 Great photo by Grok. Here at Copel Communications, we recently completed the sixth revision of a project we were working on for a client. And boy was it fun!
No. We are not being sarcastic. We’re serious as a heart attack here. So what gives? And how can this be the basis for an article? More to the point, what can you take away from this story? How can it make you more productive? Happier? Once the bones are in place… We can’t tell you too many details about the project itself, because it’s confidential/protected by NDA. But we can say that it was an internal written piece, very important, that would be shared across the organization, and eventually re-jiggered into a prospect-facing piece, to help drive sales. So it was a very important document. And our client was understandably maniacal about the thing, sending us change after change after change. It was a real revisions hamster-wheel. But by the fifth round, the client had run out of new ideas and tweaks. The ideas, the tenets of the piece, were fixed. The bones were in place. And so it was our turn to create Draft Six. And yes, it was actually fun. Why? In praise of polishing At this point, since the facts of the content were locked, Draft Six became an entirely stylistic challenge. It was 100-percent “polish this document.” We didn’t have to worry about getting new material tossed out wholesale by the client because new quirks and features had crept in. In other words, we could happily roll up our sleeves, and dive into making the English better. (Did you know that Google will ding your website if you use AI-generated copy? As a prime purveyor of AI, Google can recognize it better than anyone, and since their goal is to serve their users with trustworthy content, they seek out human-written material, vs. stuff that had been created by clicking the “Generate” button.) As you might’ve guessed by now, we certainly didn’t use ChatGPT to “polish” this document. We had the luxury of reading passages aloud, consulting a thesaurus, testing out different sentence structures and phrasing, and getting to the point where it was so tight that it squeaked. It wasn’t hard. It was gratifying. It was like scratching an itch. And the piece just got better and better, the more we polished it. Mind you, we didn’t spend a week on what we just described. Creating Draft Six only took us an hour or two. But boy did it come out great, and the client was delighted, and to this day, that piece is doing its job, ably. The reason we tell this story is that it doesn’t just apply to this arcane document that we were working on, here at Copel Communications. It pertains to everything that you create, in your business, too. There’s always going to be the ideation phase. Then the creation phase, based on the vetted ideas. But too many people overlook the final polishing phase, which is when that piece really comes to life and shines. This is true for web pages, for product designs, for graphical layouts, for sales plans, you name it. The key here is recognizing the inflection point when the initial creation ends, and the polishing begins. Once you can spot it, you’ll be liberated to apply the best possible polish to whatever it is you’ve been working on, without that looming dread of “Oh, this will just get tossed because new input for Version 7 is on its way.” So enjoy your time in the black hole, with your email and text notifications disabled, as you polish away, knowing that you’ll emerge with a gem in your hand. Need some help ideating, creating, or polishing that next project? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.
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