- By: Mark Jakobsen
- Published on:
Share on:
The importance of checking your work
We all want to strive for perfection in what we do and thought leadership is no different. We want our blogs, whitepapers, and other collateral to be spot-on without any mistakes. But the problem is we’re not perfect, and as the saying goes: to err is human. So, while all of us may want perfection in everything we publish we probably won’t get it. That’s why our motto is to just get it out. That said we still insist on doing peer reviews.
The importance of incorporating peer review in your process
If you’re thinking of skipping the pear review, think again. There is a lot of research showing we can be blind to our own mistakes and weaknesses. If you’re wondering what these could be:
- You’re too close to the work: You may be reading what you want to read, not what’s on the page (or screen). This can leave you blind to spelling or grammar mistakes that a colleague, with a fresh pair of eyes, could pick up. Alternatively, you could have awkwardly phrased a sentence here or there that could do with a little extra editing.
- You could miss inconsistencies: Like when all the points in a bulleted list have a full stop at the end but one
- You may be too critical, or not critical enough of your writing: Two sides of the same coin. Either you have perfectionist tendencies, and you continue to rewrite and rewrite sentences, paragraphs, or an entire blog. The knock-on effect here is increasing the lead time to publishing and potentially missing the deadline. Or you’re overly confident that you hit publish without properly editing the piece.
You lack the expertise: Working as a content creator, you will develop a good understanding of the topic they write about over time, it’s doubtful it will be as comprehensive as that of the subject matter expert.
It’s peer review, not pear review...!
Mistakes happen. You get your latest content piece out only for a colleague to discover a spelling mistake, grammar error, or some other inconsistency just five minutes later. Don’t worry, you’re in good company.
Back in 2022, Susie Dent (a presenter on Countdown’s Dictionary Corner since 1992) published a book, which unfortunately took an earlier version of the manuscript with a whole host of errors in it. So, if it can happen to her, it can happen to any of us.
Don’t reach for perfection
We’ve seen it before, striving for perfection in content can mean it gets delayed. Sometimes it’s not worth the cost, sometimes you just need to say “get it out!”.
There shouldn’t really be a worry over spelling and grammar with all the tools out there, from Word’s own inbuilt functionality to popular web-based tools like Grammarly. So, the main focus needs to be ensuring you have the content, positioning, and meaning of your piece correct.
By establishing a good content creation process, you can ensure that what you are saying is correct and you’re not miss-selling any product, service, or solution to potential customers.
If you’re looking at establishing thought leadership, or looking to expand it, and need help. Get in touch and we would be happy to talk it through.