Content Brief Builder

Most briefs that reach a writer are a title, a number and a date. Write this, make it 1,200 words, send it Friday. Everything that would have made the work easy stays in the head of the person who asked. A brief is supposed to move that knowledge onto a page before the writing starts.

The cost of skipping it is not paid by the person who skipped it. The writer guesses the reader, guesses the point, and researches facts the editor already had. Then the draft comes back wrong in ways nobody wrote down, and both of them spend a second week on a job that needed one good page.

Where the brief comes from

The form has been written down with unusual care in public health. The United States National Cancer Institute’s planning guide for health communication calls it a communication strategy statement and notes that it is sometimes called a creative brief, because it is used to brief the creative team. The guide is blunt about the temptation to skip it: do not. An approved statement, it says, saves time and effort later, and gives every later piece of material both a foundation and boundaries.

That guide’s template has nine headings: intended audiences, objectives, obstacles, a key promise, support statements, tone, media, openings and creative considerations. Its glossary defines the short form as a document of 1 to 2 pages. Notice what is absent from the list. There is no length for the finished piece and no score it must reach. Every heading is about a person, what they should do, and why they might.

The advice on the audience is the most useful line in the whole document. Think of one person in the intended audience and describe that person, it says, instead of describing the group. A writer can aim a sentence at a nurse on a night shift. Nobody can aim one at “healthcare stakeholders”.

The four parts that carry the weight

A brief can hold a dozen fields, but four of them do most of the work: the goal, the reader, the questions and the sources. If those four are sound, a competent writer can repair the rest. If they are missing, no amount of formatting detail will rescue the piece.

Start with the reader, because government writing guides on both sides of the Atlantic start there. The plain language guide for United States federal agencies states its first rule in four words: write for your audience. It then attacks a common misreading. Plain language does not mean writing for an eighth-grade class, it says, unless your readers are in fact an eighth-grade class.

The British government’s publishing guidance turns the same idea into a sentence with three slots. As a certain kind of person, I need to do something, so that some outcome follows. The guidance adds a small rule that does a lot of work: do not begin with “as a user”. A brief that cannot say who the reader is, in relation to what they are trying to do, is not ready to hand over.

The goal is one sentence about what the piece is for, and the reader action is what you hope happens next. They are different things. “Explain how the grade formula works” is a goal. “Measure your own draft, then ask one person to read it” is an action. Writers who are given only the first tend to produce an explainer that ends by trailing off.

Questions come next: one main question and a short list of supporting ones. They are the cheapest test of an outline anyone has devised. Lay the questions beside the headings and see whether each has a home. A tool can do a rough version by matching words, and it will miss synonyms and be fooled by shared vocabulary, so the list still needs a human eye. The exercise is worth doing by hand.

Why facts and sources beat a word count

The single most generous thing a brief can contain is a list of facts that must appear, each with where it came from and the date somebody last checked it. That turns hours of research into minutes of verification. It also protects the writer: a fact with a source can be defended, and a fact without one is an opinion waiting for a complaint.

A date matters more than it seems. Pages move, figures are revised, a guideline is withdrawn. “Checked on” tells the reviewer which claims need a second look before publishing and which are fresh. A source list that sits entirely on one site deserves the same suspicion a journalist would give a single witness.

Length, by contrast, is the field that gets filled in first and means least. It is a budget, useful for planning sections so that the introduction does not eat a third of the page. It is not a quality. One large search engine’s own guidance for publishers asks, among its warning signs, whether you are writing to a particular word count because you have heard that it prefers one, and answers in brackets: no, we don’t.

The same publisher’s spam policy describes keyword stuffing as filling a page with keywords, including repeating the same words so often that the text sounds unnatural. That is one company’s stated policy, not a law of nature, but it points the right way for a brief. List the terms the piece should use because readers use them, and then count them in the draft only to notice excess, never to hit a quota.

Structure belongs in the brief for a reason that has nothing to do with search. Accessibility guidance from the web’s standards body says that skipping heading ranks can be confusing and should be avoided where possible, and a widely used reference for web developers says the same thing more curtly. People using screen readers move through a page by its headings. Images need a line too: the standards body publishes a decision tree for alternative text, and its answer depends on what the image is for, which only the person commissioning it knows.

What a reading grade measures

Many briefs now carry a reading level, and the number usually comes from one formula. In February 1975 a research branch of the United States Navy published new versions of three readability formulas. The team tested the reading ability of Navy enlisted personnel at four technical training schools, then tested how well the same people understood 18 passages from training manuals. Those 531 readers are the ground under the grade score that this formula still produces.

The grade formula they derived is short. Multiply the average number of words per sentence by 0.39. Multiply the average number of syllables per word by 11.8. Add the two and subtract 15.59. The older reading ease score, which runs the other way so that higher is easier, is 206.835 minus 1.015 times the words per sentence, minus 84.6 times the syllables per word.

A worked example shows how little goes in. Take the sentence “The Australian platypus is seemingly a hybrid of a mammal and reptilian creature.” It has 13 words and 24 syllables in one sentence. Thirteen times 0.39 is 5.07. Twenty-four divided by thirteen, times 11.8, is 21.78. Together they make 26.85, and taking away 15.59 leaves a grade of 11.3. Paste the sentence into the draft box of the tool on this page and it reports the same three counts and the same grade.

Nothing in that arithmetic knows what a platypus is. The Navy report’s own instructions say to count syllables as the word is pronounced and to consult a dictionary when in doubt, which a program cannot do. The tool here uses spelling rules instead. The rule on this page, checked against a pronouncing dictionary of 124,903 English words, gave the dictionary’s count for 91.5 in 100 of them and was within one syllable for nearly all the rest. It still miscounts “business” and “rhythm”.

The deeper limit is stated plainly in the cancer institute’s guide: readability formulas do not measure the reader’s level of comprehension. It passes on three principles for using them. Use a formula only alongside other ways of judging the material. Use it only when your readers resemble the people it was validated on. And do not write with the formula in mind. The last one is the hardest to obey once a number is in the brief.

There is a respectable use for the target all the same. The web accessibility guidelines include a criterion, at their strictest level, for text that demands more than a lower secondary education, which they gloss as more than nine years of school. Such text should come with a simpler version or extra help. A grade score is a quick way to find the pages where that question should be asked.

It cannot answer the question. The plain language guide recommends paraphrase testing for short pages: hand the text to a person and ask them to say it back in their own words. It also says to test early and at least twice. A brief that sets a reading grade should name that step as well, or the number becomes the goal.

A courtesy with a deadline

None of this needs software. A brief is a page that a considerate editor would write anyway, set out so that nothing is forgotten: who it is for, what it must answer, what must be true in it and how we know, how long, by when, and who reads it before it goes out.

The discipline cuts both ways. Writing the brief forces the person commissioning the work to find out whether they know what they want. Often they discover they do not, and that is the cheapest moment to discover it. The cancer institute’s guide has a line for the commissioning side that deserves a place above every editor’s desk: be a good client.