Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Somebody on the sales team wants you to look over the standard email they send to their best leads, to make it sound more human and friendly. Someone on the marketing team asks you for feedback on a landing page format that just isn’t converting the way they think it should. Someone on the legal team wants to know how to make their dry and dusty terms of service sound less like legalese.

If you’re a solo content person, or even part of a very small content team, you’re probably quite used to these casual requests for editorial help. They always “should only take a minute,” and, usually, they do. But those minutes pile up, don’t they?

Now that you’ve been humming a catchy content tune all over the place, people are going to be asking you for help more than ever before. You might find these cries for help flattering, even fun to work on, but they may also be a source of additional stress on your workload. So why am I suggesting you generate even more?

Because you’re going to start using these requests to grow your organization’s content chops. From now on, when people ask you for tips, you’re going to give them something even better than that.

You’re going to suggest that you offer your best tips and tricks in the form of a workshop for their wh**ole team.

I Like the Way You Workshop

You might be surprised by how many people will think a workshop is a fantastic idea, so don’t be shy about suggesting it. You’re an expert they respected enough to ask for advice, and they’ll be grateful for your time, energy, and support. They asked for your help because they think you’re good at this stuff. And when you tell them to bring along their whole team, it means you’re willing to share that knowledge with more people, which will make their jobs easier, too.

Running content workshops for teams that ask for your help will allow you to scale what you do like nothing else. But you’re likely not already in the habit of running these kinds of workshops. You may be very well versed in the kind of workshop that tends to happen on design and UX teams, full of Post-it notes and ideation sprints and maybe the occasional improv game. I love improv games. But this isn’t going to be that kind of workshop.

You’re going to develop a very particular style of workshop—one designed to help teams tackle, for themselves, some vital component of your full-stack content practice.

No matter which layer of the content stack your hypothetical team needs help with, your workshop will follow the same five basic steps:

1. Do your research.
2. Diagnose the problem.
3. Find your five.
4. Terrible-ize it.
5. Teach your team.

The first four steps here are preparatory and will help you structure the format and content of the workshop itself, tailoring the message to what each team needs to hear most. The final stage, the workshop itself, is about an hour in length. Let’s go through each step in turn.

Do Your Research

Start where any project starts: with basic research. In order to diagnose the problem this team needs help with, work with your contact person on the team—the one who originally asked you for help—to define:

1. the container for the content in question;
2. the content itself, also known as the message; and
3. the goal of the content, which you’ll measure with an agreed-upon metric.

This part of the process is vital, so make sure to give yourself enough time to gather your notes and customize your workshop to the problem at hand. Your goal here is to deliver a workshop that opens this team’s eyes to the full suite of content design as it applies to their jobs, so it’s well worth the time it takes to fully prepare.

The container

Your first source document will be the original piece of content your contact brought to your attention. Ask yourself: What’s the nature of the content they want help with? For example:

• A product team wants to write error messages that will reduce support calls.
• A sales team wants to create an email that will help them book demos.
• A marketing team wants to build a higher-converting landing page.

Error messages, emails, landing pages—these are all containers for the content you’ll be working on. They’re the delivery vehicles for the team’s messaging.

It’s possible that the container they’re using isn’t the right one for the message and goal, and that’s something you might encourage the team to question during the workshop. It’s a major teachable moment when you can get a team to see that in order to achieve the goal they have for this content, they might need to go deeper than adjusting the subject line or tone. But for now, the important thing is to help them see that there’s a distinction between the content and the container, and that they can make choices about each.

The content

Next, identify the meaning of the content within that container. What’s the message they’re trying to get across? For example:

• The error message should tell the user what’s wrong and what they can do next.
• The sales email should tell the user there’s a solution to their problem.
• The landing page should convince the user that attending a webinar will answer their questions.

You’ll often find that a piece of content is primarily concerned with getting the user to understand something new, or in a new way. It should also offer the user an action they can take as result, which is tied to the content’s goal.

