This week, I decided to revisit the crucial content strategy book Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher. I thought this book, highly recommended by my mentor, would be a great way to start my summer reading and to refresh my skills now that I’m officially on the job market.
Here are a few quick highlights that stood out while I read these initial chapters. :
· Erin Kissane highlights the flexibility of content strategy as a discipline-- user experience, business analysis, rhetoric studies, marketing, publishing, and more! In retrospect, this mirrors a lot of my own mixed methods background during my graduate program and provides the perfect “umbrella term” for the projects I have worked on for so long.
· Close reading, as a method of research practice, is an underappreciated skill that has its methodological roots in qualitative research. Wachter-Boettcher reminds us that in order to strategically understand our content, we have to be willing to take the time and energy to closely read the content that has already been produced. As someone originally trained in literary studies, it can seem like the process of close reading is a “given” fact. We might think, “Well of course I will read the content-- I can do it without even being aware of it, just like breathing.” However, it's a skill like any other, and researchers need practice and guidance to develop it. It might seem like a truism to say “words matter”, but the time and energy it takes to produce, plan and explore content saves so many end-users a lot of frustration.
· “We don’t have to choose between structure and soul” may be my new mantra. One of the first things that drew me to information science, was the fact that the deliverables around information architecture make it so much easier to have discussions with so many diverse stakeholders. These are tools which facilitate conversation, not hindrances, and it is easy to feel “stuck” when trying to craft a story for my clients and students. Like many of us, I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking of the use of visual content in my work as somehow “less than” and have caused myself a lot of stress by thinking of a narrow definition of structure when creating lesson artifacts in the classroom. Take the start of this blog as another example of the conflict between structure and soul. After quite a bit of brainstorming (and LOTS of crumbled post-it notes) I had to go back to the trusty “rhetorical triangle” favored by writing instructors everywhere, in order to really get to the heart of what I would like for this blog’s content “to do”, and how to produce its content in a way that captures my voice (soul) as a writer, educator and researcher. Of course, I also needed to determine the type of structure I needed to plan. After discussing my frustration with my friend, a content strategist with years of experience, she reminded me that without truly knowing my audience, I would have a tough time producing and structuring content. Even when I was my own primary stakeholder, I had trouble planning what I wanted from my content, its purpose, audience, and even ownership. Hence, my difficulty when making modeling the relationships.
I think her book The Elements of Content Strategy will be my next summer read; as I am starting this blog, and reviewing my own content, these early chapters have already offered some great points to consider for my own work!