As a journalist and communications strategist, I’ve helped write and edit thousands of news stories and blog posts, hundreds of bylines, scores of speeches and presentation talk tracks, dozens of research reports, and many other types of content.
In short, I've learned a lot about collaborative writing.
Over the past few months, I've distilled those lessons into a practical guide.
There's lots of advice available online and in books on how to write your memoir, novel, or screenplay. Most of it focuses on you writing by yourself, as a sole creator. But those books and how-to videos don't explain how to handle the reality of writing collaboratively.
When you're writing as part of a team, a host of issues crop up that most writing manuals don’t cover. Issues like these:
- The engineer who wants your team’s help to revise something they’ve written to make it more publishable, but who can’t let go of specific technical descriptions that they insist are necessary for accuracy — which make the copy almost unreadable.
- The top executive who needs your help writing a speech but is so concerned with specific wording that he’s still asking you for revisions backstage, shortly before he’s about to go on.
- The research firm that keeps revising the results of a survey, forcing you to make endless revisions of the supposedly final report up until the day before it’s scheduled to be published.
- The key member of the writing team, brilliant but inconsistent, who decides that they’ve had enough of your feedback and quits, leaving you to scramble to find someone else to cover their responsibilities.
All of these have happened to me and the teams I’ve been part of. In fact, every story above has happened to me multiple times!
In the moment, each of these incidents felt like a crisis. Yet my teams and I delivered the content we needed to, on time and as promised. In some cases what we delivered exceeded expectations, sometimes by far, delivering results that were 10x or 100x the investment our clients had made.
When we were able to handle these crises with aplomb, it's because we had a playbook – a guide, and practical templates, to make content creation, editing, and approvals easier.
This guide is what I wish I'd been given when I started my career. In these posts, I show you how to write as part of a team, one where multiple contributors (writers, editors, and designers) work together to create and publish something excellent – something that they can all be proud of.
The POWERS process
Let's start with a high-level overview of the six-step process I recommend content teams use.
You don't have to use every stage in this process, but it helps. Breaking down content creation into stages is a massive step towards clarifying what needs to be done, when – and by whom.
Follow this process, or something like it, and you'll stay out of trouble most of the time (and you'll be able to get out of trouble easier).
I use a hopefully not-too-dorky acronym to make this six-step writing process more memorable: POWERS.
- Prepare. At this stage, the team is generating ideas, establishing goals, doing research, and determining the criteria for success. The output of this stage is an assignment brief that describes the work and the expected deliverable
- Organize. Also known as "getting your stuff together." The output of this stage is usually an outline, which they can deliver to a writer along with the assignment brief.
- Write. Perhaps better called "typing," this stage involves fleshing out the outline to create a first draft.
- Edit. Once you've got a draft, it's time to get it in better shape for publication. Editing can happen at several levels: structural, flow, line, and proofreading. The output of this stage is a publication-ready draft.
- Release. This is the publication stage, when you publish the draft on a blog or social media site or deliver it to the editor of a publication. It's helpful to include promotion and distribution in this stage, too. The output of this stage is a published piece of content — and an audience that’s spending time with it.
- Study the results. Once something has been published and promoted, studying the results can really pay off. How many people read it? How much engagement did it get on social media? Is anyone linking to it? The output of this stage is a report (formal or informal) on the project's results.
That's just scratching the surface. Want to know more? Go deeper with this post:
Dylan Tweney
1. Prepare: How to start a content project
How you start a project has a huge influence on how successful it ultimately will be. Holding a kickoff meeting can go a long way toward producing alignment and happy clients (internal or external) at the end of the day.
For small projects like a short blog post or social post, you can align on objectives through a simple conversation with your client.
A side note: When I write “client” here, I’m referring to the consumer of the content team’s work product, whether that’s an internal client, like your boss or a team over in marketing that has requested your team’s help, or an external client that’s paying your firm for services.
Holding a more formal kickoff meeting with the client is extremely helpful for bigger projects like a research report or a lengthy e-book.
The output of a kickoff is an assignment brief: a document that specifies what we’re trying to produce. It gives the writer or content team clear directions on what they need to write.
A brief often starts with a working title and a simple one-paragraph abstract. As the team does research and discovers more details about the assignment, they can add notes and links to the document. Eventually, it may even include the outline created in the next major step of the process — and at that point, the assignment brief has become a comprehensive resource for creating the content, a one-stop shop for kicking off, writing, and reviewing the draft.
Learn more about kickoff meetings and assignment briefs – with links to two crucial templates to make each one a success:
Dylan Tweney
2. Organizing and the "O" word (Outlining)
I know many writers hate working with an outline, and for creative projects, their reluctance is understandable.
But for team writing, some kind of outline — even if it’s just a basic set of bullet points — is essential.
Without an outline, you’re writing aimlessly, wandering across the page, not knowing where you’re going. (This can be fun for creative writing; in business writing, it’s torture.)
