“Stories are a great warmup technique for blogs and emails, but not when we get serious about copy. The closer to the conversion action, the more we should be using ‘direct response’ techniques.”

And this is just so, so wrong. Let me tell you why:

Story was the OG direct response technique

Humans created story as a way to help them take action (and stay alive as a result).

The ‘truest’ way to make a decision is to look at our past experience and use that to determine what to do next.

But if everyone has to experience a sharp-toothed predator to know whether to fight it or hide, we’re going to lose a lot of people in the process, which goes directly against our desire to pass on our genes.

Story allows those with experience to pass knowledge on to those who don’t.

How? Because the structure of story lights up those same parts in our brain as we hear it as if we were experiencing it ourselves.

It’s like an experiential download directly into our brain, so we can make a decision on what to do in new (to us) circumstances.

I describe story like an emotional VR headset. It activates those emotions in our body. And what we know but often forget is that emotions move us to make decisions.

Direct Response copywriting uses story structure

And even those direct response techniques you might think of, like explaining pain points and using urgency, these are structured the same way as story.

We think of copywriting formulas as ways to implement direct response techniques. But what were those built on? The same 3- or 4-part structure we use to tell story.

When I support copywriters by editing their sales pages and emails, I’m not just fixing typos. I’m often looking at that story engine underneath and helping make sure it is paced correctly.

Not ‘what formula did they use’? But really understanding if enough time was spent in the Ordinary World, before moving into the struggles (the pain points) and when to release the tension and show how life could be (the climax and resolution).

Micro Stories to connect quickly

So hopefully I have convinced you that story, both in it’s experiential details and structure, is essential.

But how do we add it without messing up the pacing of a sales page? Most great story examples we teach from are books and movies and 6-part TV shows. Things that take hours to consume.

But good stories can be held in just a couple of sentences, once you understand the essential building blocks.

I’m going to be talking about this more over the coming weeks, but if you are someone who likes to learn by doing, then I want to invite you to my Micro Stories that Sell Workshop.

It is for marketers who want to LAF!

• Learn the essential blocks of micro story

• Apply the lessons with me in a workshop by building their own micro stories for their website

• Use the Framework with clients to create powerful, successful copy

In the first hour, I’ll teach you about the 3 essential micro stories for your website.

In the second hour, we’ll write at least 1 of them, and you can get feedback from me to make sure you’re implementing correctly.

I’ve seen the cheap (and free) guides on story that have you nodding your head, but wondering how to apply. Which is why I limited the workshop to 12, not as a DR technique (!), but because I want to provide feedback and support in real time as you write.

(There is a waitlist and I will offer it again if there is enough interest, at the same price.)

AI can’t tell good stories

I wanted to write about this without lambasting AI, but sorry, it snuck in here at the end.

Story is how we connect with other humans, using emotions, to pass on our experiences and help them take action.

If you’ve ever read AI content and it felt flat or hollow, I believe this is why. It doesn’t have emotions or experiences so (for now) this is still a human-only skill.

As we start to see a pushback to hollow AI copy, you will stand out if you have skills that allow you to, yes, use AI in some parts of your process, but write connected, deep copy based in story structure.

I’d love to see you at the workshop (or on the waitlist). If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖 Dungeon Crawler Carl. Still, and it is still so good.

• 📺 The House of Guinness. We are a bit behind on catching it, but I love this high-society, earlier-era version of Peaky Blinders.

• 🎧Loon Call. This is a Heated Rivalry podcast that has a great segment called Craft Cottage where they look at the plot and writing in certain scenes. This is for a very specific cross section of HR fans (who call themselves Loons) and story geeks, so I am in my element!

It’s time for recess

Let’s tell a micro story!

Obviously you’ll have to come to the workshop to learn exactly what is needed and why some stories hoping to sell fall short, but there’s no harm in practicing.

You have a max of 3 sentences (at your natural word length, this isn’t sneaking around the rules in English class!) to tell the story of a client you have worked with.

How can you add emotion and experience to the story to help your reader put on that emotional VR headset? And once you’ve drafted, the more important question is, what can you remove? The editing down to only essentials is what will help this become a micro story fit for your website.

• To make a client feel comfortable that you will give them copy they like

• To make you feel comfortable that your client won’t just change your copy to something they like, and in the process make it no longer effective

• To ensure you have truly understood what the client is asking for in all the complex areas (offer, audience, brand voice, VoC, messaging hierarchy)

So sure, we know we need a revision process, but it still usually sucks. So how can we make it suck less?

Gain some control

I asked my copywriter peers how they handle revisions, and here are the main elements that I found (note: not one person had all of these!)

Start the process before the revision stage

Sometimes as early as onboarding a client, copywriters provide information about how to provide good feedback. This can include describing what are ‘good’ and bad comments and what you need to make the revisions useful, who can revise, and what to think about when looking at the draft.

Pros: this is a great way to set expectations and boundaries early on what you will and won’t accept at the end of the process.

Cons: unless you remind clients of this again at the time of revision, you risk them forgetting. And it can feel overwhelming to a client as the project starts.

Limited rounds of revision

Most people offer 2-3 rounds of revision, with a few explaining that the last is a proofreading round. This in itself highlights a common problem — what is a revision and what is a rewrite?

Pros: this is a great way to limit how long you spend on revisions after you’ve delivered a draft, allowing you the brain space to start new projects.

Cons: what constitutes a round? And how many people can revise? It’s easy for the edges of this to become blurred. Clients can also feel concerned they won’t get to a draft they like within the number of rounds.

Limited time for revision

Some writers provide a set time period for revision, with unlimited revisions during this time.

Pros: Gives the client comfort that you will get to copy they ‘like’ no matter the state of the first draft. It also allows you to limit the time you need to keep a project top of mind, especially if you are running multiple client projects at a time.

Cons: there is a risk that a client is in your inbox constantly asking for tweaks. I also have dealt with the issue where there is no contact from the client until after the revision period, or I tell them I am ready to deliver, and they ask for an extension due to vacations etc. The follow ups and adjustments can add admin time to a process that is supposed to limit your engagement post project delivery.

And how *exactly do the revisions happen?

Most writers (and clients) assume that you ‘hand over the doc’, the client edits all over it, and then it arrives in your inbox and you have to deal with their revisions.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I like to live edit with clients (a minority of copywriters offer this). While this can feel intimidating if you’re not used to it, I will outline in a moment some of the common feedback problems it can solve.

When providing the copy, it is common to either present it, or more likely in these async days, record a video walking through the draft. This allows you to retain some control by explaining your process and reasoning for certain phrases or sections and directing the client to look at specific sections of the document.

Did you deliver a final draft?

This is the biggest shift I think we should make when delivering our copy. There is an unwritten assumption among clients that we are delivering something that is almost ready to be put up on the website or emailed to the audience.

And that means clients will zoom in and get picky about typos and annoyed by word choices, even if you are still thinking big picture and just trying to get the core messaging in place.

This disconnect can result in clients being disappointed in your attention to detail, which can result in a panic that you are not as ‘good’ as they had thought, and therefore you won’t deliver a quality final draft.

And that panic can lead to you getting defensive when your writing skills are questioned; of course you have still to proof it, you would never have it published as is.

This is where live editing can help. If you are looking for big picture edits — does this make sense, is this the actual pain point, have I described this technical thing correctly — you can make that clear on a call, direct the client to the specific areas you are unsure about, and redirect them if they start picking at semi colons and grammar choices.

A copywriter shared this article with me about the 30/60/90 process for obtaining feedback. Briefly, this outlines what kind of feedback to ask for and when. 30% feedback is high level only, not grammar or comma choices and comes early in the process. 90% feedback are the final ‘proofs’ you would expect before copy goes live.

And my fundamental takeaway from it is that the first feedback round happens way before a final draft.

By changing the word revision to feedback, you show the client this is part of the process of collaborative writing, not an end product to be picked apart for it’s faults. And hopefully we can bypass a lot of that defensiveness that comes from a misunderstanding of what we’re delivering and when.

How live editing helps

*I know most of you probably hate this idea. But I promise that it can be life changing to the editing process, especially if you have a picky client.

Big picture changes first

If clients are used to receiving drafts as ‘final’ deliverables to be tweaked, even explaining that this is an earlier stage in the process might not bypass their critical eye. That’s why I love live editing — you can explain, and make sure the client understands, the goal of the feedback before you start. And if they start to drift into pointing out typos, you can gently bring them back to the goal of this round of revisions.

The compulsion to edit

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

― H. G. Wells

The mere action of asking for revisals can make clients feel like they must do so. So sometimes clients suggest a new word when there was nothing wrong with the original word in the first place, they just needed to do as they were asked.

Live editing helps clients feel fully involved in the process without actually tweaking any copy if it isn’t needed.

Revisions that don’t get to the root of the problem

Most of the onboarding instructions I saw explained how to give constructive feedback, not just “I don’t like this.” But sometimes clients can’t explain what is right, they just know what you have is wrong. If they could articulate it correctly, they probably wouldn’t need us, after all.

By live editing, a client can tell you what they don’t like or aren’t sure about and you can work with them to understand why and find the real problem they need solved. Is it just a word choice that gives them the ick or have you fundamentally misunderstood what needs to be communicated here?

