Content Writers Find and Process Facts

“Without solid information, your article doesn’t come across as credible,” makealivingwriting.com cautions. But, with all the information bouncing around on the internet, the editor admits, the key is to use sources you can trust. Four major sources for data include:

• the federal government (Centers for Disease control, National Institutes of Health, USA.gov)
• national organizations (nonprofit groups, industry associations, special interest organizations)
• trade publications
• name brand studies and surveys (find the original poll, study, or survey rather than citing a secondary source)

Use well-known news sites, Elna Cain advises, such as:

• Harvard Business review
• Psychology Today
• The New York Times

At Say It For You, freelance content writers are encouraged to curate, meaning to gather OPW (Other People’s Wisdom) and share that with readers, commenting on that material and relating it to their own topic. In fact, in order to sustain our blog content writing over long periods of time without losing reader excitement and engagement, we need to constantly add to our own body of knowledge – about our industry or professional field, and about what’s going on around us in our culture. Business blogging can serve as a form of market research in itself, as we find sources of knowledge and then add our own original thinking about what we’re sharing.

But, as we find and share content in order to bring value to readers, it’s important to remember that collating and curating are two different things. When we collate, we are putting together collections of content on a topic. That content might comes from our own former blog posts, newsletters, or emails, or selected from books or articles by other authors. We organize those materials into new categories, summarizing the main ideas we think will be most useful to readers. Curating goes a step further, offering our own perspective on each item, and using our understanding of our target audience to show readers why there’s something important here for them.

In content writing, we take care in finding reliable, trustworthy, primary sources of information. Our job as curators then becomes interpreting and synthesizing information, putting into terms our readers can understand and to which they are most likely to relate.