Has this ever happened to you? You start an important article or a thought leadership piece with a clear purpose and a strong argument. It’s concise, compelling, and what your audience needs. But as more contributors weigh in and each adds their must-have example or expands on a tangential idea, the document begins to swell. What started as a sharp 1,000-word insight becomes a sprawling, 3,000-word tome, diluted by unnecessary asides and wandering logic.

This is the silent toll of “writing by committee.” While collaboration is a powerful tool, unfettered groupthink can diminish the impact of an article. Here’s why this happens and how you can guard against it.

The Traps of “Writing by Committee”

The path to a bloated article is paved with good intentions. Understanding the two most common ones is the first step toward avoiding them:

1. The Completeness Fallacy: Many professionals, especially those trained in rigorous analysis, have a deep-seated belief that an article, like a contract, a proposal, or an end-of-project report, must be “complete.” This is not true. The best articles have a strong point of view and content not directly relevant to the argument dilutes it. In a written article, what to leave out is as important as what to include.
2. Fear of Omission or Offence: When multiple people contribute, there’s a natural reluctance to cut or rephrase material added by a colleague, particularly a more senior one. This can lead to every idea being included.

These traps aren’t benign; they carry significant costs for authors and their organizations:

• Lost Reader Attention: Overly long content is often skimmed or abandoned by busy executives. The primary purposes of professional writing are to inform, persuade, and prompt action. If your message is diluted or unread, it fails on all counts.
• Wasted Time and Resources: The time authors spent contributing, reviewing, debating, and editing thousands of words of content might have been better used for client work, strategy, or other high-value activities.
• Damaged Credibility: As professionals, we are judged on our ability to distill complex information into clear, concise, and actionable insights. An unfocused, rambling article suggests unclear thinking.
• Missed Opportunities: A poorly received article might mean a missed opportunity to influence a client’s decision, secure further work, or establish your firm’s thought leadership.

Strategies to Safeguard Your Message

You can avoid article creep with discipline and a clear process. Here are the steps you can take:

1. Vet the team: It’s much easier to write a focused point of view with one author than with six; controlling the process gets exponentially harder with each additional contributor. Include as contributors those you need, and consider asking the others to review the draft.
2. Shun collaboration tools: That’s almost heresy today, and if you have only one or two authors, it’s fine if they share a live document. However, if you have six, and you allow them all to contribute to an article on Google Docs or SharePoint at any time of the day or night from anywhere in the world, it will be overly long and take weeks to finalize.
3. Define the purpose and audience: Before collaborators start contributing, clearly establish:
   • The primary audience, their needs, time constraints, and existing level of knowledge.
   • The one or two things you want the reader to know or do after reading the article.
   • The word count target. Consider how long an article the target audience is likely to read, and frame the length as a necessary constraint, not an arbitrary limitation.
4. Designate a lead author: Assign one person to maintain the article’s core argument, target length, and focus. Give them the authority to determine what stays and what goes. The lead author should possess enough experience to make sound decisions and be senior enough to confidently edit others’ contributions. Do not delegate this role to a junior person on the team just because they have more time for it.
5. Appoint an editor: A good alternative or complement to a lead author is an editor appointed early in the process. They will focus on strengthening the whole piece to make it more impactful. If something is merely background information or nice to know but does not support the central argument, they will remove it. It’s much easier for them to make those cuts than the authors.
6. Develop a strong outline and stick to it: A detailed outline that clearly articulates the main sections and key points within each serves as a roadmap and filter. Every contribution must fit within this agreed-upon structure and directly support the central argument. Any idea that doesn’t fit the outline, no matter how brilliant, should be reserved for another time.
7. Communicate Expectations: Before contributors begin, explain the writing process: the article’s purpose, the target length, who has final say, and the editing philosophy. Remind authors that, unlike a contract or report, an article does not have to, indeed cannot, include everything about a topic.  Before reviewers begin, explain that their role is to identify errors and critical omissions, not to suggest additional content that is tangential to the argument. Frame these expectations not as constraints, but as a commitment to delivering the most valuable and impactful communication to readers.

From Completeness to Clarity and Impact

In the professional world, effective communication isn’t about proving you know everything; it’s about delivering compelling insights that can be easily digested and acted on. With a disciplined approach to collaborative writing, you can produce a sleek thoroughbred of an article, which will impress your readers much more than a proverbial camel.