The goal

Now that you know what the content is and what it’s trying to communicate, you can identify its goal—the action taken by the user—and how the team measures the success of that goal. For example:

• The product team wants users to return to the login screen and try logging in again, measured by the number of users who successfully log in after getting this error.
• The sales team wants their email recipients to book a live demo, measured by the number of demos booked every month through that email’s link.
• The marketing team wants people to reserve a spot in their webinar, measured by the number of people who register using that landing page’s link.

Defining the metric is a key part of planning the content workshop, since it allows you to clearly and explicitly tie what you teach them to the metrics that govern the world they live in. You’ve got to gear the whole thing around the metrics that matter to them.

Make sure the metric is clearly measurable and has real business value to the team. It should be a metric that keeps them up at night, one that makes a regular appearance on their monthly meeting slides or performance reviews.

Ask them for the actual baseline number for this metric that they’re hitting right now. Then ask them to tell you what a good outcome would be. What should that number look like? That’s your shared goal. You are now all on the same team, clearly, explicitly, trying to achieve the same ends.

Diagnose the Problem

Once you’ve compiled all this research—what type of container you’re dealing with, what the content is supposed to make the reader think or do, and how to know if it’s working—verify your conclusions with your team contact. It’s important that you go into this workshop speaking the team’s language—that the way you think about the container, content, and goal is perfectly aligned with how they think about them.

Ask your contact to gather different examples of the same type of content from other folks on the team. You don’t need a million of them—about five or six will do nicely. You just want to get a representative sample of what they’re using today.

Once you have these in hand, read through them slowly. Resist the urge to edit them as you go along. That urge will be strong. All you’re really doing at this point is trying to decide where the team needs the most help: at the Surface layer, the Structure layer, or the Scope layer.

Surface challenges

Content that has challenges primarily at the Surface layer will be rife with errors of style, voice, and tone—but that’s all that’s really wrong with it. Ask yourself: If you fixed all of the grammatical errors, bad sentence formation, misjudgments of your brand voice, or tone misalignments, would it be fine? Or are there deeper, more serious problems lurking beneath? Can this content be saved purely by giving more attention to the process of proofreading and polishing? Or does the problem extend beyond that, into the content structure itself?

Structure challenges

Structure problems are a bit harder to diagnose, especially if there are also a lot of Surface issues to distract your eye. Ignore those for now, and look closely at the content’s information order, hierarchy, usability, and accessibility. Are the sentences, paragraphs, menu options, or flow in the right order, or do they need a complete overhaul? Is the meaning clear? If you corrected all the Surface problems, would it still be a mess?

There is some potential overlap here with Surface issues, of course, especially when it comes to diagnosing problems related to usability, learnability, and accessibility. Many companies consider it an issue of house style to choose shorter words, avoid jargon, and use plain language—all core usability considerations. But questions of usability tend to raise deeper issues than just changing one word out for another. Adjusting the reading level of a whole document usually requires a more wholesale approach, often rethinking the structure and scope of the document. So while I agree in principle that content usability can and should be addressed in a style guide, I find that solutions to these issues typically require a much deeper dive than pure Surface problems do.

Scope challenges

Content with problems at the Scope layer tends to be unclear on what that user’s next step might be, or—more often—offers too many possible next steps to pursue. Either call your senator or write them or donate or email us for more details. That’s a serious muddle. It’s content that is trying to do too much at once.

I’d argue that “one” is the right number for suggested next steps (also known as the call to action, or CTA) in any given piece of content. (Maybe two, if you count the option of “No, thanks.”) Content should convince you to book a demo now—or don’t. Update your account info now—or don’t. Call your senator—or assume somebody else will do it for you. Those are your options. Do or do not. There is no try.

If you suspect you’re dealing with problems at the Scope layer, revisit your notes about the content’s goal. Is the action getting diluted by a lot of ifs, ands, or buts? If so, go back to your contact person and ask them to clarify the content’s goal. What’s the one action they want the reader to take?