Control - who has it?

Not all clients understand your dual role as a strategist and provider of the output of that strategy. If they see you just as an order-taker, they may try to assert control by choosing words and phrases they like, without understanding why that won’t align with VoC or brand voice.

This is always a hard problem to work with, but if you end up with a client like this, being able to acknowledge their power while reminding them of the strategy can help massage their ego while keeping the effectiveness of the copy.

Once a client has rewritten their choice of phrase into a document, there is an element of permanence that can be hard to fight against. By talking through the issue with them, you can reach an understanding on what phrasing to use before anything gets changed on the deliverable.

Scope creep

We’ve all been there, where the client tries to change the strategy of the copy, not just the wording. While the 30/60/90 process is a great way to minimize this risk, it can also be easier to head this off through conversation, rather than having them try to add wording that changes the audience or offer into the draft, for example.

You can provide context, dig into why the strategy might be shifting, and steer them to see why this is a different project rather than flat out rejecting a change in the document.

Scared to write live? You don’t have to

I think some writers are scared to edit live with a client because they are worried they will have to come up with better wording on the spot and they don’t want that pressure. That they will make themselves look bad in front of their clients when the right phrase won’t come to mind.

But your client won’t ask that of you, and I rarely finish an edit in the call. Really this is an opportunity to let your client be heard, and for you to fully understand what they are trying to express.

Some changes/removals can be accepted outright, and it leaves the main revisions on the page so you can both see them clearly. Then you can talk through them, make notes, possibly try out some phrases or words if they come to mind, and tell the client you will think on it and come back with detailed edits later.

And more often than not, your client will back down from a revision once they’ve talked it through with you and understood your reasoning. Or one tweak of a word to something they prefer is enough to satisfy them.

I find that clients leave happier, and writers leave with less work to do to get the draft ready to go, and more of an idea of how to make it happen.

Live editing — it’s not just for clients

If you want to see how live editing works, then I’d love to help you edit your own work in that way! Not only will that help tidy your own work up and check the flow on the page truly supports the reader, but it will be a mini-workshop in how to run a live editing session. We’ll record it so you can watch it back when you are prepping.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖 Dungeon Crawler Carl. This is a dark humor, sci-fi, fantasy, action story using RPG/DandD as it’s structure. If that felt like a word salad as you read it, same. Even though I don’t dabble in role-playing games, a friend who does recommended it to me and I am hooked. Such a fun voice.

• 📺 Something Very Bad is Going to Happen. I finally finished this one. Not sure about the ending, but still thinking about it, which is surely a good sign.

• 🎧Foundling. This is a documentary podcast about a baby found in the UK on the verge of a country lane in 1987. I noticed that there is a narrative editor separate to the main editor, and that doesn’t surprise me. It is quite a complex story but doesn’t feel that way at all as you are led through it in each episode. So fascinating from a storytelling point of view as this could have been told so many different ways.

It’s time for recess

What’s your revision process and does it need to be more clear?

Now you’ve seen all the possible ways to lead clients through revisions, take a look at what you tell clients (and when) about the revision process. Do you have a process documented, and if not, would this be a good time to write one up?

Make some notes about what you hate about revising and why and when problems most often arise. Is there a way to start the process earlier or change how the client views feedback to make it easier for you?

It’s going to take you hours to wade through these revisions and you can already feel the defensive walls going up. The copy you delivered was good and now look, the client has ripped it to shreds.

How can you possibly piece it back together again?

Revision is usually one of our least favorite parts of the process. We spent hours drafting, backspacing, and tweaking the words to get them just right. To balance the metaphors, the pacing, and the format.

And now the clients have slashed through it all in green because ‘I don’t like that word’ and ‘my spouse who’s an English teacher said that’s not how you use ellipses’ and ‘em dashes are an AI tell.’ Even worse, there are lots of changes without any context as to why.

🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄

I’ve always been fascinated listening to screenwriters talk about the notes they get from the studio because

a) it seems these notes are really just client revisions in different clothes and

b) screenwriters often seem to come at them from a completely different place than copywriters.

I am thoroughly enjoying Something Very Bad is Going to Happen on Netflix and so I listened to the writer/showrunner Haley Z. Boston on the Scriptnotes podcast this week. And in it she talked about how she handled Netflix’s many notes on her script as a young first-time showrunner.

I’m going to get into what she said (and if this interests you, I’d encourage you to listen starting at the 31:11 mark — it’s only a few minutes) but first, let’s take a look at how and why revisions happen.

Control of the process — we don’t have it

Just like scriptwriters, we copywriters don’t have full control of the process. We hand over our draft and hope it makes it on to the screen exactly as we wrote it. But visuals, website constraints, web designer’s inputs, offer owner’s opinions, all will impact the final version of the copy out in the world.

If we refuse to change a word of our deliverable, what happens?

The client takes our work and then does what they want with it, probably butchering the words in the process. (They also will likely not work with us again due to that bad experience at the end of the project, and they certainly won’t refer us to others.)

So it’s in everyone’s interest to cooperate on revisions and find a final version that makes the client happy. And we still keep some control — if the client hates one phrase or needs a paragraph to be cut in half to fit the template on the page, then at least we still retain creative control if we are the ones to rewrite into the ‘next best’ option.

Where’s the reader?

What should be foremost in everyone’s mind: how the reader will receive it. Is it clear and engaging and does it encourage action? But with so many cooks in the kitchen who all have a slightly different focus (and ego) this can easily become lost.

We’ve all had the cross to bear of editing by committee I’m sure, and that’s sometimes just from a client team before it goes to other creatives like web or visual designers.

And this ego thing can hit us too. We might have drafted the most clever, lyrical line of copy that we think nails the offer. Any green lines through it can cause us physical pain at the thought of having to ‘kill our darlings.’

Why do we even offer revisions?

This might seem obvious, but think about it for a moment. The easy answer is that it’s a risk reversal for potential clients: ‘hire me and you’ll get great copy and if you don’t like it, I’ll fix it until you do.’

Our goal should be to make the whole project (of which the copy is a part) as successful as possible. There is a risk that we misunderstood parts of the messaging or offer as we onboarded the project. We get so deep in drafting the copy that we may think our wording is clear, but on first read by the ideal audience, it’s just confusing.

In something as complex and subjective as how we explain an offer to an audience, we need to acknowledge that we might not get it 100% right first time, and that doesn’t make us bad at our job.

So agreeing to revise with context allows us to keep our expert creative advice in the copy, to keep as close to the goal as possible even as changes are made.

When the revisions suck

So we’ve accepted that we will take revisions. We encourage the client’s input!

But then we get it back, and it sucks. Half of it has been rewritten and the other half has been deleted. That clever metaphor we spent hours crafting has been flung out.

We get defensive and sometimes we are right to be. Because sometimes those revisions that the client has made are plain bad.

Control what you can — the revision process

Next week I’m going to look at the ways copywriters control the revision process and how we might do it better. (If you’re reading this and haven’t already given me feedback on your revision process then I’d love for you to comment or email me!)

Network notes vs. client revisions

So let’s get back to the writer of the hit Netflix show and what she had to say about handling them:

“I try to address the [notes] that feel true to me . . . you don’t have to take their ideas, you have to diagnose the note behind the note and defend the choice you made.”

I think we often assume that we have two options — accept the revision or reject it. But Boston reveals this third way that is harder but is more likely to keep the project on track to it’s goal: to understand the client’s problem, not accept or reject their solution.

(And isn’t that our job as a copywriter, after all? To understand someone’s problem and how they talk about it, before offering a solution!?)

More next week on how to actually implement this into your revision process, and lots of information on how other copywriters build that process if you’re reading this and wondering ‘what process?’.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖 April Fools by Jess Lourey. This is the last in the Murder by Month romcom mystery series and I’m a bit sad it’s about to end. But it’s very much a counterpoint to:

• 📺 Something Very Bad is Going to Happen. So good and so scary, but I’m wondering if I should have picked a time when I’m single momming it to watch this one.

• 🎧Something Very Bad is Going to Happen on Scriptnotes. This episode was fascinating, not just for the ‘notes’ advice. I loved how they read out the initial first 2 pages of the script for episode 1 (not how it ended up on screen) and how vivid Boston’s voice was in the script.

It’s time for recess

Let’s think about revisions (I hear you shout ‘no,’ I promise this will be worth it).

Jot down some notes on how you talk to your client about revisions, both in your offer and as you onboard.

Now take a look at a recent piece of copy that you revised with a client. If possible, go back to the version of the draft with the first set of revisions from them.

How many revisions did you get? How many of them made sense to you? Did you accept them or have a conversation with the client about them? And how did the final draft look compared to this one?

*And if you really struggle with revisions, just know that you can send your draft to me for editing first! I will take that first reader’s approach and help sort out any issues before a client can rip through it with a red pen. And I can have your back and help mediate any conversations with clients once their revisions come in if you need that.

So my kid made him a poster this weekend:

CHARLIE’S CHIKEN EGGS

Small Eggs

Please return your egg cartons

The eggs are unwashed so you don’t half to keep them in the frige.

BUY NOW

I was pretty impressed by his marketing skills, not least because there were no ‘breakfast solutions’ to be seen.

