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?
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?