Watch out if the answer is something like “be aware.” We generally write content to convince users to do something. Sometimes that involves an intermediary step of learning or gaining awareness. But the next step is almost always, “So now do this thing.” If that isn’t clear in the content, you know to focus on Scope discussions in your workshop.

Once you’ve diagnosed the problem and determined whether the greatest need is to address the Surface, Structure, or Scope of the content, it’s time to move on to the next step.

Finding Your Five

Say you’ve gotten a nice, representative handful of emails from a sales team—samples of the emails they send to prospects who might want to book a demo or contact a sales rep. They don’t know what, exactly, is wrong with the emails, but they know they’re not working as well as they should. And since they’ve tried everything else—sending them more often, less often, earlier and later in the day or on different days of the week, and so on—they reckon it has to do with the content itself.

At first glance, you can spot Surface problems. They have a bunch of minor bad habits that, taken together, are keeping their readers from getting on board with the whole demo idea. The order, flow, and amount of information looks fine, and they’re not trying to do too much or too little with this one piece of content, either. There’s a single, clearly stated CTA at the end. Okay. This baby needs some proofreading and polishing help.

You take a closer look still. Like a lot of people these days, these content creators tend to rely on commas and run-on sentences to establish a breezy, conversational tone. For instance, one of the sample emails starts out:

Hey [name]!

Thanks so much for visiting our site the other day, hope you found what you needed!

You jot down something about overusing exclamation marks and comma splices, and sip your tea for a second or two while you ponder whether “Hey” or “Hi” would be the most appropriate greeting in an email like this. You double-check your source material and, sure enough, this team is focused on reaching people in the US, mostly in entry-level roles, in a fairly casual industry, where a lighthearted voice is desired. So kicking things off with a low-key, casual “Hey” is probably just the ticket. So that’s okay.

You notice the content creators have a tendency to say “our software” and “our site” more than they talk about “your needs” and “your team,’ so you’ll want to talk to them about who pronouns say is really the hero around here.

They might lean a bit too hard on needlessly longer words when a shorter word will do, like saying “utilize” instead of “use,” or “leverage” instead of literally any other word at all. Also, there’s an “incentivize” in there. Ew. Okay, you’ll make sure to talk about plain language and short words.

You keep going, working your way through your documents until you’ve found five things you want this team to work on. Five things—that’s all.

Keep it simple

You’re not trying to compile a list of every mistake they make—you’re looking for the top five issues that, if addressed in a uniform way, would significantly raise the effectiveness of their work.

Any more than five things and you run a real risk of overwhelming them. The message you want them to walk away with isn’t, “Wow, content is super complex and hard,” or “Gosh, I’ve been doing content so incredibly wrong.” It’s, “I can do this! I just need to do these five simple things.” The confidence you give them in this workshop is just as important as the guidance you impart.

You know that there’s a lot more to this than just five simple rules. But you also know that if they just did these five things differently, every single time, they’d see a difference in the content and in how well it does the job they’re asking it to do.

Along with your five simple rules, you’ll also show them the tools and resources available to help them, most of which, I promise you, they don’t yet know exist. Or they might have heard of them (rumors of a style guide, whispers of voice-and-tone guidelines carried on the wind), but they don’t really have any sense of why they might want to access them. Now they’ll understand what those resources can do in the context of their own work.

Try to keep the workshop focused on just one content layer: Surface, Structure, or Scope. There’s usually plenty to keep you occupied within just that one realm, and a tightly focused workshop will yield far better results.

By the end of this workshop, they’ll be adept at navigating a layer of the stack as it applies to their content (which matters a great deal to them), and they’ll see how investing in that layer will help them reach their team goals.

Terrible-ize It

Now comes the best part: creating a composite version of the content that is absolutely t**he worst.