Even if the outline is quickly done and you only share it with a few people — or even if it’s just for yourself — writing an outline is the simplest way to make writing easier and faster and to get a better end product.
But there's a right way and a wrong way to create outlines.
The type of outline that works best for collaborative writing is a fat outline – an outline enhanced by adding pieces of content. The extra text might include snippets of sentences, mentions of relevant source data (with references or hyperlinks), quotes you plan to include (with attribution text included), or even drafts of whole paragraphs.
The “fat outline” was invented by Josh Bernoff, a writing coach and author. He suggests you might think of a fat outline as a “zeroth draft” — a rough but meaty document that stops short of writing out every transition (and may not even have proper grammar or complete sentences throughout) but which includes samples or descriptions of pretty much everything the first draft will include.
Learn more about how to create an outline that is actually useful, not just a painful chore:
Dylan Tweney
3. Writing with ease – and how to get unstuck
If you follow the POWERS writing process, In some ways, this part should be the easiest. You’re well-prepared, and you’re not staring down a blank page. You'll have a roadmap that spells out exactly where the writing needs to go and what needs to happen at each point.
What you need to do now is fairly straightforward:
- Write through the outline until you have a complete first draft
- Take a break (get a cup of tea, or let the draft sit overnight)
- Go through your draft line by line to revise it and clean it up as necessary
- Share the draft with the rest of your team
Of course, problems do crop up. When they do, here are some tips for getting unstuck:
Dylan Tweney
What if you've got a ton of people working together? How do you keep folks from getting confused about what they need to write? Here are some tips on making sure no one is ever staring at a blank page, wondering where to start:
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4. Editing: How to be a good editor
Editing is an essential component of any writing process, whether it involves one person or a dozen.
Editing is crucial because it’s the quality-control phase: It eliminates errors, strengthens weak copy, reduces inconsistencies, and ensures that the copy aligns with the client’s goals, tone, and expectations for excellence.
Editing is also important because it frees up the writer (or writers) to simply write. Write first, then edit. Separating creation from optimization is, it turns out, an extremely useful step in facilitating easier and less painful writing. When you can turn off your internal editor, it becomes easier to let the words flow, knowing that you or your editor can catch and correct any problems later.
Editing is also an art. And in a team of people creating content — whether that’s a newsroom on deadline or a marketing team building out materials for a new campaign — editing is never merely about making the copy better.
At its best, editing is also about developing individual writers (or other editors), helping them realize their best selves, and shaping a team of writers and editors into a functional unit capable of creating excellent content over and over again.
In practice, an editor's job can include a variety of roles:
- Quality control
- Project management
- Coaching and mentoring
Find out more about how each of these roles matters and how to be a better editor:
Dylan Tweney
5. Publishing without panic attacks
With publishing, as with flying an airplane, having a good preflight checklist can help keep you out of trouble.
Even though the content may be publication-ready, there’s almost always a bit more work before you can drop it into your content management system or send it off to the op-ed editor who’s promised to look at it.
There’s metadata, such as the author’s full, correct title and bio. There’s often a call to action that you need to add at the end, including a trackable URL with a UTM code. You’ll probably need some imagery, including possibly the author’s photo, any charts or diagrams to illustrate specific points within the piece, and a “hero” image for the top of the piece.
You should combine all of that into a checklist and include it in the document that contains your final draft.
Here’s a document template you can use as a starting point.
And here's some more background on using that template:
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6. Studying the outcomes
If you don’t pay attention to the effectiveness of your content, it’s difficult or impossible to improve it. What may be worse is that it’s also impossible to prove that the content was worth the investment.
So studying the results — quantitatively and/or qualitatively — is an essential final step. It allows you to close the loop and start the next content project smarter and better prepared.
Most of the teams I’ve worked with have done this step only sporadically. As valuable as the exercise is, teams often have difficulty finding the time to do a proper retrospective (or, as we call them in the newspaper and magazine business, a post-mortem) on all but the biggest projects.
Still, I urge every team I work with to make time for this whenever possible. Even if it’s an informal review by a couple of team leaders, rather than a formal retrospective involving all team members, there is still value in assessing what worked and what didn’t.
The more you can make this kind of review habitual, the faster you will be able to identify and correct production problems, improving your processes and getting more efficient at producing good content quickly.
Read this post for 7 quantitative and 5 qualitative metrics you can use to assess how well your content is working:
Dylan Tweney
BONUS: What do professional content creators do?
In early 2024, I conducted a survey of professional writers and editors in various content forums. I was looking for perspectives on collaborative content creation — what we write about when we write with others.
The survey, though small in size, tapped into a deep well of experience. The participants were a diverse group of content and communications professionals with decades of work history creating various types of copy, including blog posts, bylines, press releases, social media copy, research reports, and more.
I compiled the results into a 24-page e-book available as a free PDF at the link below, or as an inexpensive Kindle version available from Amazon: Content Creation: State of the Art 2024.
Dylan Tweney
I'm currently writing a book based on this approach to collaborative writing. I can't wait to show you more!
