In a 1964 case brought before the Supreme Court of the United States, a movie theater owner in Ohio showed a French film, “Les Amants” (The Lovers), directed by Louis Malle. Some viewers were offended, so the State of Ohio declared the film obscene. The theater owner was fined $2500. He fought back.

The question before the Court was the definition of obscenity. Was the French film shown in Ohio obscene? In response to this question, Justice Potter Stewart’s responded: “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.” Stewart and other Justices ruled that the film was not obscene.

From the perspective of Justice Stewart, the definitions of obscenity and high-quality writing have a lot in common. It’s hard to define quality in writing, but you know it when you read it.

In this essay, I will not define high-quality writing but suggest ways to achieve it. Write your best story; your subscribers will know it is high-quality when they read it.

What is Quality Management? My Mother’s Advice…

In 1980, I applied for a job at a national company providing treatment foster care to children with severe emotional disorders and adults with intellectual disabilities. I knew several of the principals working there, so the interview was easy. They wanted to hire me for certain job functions but didn’t know what to call the job position. My boss decided on “Director of Quality Management.” What?

I took the job, having absolutely no idea what “quality management” meant for the company’s primary business, which was treatment foster care. I recalled my mother once telling me that if you know nothing about a job for which you are interviewing, take the job and figure it out once you get there. Her advice: “Ask a lot of questions.”

My problem was that no one in my personal space knew anything about quality in healthcare. Worse, no one in the industry knew anything about quality in healthcare.

Back in 1980, quality in healthcare was an entirely new concept.

Given my passion for reading, I turned to the works of quality gurus. The good news — there were several such leading thinkers: W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Duran, Philip Crosby, Kaoru Ishikawa. I read them all. The bad news — my gurus were all industrialists concerned with topics like how to make sure machine screws met product specifications.

No one was translating these industrial quality principles for healthcare.

Stuck with the job title I was given, I had to make it up.

Long story short, I worked for 20 years in senior quality management positions at two companies and consulted for another 15 years. During that time, I learned more than a few things about quality management in healthcare.

Most importantly, though, I learned what I believe are the core principles of quality management that apply to positive growth in any human endeavor, personal or commercial.

If quality management in healthcare was a new idea in 1980, quality management in writing is an equally new idea in 2024.

The Two-Sided Coin of High-Quality Writing: Emotional Impact and Performance Metrics

Pick a coin, any coin, and you will get a two-sided object. A one-sided coin doesn’t exist.

From my 35-year career in quality management, I learned that quality is a two-sided coin — one that is commonly seen (impact) and one that is rarely seen (performance management). Both sides are important. You cannot have one without the other.

Quality Coin Side 1: Impact The first side of the quality coin is the impact of your writing on your audience. This is the emotive side. Whatever the writing project, such as writing a weekly issue for your newsletter, your product should have an emotional impact on your reader. Even intellectual points can generate emotions when someone reads a geeky piece and thinks, “AHA!”

For the Medium platform, Tony Stubblebine, CEO, has placed high value on quality over volume. Tony’s message is that thoughtful, high-quality writing is preferred over high-volume, lower-quality writing.

The pursuit of high-quality writing shouldn’t scare you off. You don’t have to be an establishment “expert” in some space. By virtue of your lived experience, if you have a well-crafted story to tell, and if it has an emotional effect on your readers, then you will have entered the ranks of high-quality authors.

In the healthcare field, we use the term “consumer delight” to describe the impact of our services on patients. This concept is similar to what is known as “user experience” (UX) in the design industry. Both ideas relate to the quality of the experience, but they are challenging to quantify because they deal with emotions. Emotions that can be felt are often difficult to define or describe in concrete, operational terms. This makes the aspect of quality analogous, as emotions themselves are analogs, sensed rather than precisely measured.

Side One, then, of the high-quality writing coin is your ability to evoke an emotional response from your readers. Whether the emotions are wonder, empathy, sorrow, regret, or the joy of insight, it is the impact side of the coin that will turn readers into followers.

