Editing Knowledge For Business Web Content – Part 1

WHY SHOULD EVERY DESIGNER BOTHER ABOUT CONTENT QUALITY ?

• Your intense designs will be withered if they are brimming with inferior content.
• By cultivating the skill to grade content quality, you are adept to administer constructive advice to other members of the creative team, increasing your value as a designer.
• If you are in a project management role, you must know what needs to be fixed, improved and enhanced in the deliverable’s content.
• Unless the content meets a high standard of quality, the finished product will undermine rather than enhance credibility, diminish rather than build brand awareness, and damage rather than improve search engine visibility.

Five Varieties Of Content Editing

1. SUBSTANTIVE EDITING
Substantive editors are chiefly worried of overall cohesion, clarity, accuracy and effectiveness. They look for unfinished or cracked arguments, unsupported assertions, inconsistencies or gaps in the logical flow of the content, and faithfulness to the assignment’s strategic goals.

2. COPYEDITING
Copyeditors are generally exercised with fashion. Are sentences appearing fair and to the point ? Does the tone look logical? Are the words being used right ? Is the text free of lingo and ambiguous references? Does the copy obey to rules of grammar, punctuation and style?

3. FACT-CHECKING
Fact-checkers are mainly concerned with informational accuracy. They make sure statistics and other quantitative information are stated fully and correctly. Fact-checking is often a research task, but in business writing, it also comes into play at the editing stage — with vitally important impact, as we will see in a moment.

4. SEO
SEO editing ensures that on-page content conforms to SEO best practices and follows the campaign’s on-page guidelines. SEO editing is typically done by a client’s internal or external SEO resource. The more the SEO resource is plugged into the creative process, the less artificial and stilted the optimized content will be.

5. PROOFREADING
Proofreaders are essentially bothered with technical heed. Contrasting standards apply to various types of content. If all of these editing tasks are done well, the final product will have the level of quality that readers and search engines desire. In terms of workflow, the editing process follows the order noted above, starting with substantive editing and ending with proofreading. However, as you might imagine, editing is not always linear; documents usually go back and forth between editors and writers as issues are fixed.