by: Dana Cass

I’ve been down several rabbit holes these last several weeks related to content and editorial frameworks—among them, MECE, or “mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive,” a concept Animalz adapted from McKinsey to apply to content. 

In short, MECE is the art of making sure your content covers everything it needs to in order to accomplish its goal, and only as much of anything as necessary. (Did you hear that, Claude? I said “only as much of anything as necessary.” I did not say “write the same sentiment at least three times to ensure your audience feels like they’re being actively beaten with a dead horse.”) 

I had MECE on my mind while I was reading Megan Garber’s Screen People, a nonfiction book about the deleterious effects of internet culture on our relationships with ourselves and each other. It was a book I was psyched to read only to discover within the first several pages that it was an exemplar of a bugaboo I’ve been carting around for as long as I’ve been a reasonably critical reader: books are either too long or too short—mostly the former—to accomplish what they’re trying to do, especially nonfiction books. 

I daresay that most nonfiction I read ought to have been a double-length New Yorker article. Instead, we get books that make me understand why Claude does what it does vis-a-vis repetition: they restate their thesis fourteen ways from Sunday and scour the universe for examples, tangents, anything to fill out the eighty thousand words their publisher needs in order for the production costs to make sense. 

By the end, I have the intellectual equivalent of the kind of stomachache you get when you eat the entire bag of Skinny Pop. I want more nonfiction that reads like John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which the New Yorker famously published in its 35,000-word entirety in one go rather than splitting it across four issues as originally planned because it was so much more impactful as a cohesive unit. But that was eighty years ago, and I haven’t seen much like that since. 

So what does any of this have to do with B2B content? 

Well, how many of us—especially freelancers, or in-house folks assigning the work out to freelancers—start a project by determining the word count? It’s a 1,500-word article. It’s a 3,000-word white paper. It’s a byline that we’re planning to pitch to publications that prefer 600-900 words, so let’s aim for 750. 

I haven’t always been like this. I spent my first decade in content in an environment where we didn’t care about any of the things people typically did in the mid-aughts (word count, but also keywords, header structures, etc.). To me, word count was the province of a college English department, not something a marketing professional needed to concern themselves with. We used whatever number of words we needed to get the point across. Sometimes that was thousands; sometimes it was just a few paragraphs. 

So it was bizarre for me when I moved into freelancing to learn that much of the content world lives and dies by word count. And of course, as a freelancer, I get it; my clients and I need a predictable way to price deliverables. Even outside of the vendor/client relationship, it’s helpful to be able to conceive of a deliverable by size, or to be able to ask for something specific. 

But it’s such a bummer that we so often hamstring ourselves at the outset by deciding on length before we’ve actually taken the time to figure out what an idea is and how much space we need to execute it. 

We say we’re going to write a thousand-word byline and we water down an idea that would be more impactful if explored to its full complexity, or we settle on a 3000-word ebook and find ourselves digressing in unnecessary directions because that’s what the client asked for. Of course we can propose a pivot midway through if the thing feels wildly off—but how often does this actually happen? In my experience, almost never. 

I would love to move to a world where MECE, not word count, governs the size and shape of our content. 

Start with an idea, figure out what structure your artifact needs to take, and let the word count happen from there, shaving down or elaborating along the way because you need to, not because you arbitrarily decided three months ago that this quarter, you’d publish an ebook. 

Shortly after I forced myself to finish Screen People, I read a delightful novella, The Iron Below Remembers, which I picked up after hearing the author read an excerpt a few months back. It was maybe a hundred pages and the author’s acknowledgments mentioned that he had pitched the publisher—an indie press—on a short story, only to discover in the process that it was going to be a long story. He thanked his publisher for giving him the freedom to make the most creatively satisfying choice, and as a reader, I was grateful to have spent what felt like exactly the right amount of time in the company of Professor Laxman Yadav and his superhero boyfriend. 

But for most publishers, the just-right length simply isn’t feasible. Likewise, for many B2B content teams, the fact that we plan and price around word count means it will persist as a driving force behind what we create. 

Still, we can at least be more mindful about word count and make the hard calls when necessary to say “Hey, we can’t make the argument we envisioned in a 900-word byline” or “We don’t actually have the meat to flesh out this white paper.” 

It’s the only way to ensure your content actually meets the business goals you’ve set out for it (you do have a business goal for your content, right? Right???). And even if that means, say, turning your envisioned byline into a series of blog posts you host—and spending the requisite time and/or budget to do so—it’s ultimately worth it if it means you can drive the action you envisioned from your audience. ■

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Dana is a freelance content writer and editor based in Brooklyn. Previously, she served as global head of content for an S&P500 software company and head of marketing for a seed-stage startup.