Can’t recall the number of times I’ve handed someone my carefully polished draft to have them return it laden with jargon and gobbledegook, rearranged, and with the formatting “improved” (without the use of styles, of course).

I may have to steal this and append it to all of my proposals.

I finally learned to do careful planning with new clients in advance to ensure that we had a single point of contact for feedback who had (and this is the critical thing) actual decision-making power in the organization. Often the client who brings you in is not this person, so work with them to find out who is before you put pen to paper and go through 32 excrutiating stages of drafts, only to end up something so incomprehensible or watered-down that you don’t want to attach your name to it.

One moment I am not proud of … walking through a document line by line in a live meeting with a global management team and fielding 12 different opinions on edits. Agonizing is too mild a word to describe it.

This post should be required reading for anyone hiring a writer. Amen to you.

All the best,
-Pam

Each time we get together to organize things, not write, the client wants me to figure out which phrases and which jargon sound best. And each time I tell the client, “Let’s get organized first; then we’ll figure out what sounds best.”