Reviewer, put down your butchering knife

Being a business writer sometimes feels like being an abattoir vet: you’re ostensibly hired to ensure the welfare of every sentence in your care, but condemned to see your words winched onto the machinery of reviews from where hopes of survival are bleak.

So here’s a plea to everyone entrusted with reviewing a professional writer’s work, a checklist to help ensure that you edit like a surgeon not a butcher:

• Have you replaced any of the writer’s verbs with ‘leverage’? Put the writer’s verb back: whatever it was, it was better.
• Have you felt the urge to change what’s fresh and surprising (such as an original metaphor) to what’s stale and predictable (such as ‘best of breed’, ‘synergy’ or ‘cutting edge’)? If you want your text to sound like everyone else’s, you don’t need a professional writer.
• Have you stuffed the prose with fatuous words like a foie-gras farmer force-feeding geese? For example, fattened ‘review’ to ‘review and challenge’ or ‘expertise’ to ‘market-leading expertise’? Put down your ego trumpet: all you’re doing is blaring your insecurities to the world, and anyone reduced to shouting has already lost the argument. Quiet and dignified wins every time.
• Have you cut words without thinking through the whole context? Good prose is an intricate network of meaning: you can’t hack out the lungs and capillaries and expect the heart to keep beating. And speaking of ‘beating’, never tell a true writer to ‘make it more punchy’ unless you want the punches to land on your nose.
• Have you assumed the writer’s ‘wrong’ on some grammatical point and ‘corrected’ them without discussion? Professional writers do make mistakes – they’re only human – but offer them the courtesy of checking first.
• If the text is marketing material, do you feel slighted that the writer hasn’t mentioned you and your company enough? Hasn’t stressed how great you are? Relax: the writer’s done a good job. Good copy isn’t a plinth for egos but a shop window to entice your clients to spend their money on your products or services. And that means talking about them, not you.
• Do you think that now you’ve amended the text, there’s no need for the writer to see it again before it’s published? Let them see it again. Please. You don’t want to risk dead or wounded text staining your reputation, do you?

If you want help in creating text that sings not squeals, get in touch now via LinkedIn or read my book Ultimate Guide to Business Writing.