Ways of Writing

You are the domain expert

When you are deep in the weeds and understand what you want to write about, you are the best source there is. Gather your thoughts, take notes, and merge them into one draft within three days. Only when the draft holds together on its own, read what others have written on the subject and look for gaps you left or didn’t know existed. Then ask someone to review it if possible.

Your team is the domain expert

Open your colleague’s calendar, find blank slots in their workday, and schedule three meetings spread across a week. This assumes you already know what you want to write about; if you don’t, scroll down to “Your audience is the domain expert”.

Before the first meeting, do thorough research, write a first draft, find terminologies you do not understand and prepare best-guess questions. The meeting time then goes into correcting you instead of briefing you.

Record each meeting and watch it yourself. Only then let Claude help with the questions you forgot or never got the chance to ask.

Important

Claude must answer from the transcript, acting as a fact-checker, not a source.

Once you have a final draft, send it to the people you interviewed and collect corrections. If time allows, send it to others on the team and ask what they understood and what they didn’t, not what they think of it. Opinions tell you about the reviewer; comprehension tells you about the draft.

Your audience is the domain expert

Your audience is already telling you what to write about. Tools like Search Console and Google Analytics point you toward what people are searching for; your job is to read the need behind the search -people ask for faster horses when what they need is a car-

Note

Use Search Console to tune a post’s keywords and to build internal links between related posts -a keyword graph-. A query performing well is not a reason to rewrite the same piece twice.

The other signal is what your domain is talking about right now. Use alerting tools, or be chronically online, and catch what’s trending while it’s still trending then write it as news, as an explainer, or as an argument.

There are plenty of ways to generate content ideas; what matters is how relevant they are to your audience, to the product, to the team, and to you.

None of them excludes the others. A post can start from your own notes, get corrected by your team, and aim at what your audience is already looking for. The only real rule is knowing whose expertise the post runs on.