People search for what they need on the internet before purchasing, so having information, answering questions, and publishing compelling articles or blogs can help make sales and keep your customers coming back.

We appreciate great content, we share it, bookmark it, and refer to it, so every business needs its content edited by professionals, like the writers here at Nyche. (Learn more about content marketing in our blog.)

It’s always a good idea to have a few eyes pass over any business materials you have, and the content on your website, brochures, blogs, and ads may be holding you back if it hasn’t been edited by a business writing, marketing oriented professional writer.

Is editing really that important? Yes, absolutely. I can’t understate the importance of sounding like a professional in the age of technology. It can hurt your business to have poor content or bad grammar.

At Nyche, we use the 5 C’s of editing to create top-quality content. Here’s what that entails:

1. Clarity

Clarity is not simply determining whether a sentence is actually a sentence grammatically. Editing for clarity where an editor ensures that each sentence makes sense to the average person. Extra descriptions, slang, jargon, cliches, and long rambling passages can all muddy up the meaning of what the author is trying to say.

Here’s a sentence that is unnecessarily wordy. The meaning is lost among all the slang, cliches, and rambling:

“No word of a lie, I tell you the truth, that thing over there, the one with the blue top part, it sure is some strange to look at.”

Here’s the same sentence, edited for clarity.

“I think that thing with a blue top over there looks strange.”

The meaning has’t changed at all. I know that it loses a bit of its character, but we’ll come to that later under C for Consistency.

The goal is to make the passage easy to read. You don’t want your reader to have to re-read them, or worse, lose focus and navigate away.

2. Correctness

Editing for correctness is a grammar nerd’s favourite thing to do. You know, those people who go through the newspaper with a red pen. It consists of editing for all those rules of grammar that writers have highlighted in our Gregg Reference Manuals, Canadian Press Style Guides, and grammar text books. We’re looking for proper punctuation, spelling, usage, and sentence structure–to say the least!

Going beyond small errors, we look for things like wrong use of common sayings or words. If we spot a misused cliche, (like a “Rickyism” see below) they will be fixed when editing for correctness.

3. Completeness and Accuracy

Editors need to do a lot of research. We need to be on the pulse of what’s modern and what’s gone on before. In an age of information, it’s our duty to make sure we don’t spread incorrect information.

Our content needs to be 100% correct. For our clients, that means that we phone around for information on their behalf, contact experts in the field, and ask our clients directly for information or clarity.

We make sure we have reliable sources, up-to-date information, correct statistics and facts, and that all of our photos are properly cited. Incorrect information is useless. You want your content to have value for your reader so they will come back to you when they need your expertise.

4. Consistency

Not that any of the 5 C’s are more important than the others, but from a marketing perspective, consistency is one the main things we focus on.

Creating content that adheres to the brand’s message and has a consistent tone and voice is essential, but it can be difficult to make content from different authors sound like the same person.

At Nyche, we acclimate ourselves to our clients’ writing styles by researching all the content they already have on their website, social accounts, marketing documents/ads, or existing blogs. We keep in touch with our clients and develop a feel for their style so we can translate their personality into the content we provide.

Apartment Therapy will give you a great example of consistency. They have many writers, but all of their articles sound like they are written by the same person because they have developed a consistent style.

Apartment Therapy’s mission is

“to help people make their homes more beautiful, organized and healthy by connecting them to a wealth of resources, ideas and community online.”

They use a casual, fun, helpful voice that their audience finds easy to read and relatable.

But maybe you’re in the homebuilding business. You would probably want your brand to sound professional, informative, practical, and less casual. So long as you sound consistent, your readers will stay with you.

5. Concise

This is a good C to end on because being concise is getting to the point. As an editor, we know that readers don’t want to waste their time. They want the answer to their question in the first couple sentences or the entire message in 30 seconds or less.

And on that note, thanks for reading. We hope you now have an idea of what content marketing editing entails. Interested in our content marketing packages? For more of what we do, see our marketing services page.