I gave ChattyG the info from the poster and asked it to create me something similar. This is what I got:

HONESTLY GOOD EGGS 🥚
From Charlie

Small but mighty

Unwashed → stay fresh on your counter

Bring cartons back if you can ♻️

BUY NOW

There are 2 sneaky words ChattyG’s added, can you spot them?

Honestly and mighty. And they also happen to be the most abstract words. What does it mean for an egg to be mighty? Or honestly good?

Abstract vs. concrete words

Concrete words are those we can understand through our senses: egg, small, run, laugh, blue.

Abstract words are those that relate to an idea or belief and we generally can’t experience them in our bodies: justice, solution, freedom, process, empowerment.

We know from studies that concrete words have many benefits:

• We process them faster

• We are more likely to remember them

• They are more easily accessed in our brain

Why do concrete words have so much more of an impact on us? It is likely because we process these words in our body, as if we are personally experiencing them.

We acquire information through our senses (we know the orange is moldy because we see and smell the mold) and studies show that the same parts of our brain that light up when we use our senses light up when we read a word that relates to that sense. (You used the same part of your brain when you read about the moldy orange as I did when I experienced it in my kitchen. Blech.)

Take a look at this image which shows where specifically in the brain we process different words.

Lettuce scores high on visual and gustatory senses. We can picture it and imagine tasting it. Gasoline scores high on olfactory. (Can you smell it right now, as you read about this!? Is your nose curling up?)

Flexibility and song score highly because these are actions we take with our body. Justice, an abstract word, doesn’t hit as many senses or as strongly.

Concrete verbs and action

So we know readers have a deeper connection when we use concrete words. But there are two ways that we can apply this even more strongly in our copy.

One is with our actions (including our CTAs). When we read this phrase:

Charlie ran forward, just catching the egg as it rolled off the counter

the parts of our body that would do the running and catching are activated.

The more we can bring concrete verbs into our copy, the more our readers will feel it. Maybe you think this is too obvious — aren’t all verbs concrete?

Well, no, but I don’t want to get too technical on you. But more importantly, we often use writing structures that minimize concrete verbs:

We studied the results and our supplement helped the most

A study showed that our supplements provided the most benefit

When we are trying to sound more formal (and maybe professional) we often use this technique. It creates a layer of separation between the reader and writer (I think because we lose that body connection in the active verb).

In sentence one above, the verbs are study and help. In sentence two, they are show and provide. Can you feel that distance as you read it?

The more specific, the better

But it’s not just that we need to use concrete words so the reader’s senses can help them process our copy. On to technique two: the more specific we are, the more the sensory parts of our brain light up.

If I tell you the orange is moldy, your brain will trigger more strongly than if I tell you the fruit is moldy. (And whatever you are picturing, it was worse than that.)

So why aren’t we more concrete and specific?

I don’t think I’m telling you anything groundbreaking here. Just backing up something we know with the science (and I’ve got to say, I love to see just how strongly our brain connects specific senses to words).

But I edit copy every day where vague, abstract language is used. We offer a ‘sales solution’ instead of ‘an app that will keep your calendar full with sales calls.’

BS jargon (i.e. business speak) loves to be vague. Why? Sometimes it’s legal: we can’t actually promise a higher ROI or a full calendar.

But it’s often a C-suite level problem. A fear of the power of one, that if we talk to person A specifically, we are ignoring person B. The idea that it’s better to dilute our message so it gets to more people. The fear that we will lose out financially if we intentionally restrict our customer pool.

But we know (and science like this proves) that when we dilute our message, it might reach more people, but they won’t react as strongly to it. And when our attention is pulled at in every direction 24/7, it’s our job to create the strongest reaction we can.

I can’t always help with this (although if I’m your editor, I will happily go to bat for you in the comments section of a draft and explain to your client why you’re right!).

Agreeing to water down your copy to get through your last round of revisions and the project off your desk without conflict? That is a short-term win.

But will it perform well for your client? If sales don’t go as well as hoped, the client probably won’t come back to you for their next sales page.

I believe it is your job to use the best set of words, in the best order, to sell for your client. And if the client, who doesn’t understand how you’ve chosen and constructed the words questions them, it is your duty to explain the risk of diluting them.

You won’t win every argument on this. I’ve put some shitty copy out into the world that was diluted by committee to the point I won’t share it in my portfolio.

But if you talk strategy with clients about funnels, client retention, and LTV, then you can’t ignore this essential copy technique as part of that strategy too.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖 It was the best of sentences, it was the worst of sentences. by June Casagrande. This book has got me fired up about sentence structure and how essential it is to marketing. See above post!

• 📺 The House of Guinness. I’m a bit late to this one, but enjoying it so far. Feeling very Peaky Blinders.

• 🎧The Girlboss Apology Tour by This is a summit looking at the Girlboss era, what we can learn about marketing form it, and where we might want to go next. I paid a ridiculously small sum of money to a nonprofit and got it delivered as a private podcast feed, which I love. I can feel my steps harden into a march as I listen on my daily walks.

It’s time for recess

Let’s hit up those senses.

Go find a piece of copy you’ve written (or if you’re looking for a fully-loaded BS website, you can check this one out.)

Circle all the concrete words and cross out all the abstract ones. How much is left!? Rewrite it to be as concrete as possible — don’t worry about selling right now, just go full sensory overload.

Now bring some balance back and think about marketing techniques, but keep as many concrete words (especially verbs) as you can. How different is it?

PS if you want to share, I’d love to see where you end up with this!

PPS My recess recently has been considering how to turn this kind of content into trainings that marketing departments and in-house copywriters could use to build the writing techniques they use to market. Interested? Let me know, I’d love to chat.

I’m reading The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel at the moment for a business book club. It’s . . . fine. There are some interesting insights. I would say I’ve been skimming pretty heavily because it’s not exactly new information.

The chapter format is pretty formulaic, which I see a lot in the business/self-help category these days. I’m sure you’ll recognize it as soon as I lay it out for you:

• someone’s story (usually historical figure, famous or otherwise)

• some insight about the story

• second story

• insights about how both stories are connected

After an introduction, there are 19 chapters that are laid out just like this, each covering a key rule the author thinks you should follow. And while the stories are interesting and the insights useful (if not brand new) it all gets a bit repetitive.

The author’s voice is strong in this book. There is lots of him in it. Lots of him lecturing, telling you why one person’s story ended well or badly. He feels like your economics lecturer (or maybe your dad!?) telling you how to be sensible with your money.

And then it got to chapter 20, the last in the book, titled Confessions: The psychology of my own money.

It started like the rest, with a story about Sandy Gottesman, a billionaire investor, who famously asks one question when interviewing for his team: “What do you own, and why?” He doesn’t want to know what they would advise clients, he wants to know what they do with their own money.

This chapter is Housel explaining how and why he breaks many of the rules laid out in the last 19 chapters that he advised us to follow.

Chasing the highest returns or leveraging my assets to live the most luxurious life has little interest to me. Both look like games people do to impress their friends, and both have hidden risks. I mostly just want to wake up every day knowing my family and I can do whatever we want to do on our own terms. Every financial decision we make revolves around that goal.

Explaining why he breaks a rule is so much interesting than learning the rule in the first place.

I know why the structure of this book was chosen, but I would love to have seen it written with this clear POV from the beginning. Did some people, like me, skim and never reach chapter 20? Did they see the lecturer and zone out, missing the chat at the bar when it was done, giving them the ideas that would stick for years afterward?

In this chapter the stories aren’t about billionaire investors. They are much closer. About his father, who quit his stressful ER doctor position one day when he’d had enough. Who had sufficient money in the bank to make that decision without worry. And about Housel and his wife eking out a life during college and how those lifestyle decisions still impact their life decades later.

I felt more invested (ha!) in these stories because Housel was more invested. After a rhythm of 19 shallow stitches in an out of people’s stories for a paragraph or two, we finally dive deeper. Now the insights are connected to a person I’ve been sitting with for hours; the author of the book.

If you’re thinking about writing a business/self-help book for yourself or as a ghostwriter for your clients, it can be easy to jump to this story/lesson, story/lesson format. If you or your client get AI to help, it will undoubtedly suggest this format, because it’s what has been successful for the past 5 - 10 years now.

But before you do, take a moment to think about how and where you will add your point of view. Like a good copywriter, think about where (and what) the hook is, and don’t assume every reader will make it to close the loop at the end.

Sometimes this hard structural work can only happen after you’ve neatly outlined the story/lesson format and written a first draft. And the idea of shifting everything might seem overwhelming. But with a good developmental editor (that’s me!) it doesn’t have to be that much work.

*Interested in working on a book-length project? I have a couple of clients about to complete drafts and look for publishers, so I will have space starting in May for more projects like this.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. As well as chapter 20, I also loved Chapter 18 on why stories are more powerful than statistics. Might come back to break this one down too!

• 📺 Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. This series has some amazing storytelling, and I was intrigued to see them choose a movie-length and not TV series-length format for the latest episode.

• 🎧The Ezra Klein Show on Consciousness. Phew-boy, this was an interesting one. Did you know some plants can be anesthetized like humans?

