One of my current clients approached me with a plea for help: he wanted to “clean up” his website content, newsletters, current blog posts; he also needed some help developing learning materials for a newly-birthed online course. With an evaluation, I was able to break that need for help into several immediate needs:
- Prose clarity
- Foregrounding his argument
- Editing to remove circular thoughts and repetition
I sent him three potential options for standard revision, and we chose the one that felt closest to his goals for the final products. While retaining his personal voice and style, we’ve reorganized for clarity and connection–polishing what was originally rough enough to lose us, into something clean enough to get those clicks.
Here’s just one paragraph of his content:
This is the kind of work I do in Janitor mode: distilling a rough text down into something stronger and smoother–more polished, if you will. As the janitor, my goal is to get the text looking clean and functional without removing its essence: I’m scrubbing off the extra, not reinventing the room. My client’s voice is preserved, the tone is (hopefully) amplified, and the final text is shorter and more effectively communicating what it’s meant to. Since I work with the client to determine just how much of each of those components is the goal, this process might mean a few exchanges back and forth before the final product goes live.
Something Polished 