Quality Coin Side 2: Performance The flip side of quality is one that is rarely talked about – it’s not just what you write, but what you put into the act of writing.

Quality doesn’t just happen. Quality must be made to happen. That is, quality has to be managed. For this, you need information related to the impact of your writing products, which means gathering data through metrics.

Sure, you can craft a highly personal story about some transformative event in your life that has a great impact on your readers. In that case, congratulations! Your high-quality story was a spontaneous success.

But suppose you want to write several stories about your growth or the growth of people you know. In order to tell meaningful stories with high impact time after time, you will need to learn about managing the impact of your writing.

Here’s an example of product impact supported by performance management. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks adopted a reg flag as a symbol of their cause. Within a few years, the red flag was emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, representing the importance of labor and peasantry in the communist revolution.

Whoever created the very first red flag had to make specific management decisions about the color’s composition. This is part of the design component of the creative process. Design features, such as hue, saturation, and brightness, needed to be understood as performance metrics to ensure that many copies of the original flag could be accurately reproduced. Foot soldiers then carried these thoughtfully designed flags to evoke the desired emotions and impact among the revolutionary forces.

This example shows that impact and performance metrics cannot be separated. A wimpy flag with a mottled, pale color wouldn’t work as the standard bearer of a revolution. Hue, saturation, and brightness are all quantitative aspects of the color rendered to maximize emotive impact. An evocative symbol of a revolution does not work without underlying metrics that support its impact.

The Performance Management of High-Quality Writing

How do the two sides of the quality writing coin (impact and performance) affect you as a content writer?

To evoke a positive reader experience time after time, you need to collect information about the readers’ experiences. You may not think of yourself as the data analytic type, but you really should dip your toe into the world of metrics. To do this, you need data — and the more, the better.

Fortunately, Substack provides several story metrics that you can use to evaluate the impact of your stories. As someone who recently migrated to Substack from Medium, I am still learning the options for gathering reader data. The Dashboard menu gives you several good data options. Go to “Stats” and click on the Subscriber Report to learn the geographic distribution of your readers.

In addition to Notes and other venues for reader engagement, I like the “Reader Surveys” option to collect feedback on articles or to publish in other media. Surveys are a great method for gathering information, especially demographics, that can be used to make your writing more relevant to your readers’ interests.

Five Take-Aways for Meeting the Challenge of High-Quality Writing

1. You may be a free-spirited thinker, but even the most accomplished artists worked on their method. Mixed media artists learn how to blend colors for the impact they desire and they experiment with different expressive materials. You, too, need to self-study your writing style.
2. Don’t just think about different writing styles. Try them! Vary your stories with forceful, suggestive, imploring, or emotional styles. How do these different styles feel to you as the writer? What styles are within your comfort zone? Can you experiment with styles that are outside your comfort zone? It might be worth a try.
3. Maintaining consistent quality in writing is a result of managing your writing performance. For each story you write, make a conscious effort to recognize and define your unique writing style. Then, using reader response metrics available from Substack, analyze how your readers react to the various writing styles you employ. This evaluation can help you understand what resonates with your audience and guide you in honing your craft.
4. Don’t get hung up on technical stuff like grammar and sentence construction. Especially for those whose writing language is not their native language, use applications that can improve the presentation of your thoughts. Grammarly and Hemingway are useful apps for good sentence and paragraph construction. When a paragraph seems clunky, feed it to ChatGPT or Claude.ai for a rewrite. Don’t let the technical details of writing get in the way of your creative expression.
5. If you don’t feel confident in your story, don’t hide this. Fellow writers are a forgiving community. Allow the vulnerable you to come through in your narrative. There may be natural and well-practiced writers among us, but most of us, including me, struggle to tell our stories as best we can. Be true to yourself, and you will find support among your followers.