It’s time for recess

Let’s tell your story

If you’ve ever wondered about packaging up your life stories into a book, let’s play with structure for a bit. Whether it’s a classic memoir or you want to show your framework as a lead magnet, we all know you need to add stories.

And while you can, and probably should, use stories of others to explain your worldviews, readers will really connect when you bring your own stories into the spotlight.

Choose a story from your life that you know would be in a book you’d publish. Write it out, without thinking about how it connects to your larger worldview first. Then write your insights (lecture style) and use your story as the supporting argument.

Which format do you like best?

Corporate America’s latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history: storyteller.

I think this push to story in selling is for a number of reasons, including that badly created AI content usually misses a point of view, opinion, or person at the center.

We’re craving character, as we should. Story is how we have always modeled making difficult choices. Without it as a central part of decision making, we can read all the informational or finger-wagging content we want (or is foisted upon us), but we will remain rudderless, struggling to know what to do.

And if we don’t know what to do, we won’t take action.

Direct response marketers traditionally turn their noses up at story, worried that it adds bloat and takes away from the conversion aspects of a sales funnel. But I think what’s crucial here is that you could get away with no story at the bottom of a funnel, the final place to click, only when story had been used at many points further up the funnel.

We’re slowly stripping story out from all levels of the funnel and it’s leaving a sanitized experience at the sales page.

As always, I take insights on how to sell from the world of story, particularly podcasts on scriptwriting. This week’s come from a Scriptnotes roundup episode on endings.

Selling to a problem-aware audience

Your audience has tried a variety of solutions and are frustrated and skeptical. If you tell them your solution will work, they are immediately on the defensive, suspicious of just another thing that they don’t believe will work for them specifically.

And this is why classic endings of story can work so well for this audience. Usually at the end of a story, a character takes a leap of faith and does something that they could not have done at the beginning. Think Luke Skywalker changing from scared farm boy who initially wouldn’t go with Obi-Wan to Alderaan to risking his life by flying into the Death Star.

Usually during the story, the character learns things about themselves and the world that lets them see themselves differently. These learning experiences are what allows them to take a leap of faith and attempt a thing (successfully) that they could never have at the beginning.

You need your audience to take a leap of faith and try this new thing. If you show a character taking a leap and succeeding then you are modeling a successful payoff. Now instead of telling your audience that your solution will work if they try it and hoping you can bypass their skepticism through logic, you leave them to come to the conclusion it is worth trying.

When you’re selling a transformation that you promise will ‘stick’

Problem-aware audiences often have another problem; they have tried solutions before that worked for a while, until they didn’t.

Think the 17th planning system you bought that you were sure would organize your life but you abandoned after just a few weeks (I am feeling personally attacked as I write this).

For this audience, the issue is not getting them to believe your solution will work, it’s getting them to believe it will ‘stick’ and their life will be permanently transformed.

And this is why learning about the denouement is crucial. It is the part of the story that happens after the plot has been tied up.

In Inception it is not when they succeed in planting the idea in Robert’s mind, it is when Dom walks away from the spinning top without knowing if it will fall or not. In the Lion King, it is not Simba winning the fight with Scar, but restoring the Pride Lands

Often in a story, the denouement is set a few months or even years later. This is to show that the change in the main character, that allows them to do the thing at the end that they couldn’t do at the beginning, has ‘stuck.’

Simba hasn’t just won the title of King, he also has taken on the responsibility as leader for his lands and subjects. In Star Wars, it is not just that Luke saved that day, it is that the rebel cause can now continue, as we see in the medal ceremony.

If you want to show your audience that your solution will ‘stick,’ you can’t just show it solving the problem on day 1, you need to show what happens after that.

And once again, modeling that success leaves your audience to imagine how it will feel to finally have a solution that sticks long term.

*No selling from me, or things to read or watch or listen to.

Because the things I’m listening to this week are a huge number of bands at Treefort Music Festival which is running in my hometown of Boise this week!

It started because my demographic (i.e. straight women in relationships in their 30s and 40s) are loving the show and talking about it a lot on the socials. And I was immediately intrigued by the depth of emotion being displayed around a 6-episode series that seemed to just be a smutty show about hockey players.

Of course I had to watch.

The first sex scene happens just 17 minutes into episode 1. So smutty, for sure. I settled in for a fun show.

And yet, by the end of episode 5 I was doing that ugly sobbing that leaves you with a swollen face and an inability to breathe properly. And it wasn’t because it was sad, far from it. Goddammit, I was just watching for hot guys, why was I being emotionally destroyed in the process!?

At the heart of the story

The conversations coming out of this show, specifically for straight women, are about:

• Emotional intimacy and how it connects to sexual intimacy

• What true consent looks and sounds like, especially at the beginning of relationships

• How partners connect when a patriarchal power dynamic isn’t infused into, well, everything

If that sounds much deeper than you had expected from Sex and the City on ice, you would be right. Because the storytelling in this show is ON POINT. If you know me, you know that Breaking Bad is my favorite TV show for its spectacular, layered storytelling, but Heated Rivalry may surpass it.

Why storytelling sells

I get a lot of pushback from copywriters that storytelling is a branding not conversion technique. A lot of writers don’t trust that a story about someone else will connect enough with the reader if the details aren’t similar enough to their life and their problem. And if they don’t connect, they won’t take a conversion action.

But Heated Rivalry blows that out of the water. [insert smutty joke here] Because the fans reheating the show (the show-specific term for rewatching) 5 - 10 times per episode aren’t closeted gay men at the prime of their hockey careers as they prepare for the Olympics.

They are connecting emotionally with the characters and the development of their relationship. The fears they keep hidden and the risks they weigh up in response to what is happening around them.

A sales page is 1:many not 1:1

When I’m editing sales copy, I’m always looking for those ‘head-nodding’ moments. For me, these are when the copy has details — it’s specific enough that we can create an image of it in our mind.

And it’s not that the details have to be relatable; it’s that the emotions of the situation have to feel true to the reader.

A conversion event where you talk 1:1 to your reader — that is a sales call. Then you can provide context and share an example that is specific to the details of their life.

But a sales page cannot scale that 1:1 experience directly. We need a conversion action that can be taken by hundreds, if not thousands of people, who all have different detailed lives.

That is why the head-nodding moment needs to connect to the emotions everyone feels regardless of the details of their life.

How do you know which story to tell to get the head-nodding moment?

This starts with classic copywriting research, my friend. You interview past customers, you read testimonials and reviews, you ask your client to tell you stories about who they’ve worked with.

And your job is to extrapolate from those stories the key emotions each person felt and figure out how to represent them in a specific story that will allow others to access those same emotions.

Easy, right!?

This is something that takes years of experience to spot (and you get better at when you immerse yourself in storytelling to see how others do it). For those who are good at it, they often can’t really break it down, which can lead to more frustration for junior copywriters. Where does this magic come from!?

And this is when AI comes in (and it shouldn’t)

I have spent more time than I would like editing copy primarily created by AI, and I sense that people are trying to use it to overcome this friction of how to find the right story.

Don’t get me wrong, AI can be useful in a number of ways as you research and draft a sales page. But not for this.

AI could help you spot patterns in the stories you collect, but what I see it doing wrong is:

• removing the detail and generalizing to the point of being meaningless. It won’t have anything ‘wrong’ in it for anyone, but in the process it won’t have anything particularly ‘right’ in it either. Which means we gloss over the copy and don’t connect emotionally. No head-nodding moment.

• identifying the wrong patterns. Yes, every story you collected might have involved people journaling at breakfast and in the process realizing what they needed to change in their life. But that doesn’t mean that breakfast is the key detail here. We don’t get to the root of the emotion by setting our sales story at the breakfast bar, so no head-nodding moment here, either.

What if we started with emotion first?

That overly smooth copy that sounds good but means nothing? It was always the sign of an inexperienced copywriter who didn’t know to dig in and find specific ‘sticky’ details. But with AI it is becoming so much more common.

Another sign of low quality copy, whether that is from a person or AI, is starting with a template and filling it in from beginning to end. Most good copywriters will tell you they write the headline last (or at least don’t choose the final version until then). Because we use different formulas at different times, depending on how we need to shape the piece to lead to a conversion.

I listened to the screenwriter for Project Hail Mary on a podcast this week, talking about starting his ideas with ‘beats,’ which for him are just moments he responds to that he wants to see in the movie.

He puts them all up on a board and only once he’s collected them all does he start to create the script.

He wrote for the TV show Daredevil and while brainstorming one episode, this happened";

That was the beat. Matt in dumpster. We go, “What is that?” I’m like, “I don’t know, but I like the idea of starting an episode early with our main character nearly beaten to death in a dumpster, and let’s just see.”

From this level of detail and things he connects with, he moves up to shaping scenes around them, which connect the stakes, who does what to who and why and when. And from that he can finally structure the scenes into the shape of the movie.

And it led me to wonder, what if instead of starting with a formula like AIDA, mad-libbing the headline, then the attention section, then the interest and so on, we started with the detail of the emotion.

What do we need our readers to feel to connect them to the stakes, who does what to who and why and when?

Because that is what causes the head-nodding moments that cause the conversion. Instead of shoe-horning emotion into a framework (or worse, not adding it because it doesn’t fit or we’re scared it’s too specific) what if we built the framework to fit the emotions we need the reader to feel to take the conversion action?

