Craft

The Brief Is the Deliverable

The document a client signs off on before any writing happens decides more about the final piece than any edit that comes after.

Imen Bliwa

Clients hire us to write. What they are actually paying for, most of the time, happens before a single sentence does — in the half hour spent agreeing what the piece is for, who it has to convince, and what it is allowed to leave out.

A weak brief produces a weak edit, not a weak draft

A first draft written against a vague brief usually reads fine. It's grammatically sound, on topic, reasonably well organized — and it goes through four rounds of revision anyway, because nobody agreed in advance what "good" meant for this particular piece. Each round fixes a symptom. The actual disease is that the brief described a topic instead of a job.

A topic tells a writer what to say. A brief tells them what has to happen after someone reads it.

The three questions that do the real work

We've stopped accepting a brief that can't answer three things: who is reading this and what do they already believe, what is the one sentence that has to survive every cut, and what does this piece need the reader to do next. A brief that answers those in two paragraphs saves more editing time than a two-page brief that answers none of them.

Why this is a translation issue too

A brief that only exists in the client's head travels badly across a language boundary — whatever got skipped in the first conversation gets reinvented, differently, by whoever drafts the French version and whoever drafts the Arabic one. Write the brief down once, properly, and three language versions written independently against it will still agree with each other. That agreement is the actual deliverable; the sentences are just how it gets read.