No, We Can't All Write

Why copywriters are still necessary, even in the age of ChatGPT

This post is dedicated to a certain senior executive at my current workplace who, when one of my coworkers expressed that the amount of marketing we wanted to do for a new product might exceed my bandwidth, insisted that “Any of us can write!”

Eliza can’t write because she doesn’t have thumbs.

Now, you might think: Reading and writing is the foundation of a literate society! We’re taught to write since childhood! It’s so easy, I can do it in my sleep!

Or maybe: Who are you to tell me I can’t write? This is the internet! I can write whatever I want and you can’t stop me!

Sure, yeah, fine. Writing as a basic form of communication between a limited number of people. Texting. Journaling. All of this is fine. Go ahead, have fun.

But when we’re talking about writing for an audience, whether that’s marketing, digital or analog products, journalism, books, plays, movies, TV shows, poetry…those media take skill, and not every Joe Shmoe can just sit down and do it.

In my opinion, you can’t write in a professional setting unless…

You can read your writing back from someone else’s point of view

Specifically, you can consider what you’ve written from the perspective of someone who knows much less about the subject matter than you do, and notice where things don’t make sense.

This is by far the largest problem I encounter when non-writers at companies I work at try to write customer-facing copy on their own. They’ll write what they want to say, as they understand it, but without any sense of audience.

Will our users know what you mean by “comprehensive care”? Will they care that we have hundreds of offerings if we don’t say what any of them are?

I think there’s a version of this that happens in fiction writing as well, when the author is so committed to showing and not telling or withholding information for the sake of suspense that…readers can’t actually follow what’s going on.

Your reader is not inside your brain. You need to give them some guardrails to hang on to.

Even if your writing is coherent to its intended audience (a surprisingly hard hurdle to clear for many folks), it’s just as important that…

You understand that different types of writing have different purposes

And, crucially, what the purpose of the text you’re currently writing actually is. For instance, generally marketing is for drawing attention to yourself, UX and technical writing are for providing clear instructions on what to do, journalism is for educating the reader (though opinion columns are for persuading them instead), and fiction is for entertainment.

Those are just the broad strokes. Obviously, a reader can be “entertained” in a myriad of different ways; consider the difference between how the romance and horror genres do it. You may want to leave your reader gasping with laughter or crying at the profundity of the human condition. All of these goals are valid.

But I firmly believe that you can’t achieve any of them unless you’re clear as the writer what your goal actually is. You want to be “snarky” or “clever” in this marketing email? Why? How does that accomplish your goal of driving users to take the desired action?

This is not a very sexy way of looking at writing, I know. But words have power if you use them correctly. If you don’t, people will skim right over them. Speaking of which…

You know when to stand out, and when to blend in

Not all writing should scream “ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!” at a reader. If it did, we would all write in all caps all the time, bolded and in red ink. But readers can’t pay attention to everything all the time.

A fundamental UX writing principle is that people read in the pattern of an “F” shape. You read the headline, maybe the first line of an article, then skim down the left side until you see the next important thing, which you read all the way across, and continue on until you find what you’re looking for.

(This is why we internet writers use so many section headings, by the way, in addition to the fact that they make it easier for Google crawlers to understand and index our content for search results.)

The human brain just can’t pay attention to everything all the time. It makes choices, and a smart writer helps the reader’s brain do that in a meaningful way so they still get the information they’re looking for.

In UX writing, you don’t really want readers to pay attention to the words you’ve written at all. In an ideal world, the language directing you to complete a checkout flow or sign in to an account is so self-evident that their brains don’t even consciously process what it is.

Even in the most attention-grabbing sort of writing, like an email subject line (where you need to stand out against the rest of the recipient’s inbox using only words), there are times when you want to be shouty (i.e. Black Friday) and times when you really only want to get a reader who’s in the right mental space to take the action you want them to take.

Most forms of writing operate somewhere between these two extremes of standing out and blending in so the reader knows where the really important text lies. Otherwise, they’ll just see a wall of text and tune out.

So, let’s say you’ve got all that down. You get why you’re writing what you’re writing, how to explain it to someone who isn’t yourself, and how aggressively you want to draw attention to it. There’s one more bar you need to clear…

You can follow an internally consistent set of grammar rules

As someone who’s proofread professionally, I understand there are typos literally everywhere: breaking news articles, print books, definitely Substack posts written by folks who work without an editor. This concern isn’t about that.

It’s about making everything you write sound like it’s coming from the same person, which actually engenders trust in a reader. If you’re constantly switching up the grammatical rules you follow, it’s as jarring as changing your overall brand voice.

Readers probably won’t care if you’re a devoted follower of the Oxford comma, which way you spell “theater” or if you put spaces on either side of your emdashes. (Depending on the context, you can probably even get away with eschewing all capital letters or end punctuation so you can sound like a true Gen Z-er.) But if you can’t keep it consistent, they’ll catch on, and your authority will suffer as a result.

So…do you think you can handle it? Do you think your handy AI friend who can’t do math and regularly makes up sources can handle it?

Or, would you like to pay for a professional writer instead?