PS If you want to do this but you’re not sure how, hit me up. I can help you take your messy notes of beats and help you build a structure that will work.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 🎧Beats to Scenes with Drew Goddard. This is the podcast episode I referenced above.

• 📖Parallel Secrets. I read the second book of this season as an ARC reader and loved it so much I bought the first one.

• 📺Heated Rivalry. Still reheating this one (for research, obvs).

It’s time for recess

Let’s find that emotion!

This is a great exercise as you go to draft a sales page. Alternatively, you could take a sales page for a product or service you know well.

Before reading or writing anything, make a note of all the emotions you want your readers to experience (you could read this post on Emotion Mapping for more advice on emotions) and any moments you know you want to describe that readers can connect to.

Once you’ve made your notes, think about what order you want the reader to experience them. I like to do this on a whiteboard and move the notecards around physically, but you could also use a whiteboard app like Miro.

What copywriting framework does this suggest? Are there any sections that are missing these visceral experiences that you need to think about more before you write?

If you are looking at a pre-written sales page, only now examine what framework it used and if any of your ‘beats’ lined up with what was described on the page.

And while most articles will tell you (quite rightly) that you need both brand voice and conversion techniques to write good copy, the truth is one usually needs to take precedence at any given time. And that’s what I’m interested in digging into today — who would actually win, at each part of the copy?

So let me tell you the working rules I came up with this week use when thinking about this:

Type of Copy/Content

• The closer to the sale/the lower the funnel, the more conversion principles should win. So sales page, landing pages and launch emails will follow conversion rules more closely than a blog or newsletter email that can lean on brand voice more.

• How closely does the brand voice align to the conversion principles in question? For example, a brand voice with naturally short sentences will more easily fit headline styles than a brand voice that runs long in sentence and paragraph length.

Places We Leverage Conversion within the Copy

• Headlines, subheads, crossheads. These are written to be scanned and to encourage movement down the page. They usually have to be short and have a lot of jobs to do so brand voice is lower down the list.

• Above the fold/Hero section. Generally this copy is made mostly of headlines, subheads, and eyebrow copy (so see above). If body copy is included, it usually runs short.

• Bullet lists of features and benefits. Again copy is short here so is already doing a lot of heavy lifting.

• CTAs. Following the short principle (again) but also, this is one of the closest pieces of copy to the sale or action, so the pressure to ensure conversion is highest here

Here’s an example from above the fold on Alex Catoni’s Copy Posse website:

While it follows a standard format for eyebrow, headline and subhead, look at all those word choices that display her brand voice!

And here’s above the fold on one of her sales pages:

Now the copy is much more ‘buttoned up’ and focuses specifically on conversion principles with a clear CTA and no brand voice elements (although personality comes through in the visuals).

Places We Can Focus More on Brand Voice

• About section. These often feel like a letter direct from the seller to the audience. It might shift to first person if the rest of the sales page or website is in third, and generally feels more intimate. When talking about what a brand or person thinks or feels, brand voice should naturally come through more strongly.

• FAQs. This is another section that often feels more intimate, as if the seller is answering the questions directly. Because this is a place not just to address objections, but also to reassure a reader that they are in the right place, voice should come through more strongly.

Ways to add brand voice in conversion-heavy sections

• Don’t! Brand voice is how we express brand personality through language. In some sections like the hero, there is very little ability to trade words or structure once you’ve added conversion principles. So you might find the visuals need to do the heavy lifting to display personality. Later, when you have more space, you can bring in brand voice.

• Word choice. If you are limited in how many words you can use, the only way to add voice is by switching words. Is there a synonym that you could use that would more accurately reflect the voice? This might be a latinate vs. Anglo-Saxon choice — see this section from a Tony Robbins product:

  

  For more on the difference between latinate and Anglo-Saxon words, check out this post:

• Sentence structure. If your brand voice allows it, you might want to focus on sentence structure. For example, I edit for a brand where sentence fragments are defined in their voice guide as standard for headlines. This naturally leads to two fragment sentences in a headline (where other brands might use a colon or em dash). The repetition of this style makes framing headlines easy from a conversion principle and the consistency keeps the brand voice clear.

• Punctuation, emojis, formatting. Some voices (mine!) use a lot of parenthetical asides. Some brands use emojis, or punctuation in the CTAs. Some. Would. Never. This can be an easy way to splash some brand voice in without messing with conversion principles.

If you’re documenting a brand voice

• Document conversion sections in brand voice. Particularly for a brand that will have a lot of sales pages and launches, it is worth documenting specifically how conversion sections like headlines, CTAs, etc. sound in brand voice.

• Educate your client. If you are working with someone who is uncomfortable with sales copy, it might be worth talking through various options of conversion sections (headlines, fascination bullets etc.) to find ones they like. I often find that asking them why they like or don’t like it will reveal some brand values/personality aspects that justify the choices.

  For example, they might prefer that loftier latinate verb choice, they may prefer to focus on the positive of the benefit than sit in the pain of the before state, or put a parenthetical aside or hedged subhead in to soften a declarative statement. This is especially useful if you suspect (or want to pitch) that you will be using the brand voice guide to write for them, as it can reduce the back and forth in drafts by pre-clearing styles.

And as always — if you need help, I’m here! My editing support includes documents like brand voice and messaging guides.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Night by Elie Wiesel. My 14 year old is reading this in English for their section on the Holocaust. It is absolutely devastating but such an important read.

• 📺 The Night Agent. I love thriller TV series based on books, especially when there are multiple seasons. It is exciting, but also safe, because we know they are not going to kill off the main character!

It’s time for recess

Let’s sell that brand voice!

I love to collect sales pages where brand voice is on display, because when done well, it is usually the sign of a strongly written piece of copy. Next time you see a sales page for a brand you know well and it has very little brand voice, think about how you would layer it in without breaking the conversion principles.

We registered with the local doctor’s surgery, which was in a street called Bellies Brae. Now, I knew the word ‘brae,’ which is standard Scots for hill. But ‘bellies’ was new to me and my family.

Particularly my mum, who wouldn’t say the name of the street, and hated hearing us say it. Because she thought it was rude. My mum assumed Bellies meant ‘belly.’ (Why she felt she couldn’t say the word ‘belly’ is a question I would love to have asked my grandma.)

But I found out years later that ‘bellie’ is actually a local variation of the word Baillie, an old Scots term for the local judge.

My parents lived in that town for about 20 years and for most of that time my mum was uncomfortable saying the name of a street that no one else thought twice about.

Humans are not objective about words

Most people assume my job as an editor is subjective, but the truth of it is, we all have feelings about words. They don’t always make sense (because, duh, feelings) and we don’t always even realize we have them (because, duh, people).

It’s easier when the words relate to something external. If I see a cat, I can tell you there is a cat, and ask you to write a post telling people about the cat.

But when the things we need to write about and sell are interior in any way, like thoughts, feelings, or insights, then it gets much harder.

Your client has to express the things inside their head accurately to you and then you have to express them accurately to an audience. And every person in that chain from your client to you to the hundreds or thousands of people in the audience probably have different subjective opinions about words.

Brand voice as therapy

Particularly for personal brands, spending time digging into their brand voice often means opening a little window into their psyche, and not just for me. More than once someone has cried in a brand voice finder or POV finder session.

Most people don’t think deeply about word choice (sorry to break it to you). So when you ask them to tell you what they think about a word, sometimes feelings come up they haven’t addressed before (or at least not connected to that word before).

Some are proud to be seen as controversial. Some hate the idea that they are seen as someone who kicks up a fuss. Some want to be seen in a parent role. Some have major parent issues and can’t bear the thought of being in that role for anybody in their life, much less potential clients.

It goes beyond words

And this is something that I see on all levels of brand voice, not just words.

Some people were publicly shamed by their English teacher for incorrect grammar and so can’t bear to see a sentence start with ‘and.’

Some people believe you need to prove your education in your writing and will only write long sentences and paragraphs that look horrible on mobile.

Different generations, genders, races, and even cities can have default styles that they haven’t examined; and it’s your job as their copywriter to do so.

Why this kind of brand voice therapy is worth it

I’ll dig into why this is useful for you as a copywriter in a moment. But first, I want to tell you just how often clients tell me they ‘feel seen’ after a session where I ask them to think about what words mean to them. (I wish they would say they ‘felt heard’ but VOC is what it is!)

And this relief that someone has seen the authentic person under the marketing? Doesn’t come from me making observations; it’s really that they finally see themselves better.

Often after writing a voice guide for a personal brand, they’ll ask me to write copy for them, because I truly ‘get’ them and what they are trying to do. Even if the voice guide was to help them explain their voice to any copywriter.

Unlocking language choices allows you to find loyal clients who recommend you to all their biz friends.

When brand voice and conversion copy rules conflict

So what do you do if your client loves run-on sentences but you need to write a snappy intro with a strong hook?

You explain your expertise in copy through the lens of their brand voice.

“I know you love to get into the nuance of a topic, which makes your sentences longer. We will do that in the middle of the email, but we need to use conversion techniques for the introduction, which means I will be shortening your normal sentence length considerably for this section.”

