The Dilemma of the Content Writer 1
On the craving to write a typical newsletter and quality of writing or content
I stood there at the shore. One step in the sea, the other on the sand. Out there on the horizon, I could see my dilemma playing with the clouds and the waves.
Thoughts kept rupturing like baby galaxies in my mind. I told myself that between ideas and their execution, life happens in all its n degrees of dilemmas.
So this one’s for the dilemmas and especially for this one particular dilemma.
Since the day, I created this newsletter, which is not very long ago, (I know I am overusing adverbs, dear marketer, thanks for reminding!), I have been having this debate with myself, and sometimes with some friends who share companionship in marketing with me- what precisely is the value of such a content that doesn’t have growth hacks, or guides, or doesn't follow any established rule of marketable content? (I know that I could have said it without using ‘precisely’). Typical marketing questions, you see!
Today as I face this dilemma, I also delve into the depths of content writing and structures.
The reason for content
In marketing, the value of an activity is defined by the outcome. The ends justify the means, most of the time in most of the places. This is almost universally accepted as the thumb rule. By this rule, your content exists to bring subscriptions, increase sales, and be perceived as something that the customer can call insightful and then, more importantly, ‘share’.
In a way, the entire content creation strategy is dominated by a thorough focus on what it is supposed to deliver. It should be able to market ideas and products and be marketable as well while at it.
Even though there are so-called principles like ‘don’t make it a click-bait’, ‘humanize the idea’, and so on - I think even these positive allowances are in a way impositions. The marketer (within or without) is slowly stripping away degrees of freedom from the writer like an onion peel. This goes on till one reaches the bottom of the onion - a content-writer mold that can be found in almost every company. But is this fair or natural or even worth it?
The Divide
Some things should be clarified. There is a clear distinction between sloppy writing and well-crafted content that is universally felt and understood across domains of marketing, literature, science, and so on.
A good piece of writing
expresses the idea it set itself to in the first place,
has good grammar and narrative,
doesn’t confuse or confound the reader (unless that’s what the aim is), and
can engage the reader till the end.
A bad piece of writing on the other hand fails on one or more of the above counts. This looks like a fairly basic and useful analysis of content writing. The only problem with this analysis is that all of the above pointers except that of the grammar are subjective. This brings to a highly relevant and important content that plagues marketers today- what makes a good quality writing?
Can you measure the goodness (or badness) of a ‘writing’?
I remember this scene from Dead Poet’s Society where John Keating, the character played by Robin Williams, discusses the measurement of the greatness of a poem using a preface of a fictional textbook called "Understanding Poetry" by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard.
To quote the exact words from the movie (same as the video above)-
To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech, then ask two questions:
1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and
2) How important is that objective?
Question 1 rates the poem’s perfection; question 2 rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the poem’s greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.
If the poem’s score for perfection is plotted on the horizontal of a graph and its importance is plotted on the vertical, then calculating the total area of the poem yields the measure of its greatness.
A sonnet by Byron might score high on the vertical but only average on the horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on the other hand, would score high both horizontally and vertically, yielding a massive total area, thereby revealing the poem to be truly great. As you proceed through the poetry in this book, practice this rating method. As your ability to evaluate poems in this matter grows, so will, so will your enjoyment and understanding of poetry.
From Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. featured in the movie Dead Poet’s Society
The issuing rebuttals from John Keating in the movie provide very clear insights into how not to evaluate poetry, at least. You might be able to measure the rhyme and meter to a certain extent, but the actual worth of the poem is something that cannot be solved using an equation, however many variables you use.
This argument is of course not very complete in the sense that it doesn’t state explicitly why one cannot measure the greatness of poetry. But it accepts that poetry is more than just a form and rules of language and sound. But still, this might be a good enough argument. This argument also supports the idea that in truth you can only understand the greatness of a poem and its poetry by reading it and what it means to you - there is no other way.
What is the quality of content?
So can we make some argument of this form for content writing too?
Well, one thing one should recognize, going forward, is that there are no metrics for quantitative analysis or measurement of what we can safely call the quality of writing.
Quality by definition relates to some inherent virtue or property very much like the Greek philosophers’ idea of logos which suggested that the world manifests the properties it does because that’s the underlying and intrinsic nature of the world. The world is the way it is because that how the world ought to be.
However, I don’t want to use such a philosophy, not for the world and also not for the quality of content. For I believe that the quality of content originates not from the writing or the inherent patterns of words, but through the will and skill of the writer.
So quantifying the goodness or quality of writing is somewhat of a misnomer. In fact, quantifying quality is an irony of sorts.
Tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway Editor indeed provide a quantitative score for a piece of writing. But how much of that is a relevant analysis of the quality of writing, is something that can be pondered upon.
The idea of syntax
A very common writing improvement technique afforded by tools like Grammarly is grammar check and sentence construction improvements.
These as such don’t change the overall essence of the writing but they make the writing acceptably correct as per the prevalent rules of grammar. Such improvements can be understood by the concept of ‘syntax’.
The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Syntax as follows-
Syntax is thus rooted in acceptable logic- acceptable because grammar itself is an accumulation of accepted rules of language or dialect over a period of time in a given geography. In fact, this is the reason there are different versions of English throughout the world. However, I do not mean to say that syntax is equal to grammar but a case can be made that syntax has a huge role in defining grammar across languages.
Why am I discussing syntax here?
The syntax of a sentence is something that can be evaluated with some kind of an algorithm. In fact, the idea of syntax is also used in coding where it is used to signify the language structure of statements for writing an algorithm.
Thus, grammar check is valid because grammar is syntactical in nature. The subject-verb agreement can be checked with logic or formulas. Voices, tenses and punctuations can be checked with an algorithm. Sentence constructions can be improved, that is again a syntactical review.
In fact, during my childhood, my father used to inspire me to score full marks in grammar and mathematics because he said both are logic or rule-based. But he always maintained that literature wouldn’t be an ideal subject to get 100 marks out of 100, because they are highly subjective.
Next up: Readability and other demons
So as far as we are correcting the grammar and construction of sentences, such an evaluation makes sense. But what about other factors that are associated with quality of writing these days, like readability, adverb usage, sales-worthiness, copywriting and so on. Are these measurements founded on strong principles or logic because many of these are subjective to the naked eye? Also, do these make sense from a marketing point of view? Does one need to write an article in a template to make it worth it? What should be the goal of a content writer who is writing to dessiminate news about a product or ideas?
These are the questions we will explore in the next issues of Market-ed-it, and tackle all the demons that a content writer must face to write that perfect marketing piece.
P.S. Here’s a small teaser into the next episode of Market-ed-it. The Hemmingway app is named after the American novelist and writer, Ernest Hemmingway. Out of curiosity, I entered the first few sections of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Ernest Hemmingway into the app, and here’s what I got-
Read the next episode here: