Free Feedback on "Against Niching”
Hi David,
Thank you for submitting your essay for feedback. You can expect:
- Written feedback on structure and flow
- Notes on clarity and concision (at the sentence/paragraph level)
- "The One Thing" to focus on if you were to revise this piece
- And a video overview of my feedback.
My goal is not just to give you feedback that would improve this single essay but to give you feedback that, if you apply it to future projects, would make you a better writer (by helping you become a better self-editor).
I'm going to work through the drafts in the order they were submitted (you're sixth), and I'll get back to everyone within the next two weeks.
All the best,
Garrett Kincaid
The One Thing
Make this more like prose and less like copy.
(I’m suggesting this because I’m imagining it as a chapter in a book.)
- More storytelling with anecdotes from your career (not just a list of lessons)
- Fewer lists (cut the ordered/numbered list but keep the unordered bullets)
- More intentional paragraphing (using breaks for the logical flow of ideas, not for emphasis or pacing).
Notes
- The structure is solid. I like what you chose to include (with some exceptions noted below), and you keep to one main idea (diversity of copywriting experience). The biggest opportunity for improvement is not in restructuring or reordering this piece but reworking the language within each subsection.
- Make sure that all the content of a section supports your main idea, and make sure that your ideas flow from one to the next within the section. This doesn’t mean you have to avoid lists. Just make sure the list items are in a purposeful order where each follows logically from the last.
- In the “Lameness of Sameness” section (nice sub-header), the plumbing example is the most develop and feels most apt. Instead of adding two other examples (tennis and language-learning), try going deep on the one example and really making it a fleshed-out, illuminating analogy.
- I like how you get into the details of your copywriting experience in the following section.
- The following bullets are tangential to this piece. Instead of supporting the point of being a jack of all trades, noting all the different clients and projects you’ve had, these points are about lessons you’ve learned. I suggest cutting them. But there’s good news! Each of these could be their own essays/articles: “How to Sell Nothing,” “The Grandfather’s Clock,” Beating the Odds,” and “Upping my Game.”
- I especially like the idea behind “Look for the Grandfather Clock in the Parlor.” That could be it’s own essay or book chapter. It’s a valuable insight that begs more of an anecdote and more evidence for / exploration of the idea. It’s outside the scope of this piece, and it’s not all that valuable just as a three-sentence bullet point.
- Notes on the “Lessons from a Diverse Copy Life” subsection:
- I’m not sure the numbered list is the best format here, especially following the bulleted list. By doing it this way, the lessons feel unearned, since what comes before is simply context on your career. Instead of listing the lessons, can you tell me a story from your career that embodies the lessons?
- In the previous section you lay out the diverse playing field of your career, which gives you credibility to speak to this idea (”Don’t niche-down”), but the examples of all your former jobs are about how you performed well within each context. In this section, explain how your diverse set of experiences helped you perform better than if you had just had 20 years of the same type of experience.
- Tell me a story, or even a few quick anecdotes, about how you solved a problem in one job by drawing on a lesson you learned from a completely different job. Use a story to demonstrate how a wide range of experience is practically beneficial. For instance, did you learn anything from Wall Street that you’ve applied to Procter & Gamble — maybe some isight about the psychology of the consumer, some unexpected overlap? A story like that would go a long way, and I think it could replace entirely the numbered list.
- Paragraphing: This is a stylistic preference, but I advice you against using so many paragraph breaks (most noticeable in the intro and conclusion), especially if this is meant to be prose in a book. Rather than using paragraph-breaks for emphasis or for formatting, use them to serve a logical purpose in the flow of information. Use a paragraph-break to transition from one main idea to the next.