• 1 min read

Read the first two hundred drafts yourself

The quickest way to learn what your help center is missing is to read what a drafting tool makes of it.

A black push-button desk telephone with its handset lying beside it on a pale wooden table.

When a team connects its sources, the temptation is to let the drafts flow and spot-check. We suggest the opposite for the first week: one person reads the first two hundred drafts, start to finish.

What you will find

Pages that answer a question in their last paragraph. Two pages with different return windows. A rule everyone knows that was never written down. Each one turns into a draft that is slightly wrong, and each one is a page to fix.

Keep a list

Write down every edit you make and why. After two hundred drafts the list is usually a dozen items long, and most teams fix all of them in a day.