Instead of your client being defensive when they see a draft that they don’t like, you validate their choices and show them where they are appropriate (and where they are not). Now they can feel seen and (hopefully) accept your expert recommendations.

What are your own brand voice rules?

And let’s not forget that you will have default word associations that you may not have examined. (If you haven’t, go do that now! If you want to run a Voice Finder session to help you uncover them, I’d be happy to help.)

Understanding your own emotional responses to words allows you to look at client brand voice choices more objectively. And crucially, not just write like yourself but truly take on a client’s brand voice when writing for them.

Do you need a brand voice guide for every project?

It is hard for me to say no to this question! Even if you don’t document it, you should be thinking about your client’s word choices as you write like them. But certainly, if you are working on a big project with multiple or high stakes deliverables, you should be documenting these choices so you can use them consistently.

And a brand voice guide is an easy upsell to a client right now when they can input it into their AI of choice to help with future content.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Parallel Peril by Maria Lynn Barrs. I’m an ARC reader for this mystery and I’m loving it so far. Going to be ordering the first book in the series as soon as I have finished this one and turned in my authentic review!

• 📺 A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms I love when series show you characters in a different light in prequels or sequels. There can be so much more nuance when we get to examine different families in the GoT world over different time periods to see how they got to where they did.

It’s time for recess

Let’s find your voice!

It is hard to do this alone (this is why you hire me to do a voice finder session!) but you can gain some insights by analyzing your writing. And FWIW, this is not the kind of thing you can ask ChattyG to help with. We need your unique opinions on words, not what anyone else (robot or otherwise) thinks about them.

Keep a notebook by the computer as you work and start noting any words that make you feel something. Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter, but if a word makes you pause, jot it down, and if possible add some details about how you feel and why.

As you get more used to this exercise, you’ll probably find you have feelings about an increasing number of words. Soon you’ll be like me and struggle to make it through a sentence without analyzing your childhood (cackling laughter but also very much some sobbing, I heartily apologize).

When I talk to business owners about voice, especially the small, local businesses I work with a lot, they say they just want something out in the world about what they do. Their website, or some emails, or a sales page.

But I usually end up talking to them about funnels (except I don’t call them that). All those words on the internet lead eventually to someone meeting them in person (or at least on a Zoom).

Marketing’s job is not just to shout loud about what you do, but make that transition down the funnel (where for small, personal brands that involves human to human interaction) feel seamless. The ‘you’ they see online is the same ‘you’ they meet in your office or in your Google Meet.

Which is why brand voice goes much deeper than tone.

What’s conflict resolution got to do with it?

recently wrote about conflict resolution for copywriters in his Nothing Held Back Facebook group, arguing that your personal style of conflict resolution will impact how you handle writing about objections and arguing your case in sales copy.

But it made me think about how a brand (especially a personal brand) handles conflict resolution. That is what should be apparent in copy, not the copywriter’s personal style.

I have started noticing this and documenting it in brand voice guides for clients, including ones they upload to AI. It helps writers (robots or not) understand how to pace and structure arguments and objections.

And why does it matter?

For a couple of reasons:

1. What’s your personal conflict resolution style? As with all things voice, it helps to understand your own default style choices before you try to mimic a brand voice. If your conflict resolution style is the opposite of your client’s, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to write like them, but it may take more drafts than normal to move fully into brand voice.

2. What’s your client’s conflict resolution style? You want to showcase it where appropriate and you can use it to handle client objections to copy, too (more on all on this in a moment).

The 5 Conflict Resolution Styles

So let’s dig in. These are generally seen as moving along two axes: cooperativeness and assertiveness:

1. Collaborating (assertive, cooperative)

2. Competing (assertive, uncooperative)

3. Compromising (intermediate on both)

4. Accommodating (unassertive, cooperative)

5. Avoiding (unassertive, uncooperative)

What does each conflict resolution style mean for brand voice?

While I’m still working out what generalities apply across each resolution style, I have so far come up with these tones and arguing ‘styles’

Collaborating

• Voice: Empathetic, open, transparent, proactive, assertive, analytical, balanced, assertive

• Style: Seeks to satisfy both sides, often using deep dialogue to find a lasting solution. Invites reader into discussion

• Pacing: slower as the brand looks for connections to make resolution last

• Potential transitions: “here’s how I see it . . .” “I might be wrong, but . . .” “I know it might feel uncomfortable to hear this, but . .”

Competing

• Voice: Authoritative, firm, direct, confident, combative, firm, demanding, can be hurtful when goes too far

• Style: Takes a stand and protects its position without considering opposing viewpoints

• Pacing: fast without spending a lot of time considering reader’s position

• Potential transitions: “you might not like to hear it, but . .” “here’s the truth no one else will tell you . . .”

Compromising

• Voice: Pragmatic, reasonable (as this is the most reasonable position, there is little to document in terms of how the voice sounds during conflict resolution)

• Style: Seeks a quick, mutually acceptable solution that partially satisfies both parties

• Pacing: this depends on the conflict. Sometimes a fast concession is best, sometimes the brand will want to go slower and learn more in an effort to find a good compromise

• Potential transitions: “I know you might not agree but” “Even if you don’t agree, you can hopefully see that . . .”

Accommodating

• Voice: Conciliatory, helpful, submissive, quiet, polite, apologetic, supportive, can be resentful when forced to talk about a conflicting situation or topic

• Style: Gives in to the other party to maintain harmony, placing the relationship over the immediate issue

• Pacing: depends on the conflict, more likely to be slower as the brand considers the reader’s position, but often looking to move quickly to resolution

• Potential transitions: “moving on, we can see. . .”

Avoiding

• Voice: Neutral, detached, silent, calm, quiet, polite, frustrated when forced to talk about a conflicting situation or topic

• Style: Withdraws from the conflict, delaying action, or ignoring the issue, sometimes hoping it resolves itself.

• Pacing: often fast in an effort to bypass conflict completely. Can be slower when actively delaying making a decision

• Potential transitions: “We don’t need to go into why this happens . . .”

Understanding a Client’s Objections to Sales Copy through Conflict Resolution Style

If a client is new to using sales copy to market their services or products, they can often push back on the ‘heavy selling’ style of conversion copy. Sometimes that comes out as telling you they don’t like some phrasing in your draft or “it’s not how I would say it.”

Understanding a client’s conflict resolution style can help you decide when to push for what you know to be the appropriate conversion techniques as an expert (i.e. an avoiding client who doesn’t like to raise objections proactively) versus accepting that you haven’t got the brand voice right (you like to move fast but the client would naturally spend longer asking the reader questions before moving to the CTA).

I don’t use AI in my own writing, but I know my clients do. I believe it is my job as their voice and messaging strategist to ensure the inputs to AI are as accurate as possible to ensure the outputs are specific and differentiated from their competitors. And that the voice feels like the human(s) inside the brand that their audience will ultimately meet down the funnel.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans. I’m reading this for a business book club. It feels like the ‘design principle’ is really a lot of brainstorming and strategy thinking, but I’m looking forward to trying some of the exercises.

• 🎞️ Wuthering Heights. I loved it and while I know there’s been a lot of criticism about the faithfulness to the original, Emerald Fennell’s adaptation is her point of view on the story based on where we are in 2026. As always, POV is what makes something more interesting!

• 📻 The Shelf Aware podcast and Long Game podcast. I’m fascinated by how deep podcasters are going into analyzing the Heated Rivalry characters as if they were real people. So much that is useful for us copywriters about the emotions below the surface.

It’s time for recess

Let’s fight it out (or not!)

If you haven’t already, spend some time identifying your own conflict resolution style. If you’re writing conversion copy for your own business, what does that style mean? Does it slow or speed up your pacing? Do you jump past objections or lean in to demanding action from your audience?

One thing I didn’t get into in the main piece was Alen Sultanic’s suggestion that once you understand your conflict resolution style, you can identify where you need to balance it out. Now you see your style and consider it in relation to conversion copy techniques, do you spot any areas you should work to ‘balance’ next time you draft?

“He suggested I spend $100 a day on ads, can you believe it? I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Does he know where you are in your business?” I asked.

“Yeah, the first call went great, he said he would put me in the beginner section. But then on the second call, he started telling us beginners about these people who grew their businesses to $100k a month. And then I was out. Why did he keep telling us these stories? I’d just be happy with consistent $10k months.”

Selling the transformation

We’re told to ‘sell the transformation’ but if we make the jump too big, then it’s hard for the audience to see or believe that the transformation is possible. It has to fit into the person’s life in a way that feels possible.

When we hear stories of influencers living in their car then making millions just a few months later, it doesn’t cause us to trust them. Sometimes (often?) it causes us to turn away.

So how can we know when the jump is too big and when it is ‘just right’?

Why we’re using story structure wrongly

When I edit sales copy, I often see copywriters tell the story of the transformation the wrong way.

They miss one stage completely, the very one that helps an audience feel that the transformation is possible for them. And another part of story, that we are more familiar with, often gets minimized to the point it feels absent. Both these issues can cause a lack of conversions.

And here’s why: We’re told that story is based on a three act structure, but there are actually four parts and they are all necessary.

