Last week, I paid a writing coach a small chunk o’change to give me some guidance about creating content.  It feels like it takes too long to create the material that makes up my business life, from home study courses to blog posts to comments in the blogosphere.  I want to be faster.

As part of her coaching package, Ali Luke will review and edit up to 2000 words of your writing, so I sent her links to three substantial blog posts.  She pasted the content into MS Word and then used Word’s “comment” feature to share her thoughts about my material.

Friends, I am a bit miffed.  Her editorial comments were useful, and actionable (good “business” word there), and except for one or two tiny typos, substantial.  What struck me is that I probably would have seen most of the edits myself if I had printed the content onto paper and read my own material on the couch first.  I can make these edits for free.

To be true, Ali and I are 25 years apart in age, so she has an eye for my tendency to preach in a way that perhaps my peers wouldn’t sense.  That is good stuff.  And I’m not in any sense denying the value of her editorial suggestions–the fact is, I hadn’t seen the sticky spots she pointed out, and the posts are better for the changes.

Before I work with her again, however, I plan to print out all my site content, double-spaced, and sit down on the couch with a green pen (kinder on self than red) to edit and mark it up.  Then we’ll see what she has to say about flaws I can’t see myself, rather than sticky spots I would have seen had I looked.

Doing a “preview” out of WordPress and looking at the content on the screen is simply not the same thing at all.

In the course of preparing Hiring is Hard:  How to Hire Your Third Employee for release, I printed the entire document (150+ pages) at least three times.  I used a professional printer, so that I could get the document bound.  Reading a “real” manual made the needed edits jump out at me in a way they simply didn’t when I looked at the material on the screen.

It may be that people who learned to write on computers have a different editing process, and that printing, for them, is a waste of time.  Can’t say.  All I know is that for those of us who learned to type on manual typewriters, who thought correcting Selectrics were simply the greatest thing since sliced bread, printing out a blog post and taking a good look at it with an editorial eye while you sit on the couch can do wonders for your internet expert status.

I listen to a lot of internet marketing advice, and I subscribe to blogs about productivity and email management, and I hear advisers telling me to “train my readers to open my email” and “plan your mailing to get your email opened” and “manage the customer experience” and all sorts of other blather that’s beginning to go a bit stale. You are not in charge of the customer experience. You can do a good bit to help the customer have a better experience in doing business with you, and most of us in business should probably do more. But you are not in charge. You are (so) not in charge.

I’ve heard, and perhaps I’ve even given, advice to be cautious about accepting requests from Linkedin Connections who “don’t write a personal note.” I teach this stuff. OK. Today, Linkedin went off on a jag of its own, and sent out 12 requests for connection without offering me the opportunity to customize the message in any way. Oops. Better eat those words quietly. I was completely ready to customize the message, to “hide email addresses from recipients” so they wouldn’t be able to tell it was a group request (cross check against my Gmail address book), even to send the requests individually. But no. Linkedin jumped in and ran. And now 12 new people “think” I’m a goober who can’t be bothered to write a tailored introduction.

Maybe I’ll never write a tailored intro again, and simply default to the canned message, and then I’ll find out who thinks they “control the customer experience” according to who refuses the connection.

In a second example, I received a “request for confirmation” (opt-in) email from someone I’d purchased products from six months ago. I wrote to ask why I was getting this opt-in message now, when I’d been on his mailing list for a good while. He replied that he was changing providers and the new provider required a confirmation (which is, by the way, good practice). I replied that he could have included that fact in the requesting email.

Four days later, I found his first email, buried in my in-box. He had explained everything. However, I hadn’t seen it. Now, on one hand, I’m the fool, for replying with a pointed suggestion. OTOH, he sent two emails where one would do, doubling the chances of a misfire. We’re even.

The larger lesson? Be careful about drawing larger lessons when technology is involved.

I’m probably not the only person with friends who read email on their phones, who regularly DON’T see the second paragraph because they have replied to your first paragraph quickly. Clearly, Linkedin has different data flows, depending on how you come into the system. There’s probably a switch in my email application that would make it process “read” and “unread” in a different direction, rather than marking “unread” items as “read” in the wrong direction according to my habits, and maybe I’ll go look for it.

Or maybe not.

Ever pondered the list of blog categories any particular author uses to aggregate his or her posts?  Ever tried to categorize your own?  Easy, the first time or two.  But before you have very many posts at all, you have almost as many categories and you can’t quite remember why you put any one post in any particular category in the first place.

In an attempt to maintain some control and consistency in this website’s categories, I thought about who had been “doing categorization” longer than blogs have been around–librarians.  I spend more time in the local public library system than I do in university libraries, so the Dewey Decimal System was a natural choice.  I copied off the categories from Wikipedia and started editing the list, removing the topics I am pretty sure I’ll never write about.

The list itself makes for interesting reading:

Now, I can see how “sex” and “the book” fall into nearby branches of a taxonomic tree, but I suspect a lot of people would be more likely to link “sex” and “the TV,” if they had to pick a communications medium.  Suddenly, a possible source of the idea for the movie Lars and the Real Girl takes shape.  (An aside:  see the movie if you’ve ever worked as, or near, computer programmers.  Also recommended is The IT Crowd, a comedy TV series from the BBC.)

Moving to the next set of shelves, we come to Philosophy.  While I might be seen to have a somewhat philosophical approach to some areas of my life, it’s not a topic I spent any time on in school.  The topic might well be served by deleting everything but the top level identifier.  (Missing numbers indicate the list has already been pruned.)

But darn it, there’s “graphology” (and is “divinatory” graphology different from and shelved elsewhere than forensic graphology?) near the bottom of the list, and “physiognomy,” and that’s where librarians put the “facial analysis” books (I think), and those are both interesting areas of non-scientific reading that feeds intuition. But will I actually write about them, enough to need their own category? Would readers understand the connection if I did write a post about handwriting analysis (met someone who does forensic graphoanalysis in Linkedin Answers the other day) and then categorized it under Philosophy?

Questions like this keep taxonomists up late at night.

Religion is easy. Don’t expect a lot of posts about the topic on this website and should any appear, they can all go into the same bucket.

Social Science, which is a topic I would have said I don’t cross paths with much (my clients tend to be natural scientists), contains law, education, economics, and communications. This is going to take some thought.

Language falls like religion. Not a lot of posts (given that “communications” is a subset of Social Science, not language), and any that do get written can go into one category. (Ditto Literature. Thinking about the difference between Language and Communication and Literature makes me wonder what it was like to sit in the committee meetings when the system was originally devised… Are the minutes of those meetings available, and where would they be shelved?)

Eventually, I’ll edit the list and then print a copy for the wall next to my PC, and if I’m really on top of my game, I’ll enter the categories I decide to keep into WordPress so I don’t have to think about this every time I write a post.

And then I’ll go back through what I’ve written so far and recategorize.