Editing for coherence

From PLN

Editing for coherence

As we add more (and more kinds of) resources to PLN, we try to think about what will serve your needs best as a busy present or future leader.

A couple of steps toward building editorial strength, from the current PLN planning document, and a third issue that's not directly in that document:

A number of “notes” articles, combining multiple Leader’s Digest items with a common perceived focus (sometimes with other items), could be strengthened by rearranging them and adding summaries.
Question: Will we need more “metanarratives” (a terrible word) as content grows—ways to guide new users, and existing users looking into new areas, through a series of related articles?
Length of articles: My naive sense is that you're served best by what I'd call "medium-length" articles--somewhere between 800 and 3,000 or 4,000 words--and that very brief articles and very long articles don't work as well. You can see for yourself where PLN has long pages (at an average of 6 characters per word, 3,000 words is about 18,000 characters, 4,000 words is about 24,000 characters) and short pages (you may need to expand the view to 100 pages, figuring that 800 words is about 4,800 characters).

Over the next few days (between May 16 and May 23, 2008), I hope to complete one set of changes that should yield more focused, coherent, and length-appropriate articles. Here's what's happening:

I'm taking (I've taken) the material from Toxicity, fear and problem people (just deleted), Coping with star employees (already deleted as redundant), and a number of brief items and reworking it into four essays (if you see a red link, that means I haven't created the essay yet):
The new articles include brief commentaries and a few highlights from the sections that follow, and I've tried to reorganize the sections into more logical order (they were originally in oldest-first chronological order; if there's no more logical order, I'll use newest-first chronological order).
When the process is "complete"--these are articles that should grow over time--I'll add a "metanarrative" for the whole group and others, with the current working title We got trouble...

So you'll see (or not see) articles appear and disappear as material is integrated into other forms.

To be honest, I'm not at all confident that my numbers for appropriate length mean anything. I won't attempt to make appropriately-short resource items longer, and I certainly won't attempt to make the monthly Leader's Digest pieces shorter (as is, we try to reuse at least 80% of those pieces in topical articles).

Your feedback is welcome, as always. Is Directors, leaders and work-life balance--to take one recently-created long article--too long at 6,500 words, or is it "just right" for what it's doing? Do you love very short articles? --Walt Crawford 13:27, 16 May 2008 (EDT)