Dealing with Professional "Writing by Committee"

ChaseJxyz

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My dayjob is in marketing with writing not my primary role, but in every marketing job I've had I've ended up doing some writing because of my degree (journalism) and past jobs (writer, editor, blogger etc). Up until recently it's not been a problem: I'd be given an assignment, I'd write it, someone gives some feedback, I'd make those changes and then it's good to go. If there's any additional changes made after that point, I'm not told about it and I don't worry about it. With my professional writing, I'm not emotionally attached to it, so criticism or things being changed don't bother me. I don't have some grand artistic vision or anything, and I only ever dig in my heels and object if the requests are for something sexist/racist/homophobic/etc.

However, things have been different lately. My company is small (<30 folx) and we're adding a new service to our site. We don't have a dedicated copywriter so I've been tasked with writing things for our site for this service, such as an FAQ, system emails and short (~100 words) blurbs on web pages. I made first drafts and asked questions to determine how exactly certain terms would be used, if we needed to use copyright symbols, what sort of info they wanted on these pages etc. It seems that, before I joined the company, the technical director had done all the writing for things like this. We end up clashing because we tackle this differently, as I'm a writer/more loosey-goosey while he's a programmer/more strict. He sees terms in more absolute ways, in reference to our own systems, and not as how the average person would see them. An example would be "return" vs "refund": he argued we should use "refund" because it was the literal definition of what our internal process would be for the situation, while I said that we should use "return" because, to the customer, a return means forfeiting an item/service for their money back while refund is only getting their money back. Some of these arguments get into nitty-gritty details, like can we call an [object] and [object] when it is not literally an [object] and can't be used with the software you'd expect to use for an [object], but it is most similar to an [object] and it's easier to call it that than a phrase with several adjectives.

There's people from other parts of the company on this project, too, and they each have their feedback and opinions that are related to their area of expertise. Some of them give good feedback and bring up points I wasn't aware of and it makes my writing stronger, while others ask for things that make things more confusing, repetitive, or otherwise worse. I've had entire documents I've written be entirely re-written by someone else and then asked to give feedback in front of everyone during a meeting. It's incredibly frustrating because I'm still seen as the company writing expert and they want my stamp of approval, but if I were such an expert why would they just throw out all of my work or ignore my concerns? My hope is that once this goes live and actual customers are reading (and misreading) things, people will see what I was trying to argue for and I'll be proven right, but that feels like a not-very-nice thing to wish for. I don't want to cause extra work for my coworkers and I'd rather we just publish the right thing the first time, but it's not very feasible when people won't listen to my concerns.

I'm sure there are people here who have experienced something similar to this in their careers and I would really appreciate their advice. How do you handle "writing by committee"? Or when edits make your work weaker or less clear?
 

InkFinger

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The committee provides and updates requirements for the writing. The writer writes it, the editor approves and/or makes update recommendations. Give them something they can change so that their feedback is included considered. And be clear about what they are not allowed to update. Welcome to life in a company. Their intentions are good, even if their writing is not.
 

veinglory

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Keep the committee to bullet point format, but be vert careful about paraphrasing as small changes can alter meaning.
 

AW Admin

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You need to create an in-house style sheet.
 

Ari Meermans

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You need to create an in-house style sheet.

^ Speaking as someone who has had to "get 'er done" on multiple jobs, creating an in-house style sheet is the way to go. And as a former project manager, I'd suggest meeting with your team members from the other departments and task them with bringing examples of best writing practices from their departments by content type. Together, you all can use the best of those examples to create your in-house style sheet. Everyone makes a contribution, everyone owns the final product. Then take it to whoever has sign-off authority for the whole company.
 

FletcherHavarti

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I had to chuckle (a sympathetic chuckle) because I have experienced this "writing by committee" situation many times, and it drives me nuts as well. A few years ago I was copied on an email from someone who said they had "wordsmithed" an attached document to make it more readable. The attachment in question was a document I had written, which had bounced around several reviewers before coming back around to me. The sender of the email had butchered it beyond recognition, to the point that I hardly recognized it anymore. Since this person was a company executive and I was not, there wasn't much I could do except smile and hold onto a deep, enduring grudge. To this day, I can't remember the person who edited "my" document, but I remember the experience.

If your work environment is more collaborative than mine was, maybe you can gently guide people to your way of thinking. It sounds like you're also using this as an opportunity to see others' perspectives, which is a good thing. There's nothing wrong with standing firm when an edit makes the writing unclear or inaccurate, especially if they do recognize you as the expert.
 

ChaseJxyz

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You need to create an in-house style sheet.

Apparently we have one, but it's ancient. I asked about it when I first started writing the blog (our company's name ends with s and I didn't know how to 's it, if at all) and it was mentioned but I don't think I've ever seen it. If the problems here was stuff like commas then I would ask for it and we'd work off of that. Some things like including trademark or not isn't up to me, it's up to partners and outside companies (at a previous job making sure you wrote Bluetooth (R) the right way was a Very Big Deal since their lawyers were always checking our products for it).

The things that are being changed are more about word choice and style. On the FAQ document one of the questions was "Should I buy format A or B?" What I wrote was plain-English that explained what each was, and what you could or couldn't do. The rewrite instead gave a technical definition for what A is and what B is and says that they both usually, but not always, do things from this list. If you went to Block Buster and asked if you should get a VHS or DVD, do you want to be told 1: that DVDs are read via a laser and VHS via a magnetic "head" and that both might have trailers, special features, and closed captions or 2: DVDs have higher-quality audio and video than VHS, but require two different types of devices to run? I wrote #2 but it got changed to #1, which I feel gives unnecessary information and the information it does give is vague and unhelpful. The target audience is customers who are, well, customers. You know how they might not be the brightest so giving them unnecessary technical info can just cause issues.

The new service is pretty different from what we're already doing, so there's a lot of discussion on how to convey information as to not cause confusion. Confusion means upset customers, which means returns/refunds, which means upset customer service and accounting folx. I'm concerned that the technical people making these changes have forgotten what regular people know and think.
 

Stytch

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Aside from the style sheet/book (yes, do that. update, etc.) I'd suggest doing a sort of "focus group" when this stuff comes up, so you don't feel put on the spot. Or, feel free to give some feedback, but then say you'd like to test run it and report back to the committee. Rather than let stuff go live later and no one understand it, gather a small group of folks who are in your target market (individually or in an actual group) and run stuff past them, check their comprehension and response, and then if they are like, "we don't understand this," you can report that. Instead of saying you think it's poorly written, let some other folks say it for you, from a distance.