Contrary to what I might like to believe, I don’t actually know everything, and the work I do means that I’m always being asked to research things I don’t know about. I know many copywriters tend to niche in a particular area, and to be honest I have a few areas I know I’m especially comfortable with; healthcare copywriting, beauty writing and unusually, given the last two, consumer law. But that doesn’t mean I can’t write about things I have no experience of.
According to the LinkedIn article I‘ve been writing about this week, one of the important things that you need to ask a writer before you hire them for a project or a full-time role is:
Ask the client first
I used the glossary, cross referenced words with words I found in the Lord of The Rings books and then added more details from textbooks about word etymology and language development to create a piece of work that got me a 2:1 grade – not bad for my first year. And Linguistics was definitely my Achille’s heel as far as modules were concerned.
Before I started, I had no idea what I was looking for, but when I’m at a total loss for inspiration, a well-placed Google hunt is usually a good place to start. It’s just a case (for me, anyway) of using efficient search terms and not being afraid to follow a search down the Google ‘rabbit hole’ until I find exactly what I’m looking for.
When research isn’t enough
I have had to turn down some projects in the past, but honestly – not many. One project involved creating instruction leaflets for orthodontic equipment imported from South Korea. No problem, I thought, until I saw the raw materials they’d supplied for me to work with; whoever was in charge of the project had run Korean instruction leaflets through Google Translate and the result was a bunch of words that made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
Now, I have zero experience of orthodontics, even with my experience in healthcare copywriting, so I couldn’t call on that. The information I had didn’t make sense, and Google was spectacularly unhelpful; I couldn’t find anything about these devices online. I was at a complete loss and had to turn the job down. But that was an extreme example of when research just isn’t enough for me to complete a job properly.
Knowing my sources
I’ve done enough healthcare copywriting and legal writing to know that there are some sources you can rely on, and some that you should avoid. A degree and Master’s has only cemented that further. It probably goes without saying – to me, anyway – that information sourced from Wikipedia is unreliable. What can be useful though, is the list of sources on a Wiki – it’s just a case of methodically checking through the list to find links to further information.
Blog posts can be unreliable too. If a blog post comes up on something I’m researching, I won’t dismiss it out of hand, but if upon further investigation it’s five years old and the blog is dormant, or it’s badly-written, unsourced and I have no idea where the information came from, nope. But if I find a good quality blog post from a reliable source – an industry expert, medical or legal practitioner, it’s up to date and there are sources I can check out…well, I’ll use it for research. In some cases I’ll take information, follow it up and ask for a quote or simply delve into the website and find out what I need to know.