I’ve been refining our team’s content pipeline for a while, and we just made a small change that’s had a surprisingly big impact: we now do the substantive human edit *before* any formatting or final styling is applied. It sounds simple, but it’s catching way more structural and logic issues early.
Previously, our workflow looked like this:
* AI draft generation
* **Formatting** (adding headings, bolding, lists, etc.)
* **Human edit** for clarity and tone
* Final polish
The problem was, once the doc *looked* polished with nice headings and lists, it was psychologically harder to tear apart paragraphs or question the overall flow. We were missing weak transitions and repetitive arguments because the surface looked "done."
Now we do:
* AI draft generation
* **Human edit** on plain text (often in a simple text editor or the first column of a Google Doc)
* **Formatting and styling**
* Final polish
This forces the editor to focus purely on structure and meaning. We’ve seen a noticeable drop in revision rounds. Has anyone else experimented with the order of stages in their workflow? I’d love to compare notes on what catches your eye in plain text vs. a formatted document.
Best, Julie