Most disappointing freelance writing projects don't fall apart at the writing stage. They fall apart earlier, in a conversation that was never written down. The client had a picture in their head. The writer had a different one. Four hundred words later, everyone is polite and slightly irritated.
A good brief is not a legal document or a display of process. It is a short, plain description of the job that removes guesswork. You can usually do it in one page. Here's what that page should contain, section by section, with a checklist at the end.
Start With One Reader, Not a Demographic
"Small business owners" is not an audience. It is a category. A writer cannot picture a category, and a piece written for a category reads like it was written for nobody.
Instead, describe one plausible reader in a sentence or two. For example: a two-person landscaping company whose invoices go out late and who has lost one client over it. That single sentence tells the writer what the reader already knows, what vocabulary they use, and what would make them keep reading past the first paragraph.
Add three details if you can: where this person will encounter the piece, what they are likely to be doing when they read it, and what they already believe about the topic. A reader skimming an email on a phone at 7am needs a different opening than one reading a printed brochure in a waiting room.
Name the Job the Piece Has to Do
Every piece of writing should have one primary job. Secondary goals are fine, but they go second.
Fill in this sentence: after reading this, the reader will ______. The blank should be a real action or a real change of mind — book a call, reply to an email, understand why a fee is structured a certain way, stop using a particular phrase in support tickets.
Be careful with goals that quietly ask the writer to guarantee a business result. "We want more demo requests" is a useful directional goal. "This article must generate forty leads" is a forecast the writer cannot control, and it tends to produce pushy copy that readers dislike.
If the piece has a job, say what it is not doing too. A single explainer does not also need to introduce the company, cover every feature, and answer sales objections.
Describe Tone With Samples, Not Adjectives
"Professional but approachable" means at least ten different things. Two people can agree on those words and still produce completely different drafts.
Trade adjectives for evidence. Send two or three short samples of writing you like — from anywhere, not necessarily your industry — and one you don't, with a line on why. That single move does more for tone than a paragraph of description.
Then answer the mechanical questions:
- Is it "we" or "the company"? Is "I" ever acceptable?
- Are contractions fine, or should they be avoided?
- Is humour welcome, and if so, dry or light?
- Are there words, phrases or competitor names to avoid entirely?
- How technical can the language get before it loses the reader?
Also state the reading level in plain terms: write for someone with no background in the subject, or assume they know the basics. Writers make this call constantly, and they would rather make it your way.
Draw the Scope Line in Both Directions
Scope is where most briefs go quiet, and where most disputes start. Say what is included and what is not, in the same place.
Included items are usually straightforward: word count with a tolerance ("900 to 1,000 words" beats "about 900"), number of interview subjects, whether outside research is expected, and whether sources should be cited with links.
The excluded list matters just as much. Common examples: no design work, no uploading to the CMS, no image sourcing beyond suggestions, no chasing approvals from your legal team, no rewriting the piece after a change of strategy. Naming these up front is not defensive. It prevents the writer from quietly absorbing three extra hours of work and then pricing defensively on the next project.
One more useful line: how many rounds of revisions are covered, and what counts as a revision versus a new direction.
Be Specific About Deliverables and Format
The draft itself has a shape, and the writer should know it before starting. A clear brief specifies format, structure and any supporting elements in one short list.
- File type and location: a Google Doc shared with edit access, or a .docx sent by email.
- Structure: with subheadings or without, paragraph length, whether bullet lists are welcome.
- Supporting elements: a set of headline options, a meta title and description, alt text suggestions, social snippets.
- Naming convention, if you have one: 2025-03-blog-invoice-timing-v2.
- Anything the piece must include: a boilerplate line, a specific call to action, a link policy, a disclaimer.
If the writer has to ask "where does this go and what do I call it?" after delivery, the brief was incomplete.
Put Every Deadline and Approval on the Page
Dates beat intentions. Write down the first draft date, the feedback date and the final date, with times and a time zone if anyone involved works remotely. If a piece needs to be live before an event, say when the event is, so the writer can work backwards and flag a problem early.
Name one approver. One. Not "the team." A single person who collects internal comments and sends back one consolidated set is the difference between a smooth project and a week of contradictory notes arriving from four directions.
Say how feedback will be delivered — comments in the document, an email summary, a short call — and what happens if feedback is late. A reasonable convention: if feedback slips by more than a few working days, the final deadline moves by the same amount. Write that down once and nobody has to be awkward about it later.
The Client Brief Checklist
Before the project starts, the brief should be able to answer all of these without a follow-up conversation:
- Audience: one described reader, where they will read it, what they already know.
- Goal: the single action or shift in understanding the piece is for.
- Tone: two or three samples, words to avoid, person and tense, humour yes or no.
- Length: a word range, not a vague target.
- Scope: research, interviews and citations confirmed, exclusions named.
- Deliverables: file format, structure, extras such as headlines and meta description.
- Must-include items: calls to action, boilerplate, disclaimers, links.
- Revisions: how many rounds, and what counts as a round.
- Dates: draft, feedback, final, with times and time zone.
- Approver: one name, one channel for feedback.
Before You Send It
Read the brief once as if you were the writer seeing it cold. Could you start work tomorrow without asking anything? If not, the gap you just noticed is the gap they will find on day two.
Then do one small thing that pays off repeatedly: hand the brief to someone outside the project and ask them to explain the job back to you in two sentences. If their version matches yours, send it. If it drifts, the brief needs another five minutes.
Keep the finished version as a template. Most briefs repeat themselves across projects — the tone notes, the approval rules, the excluded items — and a good template turns a forty-minute task into ten. When the work comes back close to what you imagined, that is rarely luck. It is usually a page of plain sentences written before anyone started typing.