Story is not linear

Story is not a linear process that pushes us out of it to an ‘outcome’ but is a spiral, circular motion that keeps the audience within the story even once they have succeeded.

I say this even as I use a linear XY chart to plot story arcs, see this post:

Everyone talks about story as a three-act, linear process but it is not what happens on the page (or in the telling).

KM Weiland (a story structure specialist I love) discussed the four parts on her podcast and blog this week and I couldn’t help but see how this applied to copy.

The four parts (as I have interpreted them for sales copy):

1. The current world—where your audience is now before they buy your offer

2. The processing stage— where a client learns how to solve their problem

3. The transformation—where a client is after the problem is solved and their life is transformed to include all the benefits of the offer

4. The new normal—where your client integrates what they learned and how they transformed into their every day life

A three-act structure doesn’t detail that fourth essential part. My client who is struggling with her funnel will fundamentally still be the same person dealing with the same personal issues and life after working with a business coach. She has to picture how she will integrate a more successful business into that life. And our job as copywriters is to show that to her through story and not just stop at the transformation.

What we really mean by trust

Part two is also key, and while we’ve always known it as part of that three act structure, it is often de-emphasized or removed completely in sales storytelling.

This is the essential, alchemical nature of what our clients do (especially when they are coaches and consultants) that leads to the transformation they promise.

We know not to ‘give away the farm’ of their work to avoid the audience thinking they can DIY the solution. But promising the transformation without any explanation of how they’ll get there doesn’t work either.

The audience has probably already tried things to solve their problem and failed. So they will be naturally distrustful of any promise of transformation.

Your client’s process must involve something different to allow their clients to succeed this time. So to gain the audience’s trust, you must provide some information or evidence about the process.

This is why we describe frameworks and repeatable systems on sales pages.

It’s also why we add the ‘it’s not your fault’ wording—the audience has not been told about a potential new way of acting or thinking about their problem and how to solve it. We have to share some detail about it to convince them we have a valid new path to transformation.

We’re all the hero of our story

How humans see story in the world all around them is that we are living in it, it is not just something we are told. We frame what happens in our lives constantly as story, whether we realize it or not, and we are the hero of the story going on around us.

If you think about the Hero’s Journey, you can see how essential this last step is:

1. The hero lives in an ordinary world that is missing something

2. He leaves the ordinary world searching for treasure and enters the adventure world,

3. He goes into the cave (the final test) to see if he learned in part 2 all he needed to take the treasure and he succeeds! He has the treasure!

4. He brings the treasure back to the ordinary world and there is a new normal where the villagers can live a better life as a result of that treasure

We discuss and theorize story as linear that moves forward in time from beginning to end, moving toward success.

But, we live as the hero of our story in our daily lives, which means we don’t exit our story until the very end. If we think of story as a spiral, part 4 brings us back around to real life, but with new insights or ‘treasures’ we gained in the process.

A value ladder or a spiral staircase?

My client would love a $100k month, I’m sure, but she is at the bottom of the spiral and can’t see that goal yet. She will have to go around the spiral multiple times, the first probably being consistent $10k months.

Think of story as a spiral not an arc (or a value ladder). It is the ultimate open loop that we partially close with new insight back in the normal, before opening it up for the next go around.

*If you feel something is missing in your sales copy, then it might be missing enough of parts 2 and 4 of this spiral structure. Hire me to edit it and I’ll show you where and how to rebalance it.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Politics and the English Language by George Orwell. The writing principles in this are so clear—more useful to marketers than Strunk and White, I’d argue. I’m going to write up a version of this as ‘AI and the English Language’ soon, but it’s a beast of a project so it will take a while.

• 📻The 4-Act Structure and the Circular Shape of Story. If you want to learn more about today’s topic, check out the full podcast episode that inspired me!

• 📺 The Olympics. If you want to see fast storytelling in action, watch commentators taking you from never having heard of a sport or its athletes to crying with delight or pain at the final.

It’s time for recess

Let’s spiral!

Look at a sales page and its transformational story. One you wrote, the one on your website, or find one on the web.

Highlight the story elements 1 - 4. Are any missing? How much time is spent on part 2, the learning phase.

If you think this story could be punched up, now you understand the 4-part spiral structure, how would you write it?

I wrote about a particularly bad segue type in this post—when we do NOT move seamlessly from story to sale.

So let’s do a quick summary of why we use a segue and then get into the topic for today—when not to use one.

Why use a segue?

Most writing uses segues as a bridge from one section or idea to the next. Without one, writing will often feel choppy and disjointed. And that is the kind of thing that can cause readers to jump away to something with less friction (see: Instagram, TikTok, your dog making a cute face).

So we think of segues as smoothing the path, and keeping the reader with us as we move through our arguments on the page. All the way to the CTA (and hopefully a click).

The most common segues you see in sales copy and emails include:

• Transitional words and phrases like, “but,” “and,” “On the other hand.”

• Headlines and crossheads

• Ellipses

• Questions (i.e. open loops)

BUT today I want to look at the ‘fade to black’ impact you can have when you don’t use a segue.

I still remember this amazing email Kevin Rogers aka Copy Chief wrote back in 2024.

It was an email unlike any I had read from him before. It didn’t have a CTA. It wasn’t (on the surface) about copy or the business of being a copywriter.

He wrote about two distinct periods in his life, the present and an incident when he was in high school, alternating between them with each scene. And instead of using segues to hold us by the hand as he pulled us from one to the next, he used a written equivalent of the fade to black. Which for him was a TON of white space.

It don’t matter if your black or white

I listened to a Scriptnotes episode this week with writer and director Joachim Trier. He discussed in great detail the narrative choices he made in his movie Sentimental Value.

Normally scriptwriters want to end scenes with momentum that carries the audience into the next scene (for us copywriters, that is the segue or open loop).

But in this screenplay, they used ‘fade to black’ between some important scenes. Trier described it as giving the audience space to close their eyes and have a ‘fresh start’ with the next scene.

We don’t know what is going to happen next. To risk that involves trusting that our audience is still with us and willing to keep guessing what might come next.

Trier also uses the fade to black when the POV in the movie changes or there is a big jump in time. This is what Kevin Rogers did in his email; you had to take the leap across the literal white space of the email to follow him back and forth from high school to now.

When should we NOT use a segue?

So when should we copywriters consider using a writing equivalent of fade to black?

• When we want readers to lean in. Rather than leading them through the piece, we want them to make the jump

• When we are signposting an abrupt change in direction, like time or POV

• When we are writing something very different to normal (see Kevin’s email)

When can we use a fade to black on the page?

I believe that your reader has to trust you and be fully committed to the piece. They have been willing to let you lead them along and now you ask them to jump, they trust you. So there is a risk using this early in your copy.

Now, Kevin Rogers used it from the start. But this was an email to his list, so they had presumably at least gone through a welcome sequence and therefore trusted his voice.

How do we show a fade to black in writing?

If a normal segue is done through words or punctuation, then a fade to black has to be something different.

I prefer a line of some kind— I use a line of asterisks to show the reader there is something they have to jump over. Kevin used several paragraph returns and that works too.

Fade to Blacks - not for the faint-hearted

This is an advanced technique to use in your copy. There is a risk using it—that your audience isn’t ready to take that leap on their own.

But the rewards of using it when you do it correctly are huge; you have encouraged your audience to take a micro action and they have done so.

You are setting them up to take a larger step at the CTA and I believe that if they are willingly following you over a physical cut in the text, they are more likely to do so.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Wuthering Heights. I had forgotten how absolutely unhinged every character in this book is. Talk about bold choices!

• 🎧Introductions with Joachim Trier This is the podcast I referred to above. They also talk a lot about the creative choices to build the opening scenes.

• 📺 The Olympics. All hail Breezy Johnson who is from my home state of Idaho! I’ve loved watching her journey this season.

It’s time for recess

Let’s fade to black!

I mentioned that this is an expert-level technique, so practice it now before you try it out on client copy!

What email or social media post could you write to your audience where you could use a fade to black between sections? Take a moment to think about what would be different about the topic that would make using this technique worthwhile?

Where in the process of reading can you trust your reader to take that micro action and jump the cut?

*And if you’re unsure if you nailed it, consider some writing coaching with me! I can give you some exercises like this (or you can bring me client drafts) and then we do an hour of live editing so I can show you what worked (and what didn’t) and how to improve your writing skills.

I know what it means to me, I don’t know what it means to you. I’m not sure you know what it means to you.

And if your CEO and marketing director and 4 freelance writers all have different meanings, then how do we decide who is right?

Brand Voice Guidelines need to be specific

For brand voice guidelines to be useful, they need to be concrete, not abstract.

Don’t tell me the tone is conversational. Explain how I would (or would not) write that way.

No one’s going to get your visuals right if you just describe the brand colors as red, blue, and gray. You get specific and use the hex codes, because you don’t hope for mind readers as your creatives.

So, what does conversation not mean?

I asked my audience on LinkedIn, and unsurprisingly there were a lot of different answers, but they all included variations of:

• Connect with people emotionally

• Use second person

• Write how you would talk

• Sound natural

• No fluff

But these do not all point to the same type of writing.