Take your team’s sample content and wildly exaggerate the worst traits you’ve identified. If they’re abusers of exclamation marks, put these everywhere. Comma splice fanatics? Leave no sentence unspliced. Push the needle on whatever five things you’ve decided to focus on and turn the awfulness all the way up to eleven. Make it really, really smelly and bad.

This accomplishes two important things: First, it makes the sample content you’re going to ask them to work on at the end of the workshop so unrecognizable that no one on the team will feel bad or singled out. It’ll be recognizable as the kind of content they need help with, but comfortably terrible enough that they know they’re at least better than that.

Second, editing content that has been expertly terrible-ized is a surprisingly effective way of getting people to remember the rules you’re teaching them. Subtlety isn’t memorable; over-the-top, laugh-out-loud, cringeworthy content is.

And third (I know I said two things but I’m a writer, not a mathematician): terrible-izing content is fun. It’s fun for you to do before the workshop—you will giggle a lot—and it’s fun for the team when you give it to them to fix.

Remember the sage words of one of my dearest friends, who likes to remind me that “the second most powerful human urge is editing other people’s writing.”

The first most powerful urge, of course, is overusing exclamation marks. You can look it up.

Teach Your Team

These workshops should never be more than an hour in length (again, you don’t want to overwhelm people). The bulk of the time will be spent exploring the nature of the problem this team needs to solve, with about fifteen minutes at the end to work on the terrible-ized content.

Kick things off with an introduction to the layers of content design—Scope, Structure, and Surface—using something like the diagram found in this book. Give participants an overview of the work required to create quality content at each layer.

I find it helpful to ask them for a parallel in their own line of work. For instance, sales people often spend hours on research and planning before they get on a call, customizing their strategy and script to each potential customer—this can be a form of full-stack content design, too. Make them see that they’re already content designers themselves, and that you’re here to help them develop that muscle to hit their goals.

Spend the majority of your time going over the five principles you identified as being most relevant to this team. Don’t go out of your way to make it clear that this is based on the work they provided you at the start. The more accidental it appears, the more likely it is they will see you as a trove of relevant, useful information that will help them move the metrics that matter most to their team. Walk them through any documentation, resources, playbooks, or guidelines that you have in your content arsenal, and point out areas of potential interest to them.

For instance, if a team needs help with basic style and tone, I’ll spend a lot of time on those areas (and less time on, say, usability recommendations). Did they know we have guidance on how to use exclamation marks? Turns out, we do! They will write down this fact. It will probably be news to them. And they will be delighted to hear it. Remember, most people are swimming around in murky, eel-infested waters when it comes to writing content; they are generally grateful if you can throw them a rope and lead them safely to shore.

If you don’t have playbooks and guidelines for each case you encounter, that’s okay. Designing these workshops can serve as your own discovery research, informing you about the needs of your users (the internal teams at your company) and the resources that will help them do their jobs. If your first few workshops seem to center on questions of voice and tone, that’s a great excuse to spend some time either creating or refining the guidance you have.

As time goes on, you’ll probably find that the workshops start naturally going deeper down the layers. You don’t need to have playbooks and libraries of guidance on hand when you start doing this work. The work will inform what you need to create. All you need to do is stay one chapter—sometimes even one page—ahead of the people you’re working with and trying to help.

Be the Guide, Not the Guru

Before long, you’ll be regularly running these workshops—introducing teams to the idea of full-stack content design, showing off the finer points of whatever documentation will help them, and concentrating on five basic principles that can change the way they work.

In return, your colleagues will start to see the pursuit of quality content as the treasure they seek. And they’ll know that the resources you’re offering them are the map for that quest.

You might be uncomfortable with this, at first, if you’re very secure in your role as the Keeper of the Words in your organization. But the more you shift how you see yourself—and how you’re willing to be seen—the more you’ll be able to empower the people around you. You’re a fellow traveler who has been down these roads before, and you’re ready to help your teammates successfully find their way through the content stack, too.