What is “expert” content?

We talk a lot on this site about creating unique, expert content for your business. But what exactly do we mean by that?

We’ll try to give some measured thoughts on that subject to help you decide both what “expert” actually means and whether or not you should place any value on expertise. There’s far more to go over here than should be reasonably covered in a single post, so this is likely to be an ongoing conversation. (We already have outlines or drafts for at least five additional posts touching on this idea in some form, so consider this the first in a series, to be published irregularly, on the idea of expertise.)

Let’s get back to that opening idea of “unique, expert content” and what we mean by it. We can put the idea of “unique” aside right away, because you’re already familiar with that: it means one-of-a-kind, and that’s exactly how we approach every article. Each one is written from the ground up, so you never need to worry about the content we produce being too similar to material that’s already out there. Our work is always original and crafted from scratch, as explained elsewhere on this site, whether we’re writing on a topic for the first time or the 101st time.

But what about “expert?” That idea has more flexibility, so it’s a good idea to explain exactly what we mean when we use the term “expert” (or the related term, “expertise” ).

An expert, as defined by…

Wait! STOP! Don’t ever do that!

We’re writers here at Waltham WordWorks. And editors. Some of us have taught writing, at various levels, from elementary school up to the graduate level. So we can say a lot of things with confidence about what makes good writing—and what doesn’t. Most of us, somewhere in our instructional materials, have a list headed something like “good and bad ways to start an essay.” On every list of ‘bad’ ways, because it’s incredibly trite and overused (and because it’s one of the quickest ways to lose your reader’s interest), is “the dictionary definition” approach.

Think about this for just a moment: How many times in your life have you seen a piece of writing start off that way—with a definition that you already knew and didn’t really need? How many times have you started (or been tempted to start) a piece of writing that way yourself, because you were out of ideas, padding to meet a word count, or just not interested in the topic? If you’re willing to think of poor writing as a kind of drug, able to put a reader to sleep, then we can offer a phrase from a drug war of a different kind: Just say no!

Which isn’t to say that there’s no place for definitions in good writing: in the work we do, it’s often necessary. Our clients, especially legal and financial services firms, need us to define unfamiliar technical terms for a non-specialized audience. But we take pains to smoothly and naturally integrate definitions into our work, and we’re unlikely to ever use the crude shoehorn of “According to the dictionary, an expert is…”

That fact brings us back to expertise, because our approach in this case demonstrates both of the two types of expertise identified by many who have looked hard at the idea: what someone knows (theory) and what someone can do (practice). Our writers not only have a solid grasp of the theory of what they’re doing (what works, why, how), they’re also able to put it into practice with each article they produce. They know how to write good headlines which work for multiple reasons; they know how to structure a simple article to hold a reader’s attention; they work to find creative approaches that will set each piece they produce apart, not only from other pieces they’ve written on similar topics, but also from articles on similar topics that are already out there.

The folks who research such things—the experts on what makes an expert—sometimes refer to these two types of expertise as epistemic (what you know) and performative (what you can do). We could pick any of a million different analogies, but let’s take the example of a would-be golfer. She reads all she can about the sport, studies books and instructional videos, learns about every aspect of golf club technology and ball dimpling, and can recite from memory every major championship winner from the past 50 years. She’s a monster at the local mini-golf course, conquering most holes on the first putt. Yet…she’s never played the real game or raised a driver above her waist for a real swing. She’s unquestionably an expert on golf, but only in the epistemic sense; she lacks performative expertise—true hands-on experience, with a record of skilled application of knowledge. Thanks to the background she’s already developed, she might be able to become an expert in playing the game in short order. But she might not: she might have a problem with hand-eye coordination and timing, or an inability to read the wind, or any of a number of factors that prevent her from playing at an expert level. Conversely, she might have a girlfriend who knows nothing about golf history (and cares less), but is a natural from the moment she first tees up a ball, able to innately read the lie of each green and make every difficult shot look easy. She has performative expertise, and in many settings her lack of epistemic expertise is no handicap (which is an idea worth exploring in a future post). The same can be true in virtually any area of knowledge.

We have a high standard at Waltham WordWorks for writing expertise (both epistemic and performative), and that’s demonstrated in the work we produce for our clients. Equally important, however, is the epistemic expertise each of our writers continuously expands in the service of our clients: a member of our team won’t write a throw-away post about the difference between no-fault and full tort insurance systems and never think about the idea again. Our writers are encouraged (and expected) to continually expand their knowledge and build upon what they already know. That writer can expect to be called upon in the future to write in greater depth about these systems, to further explain how full tort and limited tort are different, to outline key ideas and actions in the history of these different systems, and even to know and summarize the important coverage differences and liability limits across several state systems (as well as which changes are currently being lobbied for). More importantly, they’d be expected to write posts that apply this knowledge for our clients in ways that will help attract new business. And that’s a more difficult task than most people realize.

To be entirely fair, we should point out that the distinction of epistemic versus performative expertise discussed in this post will seem outdated to some researchers: the main article linked above is from 1993—not only an eternity in the past by modern research standards, but from a “pre-Internet” age. Much has changed since then…but much hasn’t. On a basic level, these ideas are still true and useful, but there are other things that should be taken into account, some of which were hardly on the radar in the early ’90s.

We’ll dive into more of that in future posts on expertise.

Did this post interest you? Come back soon for future follow ups, where we’ll also discuss a recent popular idea, namely the argument against expertise. (Hint: We don’t agree with it.)

To put your business expertise on display online, get in touch with Waltham WordWorks to learn how we can help you affordably showcase your business or industry knowledge and use it to attract new clients.