Content Strategy Sample For the JPL Copywriter/Content Strategist role · APR Consulting

Tracking Earth,
in plain English.

A small editing exercise on a NASA mission page — and a demonstration of what content strategy looks like when applied with restraint.

SOURCE: Mission overview text, NISAR Quick Facts page — nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/quick-facts
Original 4 sentences · 1 paragraph

The NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission will monitor changes in Earth's land, water, vegetation, and ice to better understand processes such as vegetation change, natural hazards, sea level variation, and groundwater movement. It will also support a host of societal benefits. NISAR will collect global observations of land and ice-covered regions every 12 days from both ascending and descending orbits, providing an average revisit time of about 6 days over a planned three-year mission. NISAR will observe Earth's land and ice-covered surfaces globally with 12-day regularity on ascending and descending passes, sampling Earth on average every 6 days for a baseline 3-year mission.

Revised 4 sentences · 3 paragraphs

Earth's surface is always moving. NISAR is built to track it.

A joint mission of NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NISAR scans nearly every land and ice surface on the planet roughly once a week, detecting motion as small as a fraction of an inch. Its data will serve farmers, emergency responders, and communities near earthquake faults, volcanoes, deforestation zones, and rising coastlines by giving them time to anticipate change rather than only respond to it.

Over a planned three-year mission, NISAR will produce one of the most detailed pictures of our changing planet ever assembled.

Editorial Decisions
1
Lead with the verb, not the subject.
The original opens with the mission's full bureaucratic name and a list of monitored variables. The reader waits fourteen words to learn why to care. The revision spends eight words establishing the stakes: Earth's surface is always moving before introducing anything else. The single highest-leverage move on the page.
2
Translate the cadence.
"Every 12 days from both ascending and descending orbits, providing an average revisit time of about 6 days" confuses the reader in its attempt to stay true to the science. Roughly once a week carries the same operational truth without the math. The precise figure belongs on the spec sheet, where engineers go for it; not in the front-door paragraph.
3
Name the beneficiaries.
"A host of societal benefits" tells the reader nothing. Audience has to take the writer's word for it. Replaced with the actual list: farmers, emergency responders, and communities near earthquake faults, volcanoes, deforestation zones, and rising coastlines. Specificity makes a claim verifiable.
4
Cut the redundancy.
The 12-day/6-day cadence appears twice in the source, in adjacent sentences with synonymized vocabulary. Catching this kind of redundancy is the routine work of a content strategist — and the reason a fresh editorial pass on existing copy is always worth doing.
5
Borrow the concrete fact.
Detecting motion as small as a fraction of an inch doesn't appear in the source paragraph but it does appear on a related JPL news page. Surfacing it here gives the lede a sensory anchor: a small, vivid detail that turns abstract capability into something a reader can picture. Content strategy is also knowing what to import.