scores if they fall below the company’s accepted threshold, unless extreme circumstances of time and budget don’t allow for further improvements.
Improvement Potential
As mentioned earlier, the effectiveness of the Passion Index depends on building trust between assessment team members.
For writers, the Passion Index:
- Gets writers thinking more critically about their own work. Writers will realize that the fact-based assessments of others cannot be dismissed.
- Offers writers an expedient “in the drawer” method for building their own objectivity.
- Writers gain input based on real writing and real observation, rather than relying on intuitive reader models, which can be too heavily biased in the writers’ favor, or usability studies, which for day-to-day applications are impractical.
- Offers an opportunity for writers to offer constructive feedback in a way the contributor and management understand.
- Offers indications where their empathy for the reader and/or subject matter may be lacking.
- Offers participants an unbiased, equally agreed-upon quantity with which to grade writing meant to represent the company.
- Offers participants increased influence on how the company is portrayed in prose.
- Provides the company with better prose that demonstrates empathy for the reader and the subject.
- Offers a scoring done by a team of writers and non-writers that adds a cross-discipline credibility to the company’s interests and readers benefits.
Index:
- Offers a quantified score on an easily-read scale.
- Offers lucid, constructive advice on making improvements, with easily-identified goals in mind.
- Ensures that the technical accuracy non-writers wish were more prevalent in company writing is there, because they’re looked at as part of the company writing team, rather than a contributor of factoids.
Conclusion
Writers in any genre know intuitively and explicitly that the measure of passion they put into their work is often the biggest deciding factor in whether a piece of writing works for its intended audience through demonstrating adequate empathy for the reader and subject matter. Finding a way to quantify passion – and then sticking to the program, building on trust among the assessment team – ensures that writers and the company as a whole are thinking deeply enough about the glaring and subtle errors of passion we see as writers and as assessors. A customized Passion Index could help writers and assessors gauge passion needs combined with a common vocabulary and assessment tool as writers and editors interact with non-writing managers.
No comments:
Post a Comment