Content writing as navigating the rough waters of a concept storm

I recently blogged about my experience. with students: What I Learnt Teaching Writing for the Web at FH JOANNEUM – Teodora Petkova, and a week later,  rereading my text, a sort of autohermeneutics, I saw something lingering behind the words, a perspective towards the practice of content writing that I find useful when it comes to finding the right place from which you start writing. That perspective is related to seeing writing as navigating the rough waters of a concept storm.

Our role in the content writing discipline of creating, curating and working with text, is not only to seek the easy serene waters of polished narratives and then write about them. Our work also involves the ability and the desire to navigate uncertainty, unclear messaging and the many times misaligned ways internal stakeholders relate to content. These rough waters many times manifest as language inconsistencies, internal framing collision, gaps in the implementation of strategic decisions abou  internal and external communication, absence of dialogic practices, competing narratives. 

That said, when setting off to write a text, content writing becomes more than merely the act of mapping reality after the fact. It turns out to be a way of finding a course through it. 

A strong text (strong in the sense of capable of meeting its goal) emerges (please, see https://teodorapetkova.com/the-brave-new-text/) from paying attention to the  tension in a given topic, sensing the edge, and writing from there. As every company is an ongoing conversation, made up of concurrent understandings, as said of competing framings, and countless acts of enunciation happening in parallel. 

“The modern organization is also a complex mosaic of more or less interconnected domains of explanation or modes and styles of discourse […]”

In: Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, James Taylor, The Search for Sustainable Organizational Coorientation. p. 139 

Writing is about navigating these waters – travelling along the dynamic flow of concurrent understandings and shaping a navigable course for others (both internal and external stakeholders). In doing so, we do map territories of existing knowledge, turning what an organization knows into content that can live and breathe on the web, but also venturing into the open space where meaning is still being negotiated, where dialogue is still unfolding, and where new understanding can emerge.

Only then can we create something statistically improbable (read different from the pattern driven by the AI-generated content, ergo discernible).

And this is not easy. It does not happen in the blink of a prompt. But it is worth it. The attention and intent you put into your text will be the attention and the intent you will get.

For years I have been struggling, even with my own inner critique – why go into the trouble of doing passionate  and hard work? Why fight for the right to be creative with content in a corporate environment? Why brave away that post that is too poetic, takes too much time or is not in the corporate agenda at the moment? 

Now I increasingly don’t. Because there is a larger why behind publishing on the web. The web deserves work that is alive. It deserves curiosity, dialogue, and imagination.

Remember, the Web is not a giant TV channel.  

“I had (and still have) a dream that the Web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge”

Ref. https://www.w3.org/community/webhistory/2018/01/07/links-fractals-and-information-plumbing/

The is “a strategic asset, not just a channel.” (That was part of a job description for Sr. Director, Web Experience and Digital Strategy https://jobs.smartrecruiters.com/WorldWildlifeFundInc1/744000135338765-sr-director-web-experience-and-digital-strategy, the link is now expired but i have the text copied 🙂 because I loved it)

Content that moves and matters is content that truly has an edge. Certainly this is not AI-generated content. Instead of creating “echo” chambers (ref. “Organizational Knowledge Drift: How AI Assistants Create Textual Echo Chambers”

https://lnkd.in/d89-Bc9w) with marketing communications which we like to listen to and think are very pleasant a melody, we better think how we can write our way out of them. Most probably not with yet another prompt.

For content writing isn’t merely documenting what is already known; it’s participating in the creation of shared understanding.It is venturing into open waters, where meaning is negotiated, co-created and only then ready to enter our beautiful Web.