As a copywriter, you're not only at the receiving end of feedback, you're often tasked with peer reviewing other copywriters' work too. It's important that your diplomacy skills grow along with your thick skin.
We all know how important it is to have your work peer reviewed and quality checked, but what about if it's you who's doing the checking. As Milo Yiannopoulos' editor at Simon & Shuster proved, your input is invaluable.
- Highlight the positive, as well as the negative. If it's a good sentence, great idea or top use of words, say so. It gives the copywriter a bit of a confidence boost.
- Use tracked changes in Word so the copywriter can easily see what's changed and only use this tool to correct any house-style or typos.
- Avoid rewriting, no matter how tempting it is. Only rewrite if it's the only way you feel you can get your point across or if you need to give an exemplar of how it's done.
- Give pointers and ideas.
- Question the facts and numbers.
- Watch out for anything that could be legally contentious.
- Be humorous, it's a serious business but being authoritarian, undermining or patronising could scare off us sensitive copywriters.
- Encourage collaboration.
- Show humility, perhaps they've had a conversation or something you don't - no one is expecting you to know everything.
