By Megha Sawhney
Written in June 2018 during the author's Modlingua internship.
The art of time management is required in almost every kind of work one does, whether financial or personal. One field that requires a constant grip on time is content creation. S. Dipak Rajav, in his article "Content is King" (The Hindu, October 27, 2013), rightly points at the ever-growing consumption of content, especially in India. Growing internet penetration, the urge to express oneself, and mass dependency on search engines like Google rightly make content the king. This makes the rapid creation of content more necessary than ever, while keeping both the required quality and the increasing quantity in mind.
Like most other fields, content creation works in a cycle. Driven by public demand, every sector now aims at an active web presence, which makes the timely, managed supply of content very important from the management's perspective. When work is delegated to content creators at large, compiling the data received becomes difficult and inconvenient; it is ultimately handled by the editor and then published. The more inefficiently content is created in the first place by writers, the more their credibility suffers. This makes time and quality control necessary for content creators to sustain themselves in a rapidly growing market. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the freelance content writing industry was expected to grow by 6% by 2020. Freelancing assures an abundant supply of content writers, which raises the danger of any one writer being replaced by another - making the management of time a constant requirement.
The compilation of enormous amounts of data, which must eventually be published free of errors, makes time management equally significant from the editor's perspective. Here, the then-newly developed Modlingua Rubric proved effective in improving efficiency, usable by both writer and editor to make content error-free, efficient and consistent. Filtering written content through the Rubric's respective heads - articles, punctuation, omissions, spellings, choice of words, facts, consistency, grammar, sentence structure and formatting - is highly beneficial. Artificial intelligence software like Grammarly can also cover some of these heads, such as punctuation and articles. It makes coordination in teams easy through consistent analysis and delegation of work.
Almost every field one can name - medical, media, lifestyle, literature or legal - requires interaction with customers through the written word. The growing presence of English makes translation, a sub-category of content writing, a very important and much-needed medium for sustaining the significance of regional languages and making regional texts available to the masses in English. With the extremely high possibility of losing the essence and meaning of source texts when cross-language counterparts are unavailable, the Modlingua Rubric becomes even more significant and necessary than ever.