• A poem can connect emotionally, but most people would not describe it as conversation

• Court sentencing can be in second person but is not how we would talk to our friends

• We usually talk with our boss very differently than we talk with our kids

• I use fluff in conversation all the time! If you transcribe a call you’ve had, you’ll see just how many hedge words and circular arguments you make

the fundamentals of ‘conversational’

• Dialogue between 2 or more people (not a speech or monologue)

• Is spoken

That’s it.

You may want your copy to do other things, like use the same language as your audience (VOC), or connect emotionally, or feel alive and not dry. But these things do not directly relate to it being conversational.

I found this amazing tool recently, Havelock.ai/orality which analyzes the orality of a piece of text. Orality meaning the characteristics of speech that distinguishes it from writing.

Drop some text into this and it will tell you the level of ‘orality’ it has. (It comes as no surprise to me that my last Substack post scored 68% in its orality.)

Crucially, the tool breaks down why the piece was oral or not. And there are loads of reasons (too many to go into in this piece), but as well as pointing out which you have used and where, it also shows you why that choice makes the piece more oral.

How you write conversationally

Second Person

Yes, we knew this one. But it’s good to understand why; that using it “assumes an immediate audience and creates intimacy.”

Rhetorical Questions

While the reader doesn’t have a space to answer you directly, orality encourages them to answer in their mind. This creates that essential dialogue ‘feel.’

Verbs

This might sound odd. We use verbs all the time. But the longer and more complex a sentence is, the fewer verbs will be in it.

So a higher percentage of verbs suggests a more simple sentence structure for the audience to hold in their head (because they can’t look back at the text to confirm what they just read).

Present Tense

This is another way to create immediacy. And for the reader who is creating a mental picture as they read (see this post) this encourages them to feel ‘in’ the action and so more involved, just as dialogue would.

Adjectives and adverbs

There are usually less of these in a highly oral piece. Which doesn’t mean to avoid adjectives, it just means carefully placing them, and often considering if there is a more active, verb-heavy way to describe your point.

When we ask someone to hold something in their mind (because they can’t go back and re-read) then we need to limit the amount of detail we add before moving into that action created by the verbs.

Conjunctions

This one gets a bit technical. Conjunctions connect words, phrases, and clauses. Both oral and literate text use these, but different ones.

Oral text uses conjunctions (and, so, but). Literate texts will use more subordinate conjunctions (although, because, which).

The crucial difference here is that oral text keeps sentences simple and so the clauses that are being joined are likely to be of equal importance. Literate text is more likely to use a complex sentence structure with nested information (which is what those subordinate conjunctions indicate). This is once again the kind of information that’s easier to go back and check when reading but is hard to hold in your head when you hear it.

Creating a common language

You can use the tool without understanding the whys of the markers, but understanding what conversational means to you is crucial if you want to use it to help write in a client’s brand voice.

If you have a client who wants you to write ‘conversationally’ but can’t explain what that means to them, you can use this tool to create a common language (or set of markers) about how you will write for them.

*And this is a great place to remind you that if you need help editing your work to make it more conversational, I can help!

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Wuthering Heights. I haven’t read this since I was a teenager but I’m really looking forward to watching the most recent movie and thought a re-read first would help.

• 🎧On character-driven storytelling in documentaries. If you use storytelling anywhere other than fiction (I’m looking at you, brand copywriters) then this is a must-hear.

• 📺Bridgerton I love how this show uses modern culture and techniques (music etc.) within a historical frame.

It’s time for recess

Let’s get conversational

This is an easy one. Take a piece of your own personal copywriting (for your website or social media) and run it through Havelock.ai/orality . What orality markers do you lean on heavily? Where do you write in a more literate way?

Now that you can see the default techniques you use, would you describe your writing as conversational? Will you lean in (or out) of any of these techniques?

Think about how you would ask a client for more information if they tell you that they want their brand to sound conversational so that you can find a common language to describe it?

Early word processors toggled between modes. If you were in edit mode, you could type away. If you wanted to change words or delete, you needed to switch to command mode.

This is not how typewriters worked. So it was confusing for your average 50-year old who had spent their life physically cutting out sections of printed copy and then gluing it into a new physical space. They would get frustrated when they couldn’t figure out how to delete a word or sentence.

Larry Tessler specialized in what we would now call UX. He tried to make these complex computer systems more user friendly. If cut and paste was what publishers understood? Then that’s what they got.

And so he persuaded Apple to move from toggling between modes to the Cut and Paste functions we know and love today.

My Gen Z kid has never had to use scissors to cut a paragraph from a sheet of paper and paste it into a different printed page of an essay in his life. And yet he fully understands these icons, which represent that 1970s way of making changes to a draft.

Are you cutting and pasting as you edit?

In my work as a writing coach to those who aren’t professional writers, we use cut and paste all the time during draft 2 (a draft I don’t often see from my professional copywriter clients).

I have a memoir client who is in her 60s and writing about her childhood. Her instinct is to start a chapter with outlining an event and why she can now see how important it was. She sets the scene and then shows us it through dialogue.

But this explanation and logical connection completely undercuts the emotional intensity of the scene. So we read her draft, then usually cut the first 2 - 3 paragraphs and move them to the end of the chapter. By letting the reader experience it first, then assimilate meaning, we give them the power of feeling the emotion rather than being told about it.

There are a couple of chapters where the events are extremely traumatic and for those I suggested we keep her instinctual style of tell and then show. Precisely so we could lessen the emotional intensity of things that are incredibly hard to read about.

Have you determined your structure?

In the fiction world this is called developmental editing and it’s not what copywriters think I can do for them. They usually picture a more Grammarly-type support, where I fix typos and apostrophes, and occasionally suggest trading in one verb for a more powerful one.

These structural dev changes are just as fast as fixing typos, thanks to cut and paste (which means it doesn’t cost more to have me point them out) but they have a much bigger impact on the piece.

And in truth, this dev editing should be at the heart of your self-editing work as a copywriter, too, before you ever make it to Grammarly tweaks.

Whether you’re writing fiction, an essay, or direct response copy, there are usually multiple options for how to structure the piece, and your go-to structure isn’t necessarily the best.

Does form impact structure?

I hear writers talk all the time about writing directly into Figma or Substack or their email platform. And it makes me shudder.

I understand the benefits of writing directly into a platform; you get to see how your text will look to the reader. And that visual layout is as important, especially in a digital age, when it comes to getting your stuff read.

But I worry you give the piece a sense of permanence once you’ve added it to your platform. That’s one of the reasons I love handwriting in my composition book before I even start typing. This right here? Was a scribbled mess on a torn-out yellow legal page before it made it to a Google doc, before I finally typed it here.

When I write something in Substack direct, I’m far less likely to play around with the order and the flow. I almost never cut and paste paragraphs. At most, I might tinker around the edges and cut a sentence because it looks too long. (My stuff always looks too long.)

But do I think about whether I could make the piece more powerful if one paragraph came after another, not before? Rarely. And I suspect you don’t either.

When I handwrite first, I find myself scanning and drawing arrows all over my draft as I bring it to the computer. I have even been known to print and physically cut long drafts (with my trusty highlighters to identify POVs or themes) to help reorder them before I write draft 2.

If you type directly into wireframes (even if they are tables in Google wireframes), Figma, Substack, or your EMS, then will you do me a favor? Will you try starting in a plain old doc? Or even writing by hand?

Just try it and see if it changes how you treat the piece as a whole and what structural dev edits you might find as a result.

*If you want help with this, then that’s all part of my standard editing service for copywriters. I work on an hourly rate, so I can do a first pass on draft 1 to give structural advice, and then you can send the final draft for me to polish.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Onyx Storm (Book 3 of the Empyrean Series). With the weight of the world this week, I’ve been hiding in fiction.

• 📺 Heated Rivalry. Still. I might be a little obsessed. But see book rec for why I’m hiding at the Cottage. And if you want to see a tight emotional arc (this is just 6 episodes covering a 10-year span of characters maturing) then check this one out.

It’s time for recess

Let’s get the scissors out!

Find a long piece you’ve written (ideally a blog post or article rather than direct response copy). Then print it out and cut it up into paragraphs. If you don’t have access to a printer, you can do this by copying it into a Google doc and highlighting each section a different color.

Now that you have separated the words and arguments from the structure on the page, what do you see? Did you start the right way? What would happen if you moved the last chapter to the beginning? How does the piece flow, paragraph to paragraph and is there another way you could order it that would change the emotional intensity?

Just like my memoir client, you probably use a certain structural style without realizing it. Structure is just as much a part of your voice as word choice. What can you learn about how you ‘normally’ write and when might you want to switch that up?

And it irked me in a way that I couldn't really put my finger on. What I did know was that I did not want to participate. But I hunted out photos from that time, feeling the pressure that everyone around me was doing it and I should probably jump on the wagon.

I still didn’t post them, though. The truth is, I wasn't in a great space in 2016. I wasn't a professional writer yet, beyond scribbling notes in spare 5 minutes here and there. I was an overwhelmed parent to a baby and toddler. I was less than a year into living in a new city with no family and no support network. I was drowning in my role as a mother, had lost any identity outside that one, and didn’t know how to make it out.

That paragraph above could be the caption to any one of the 2016 to 2026 glow up posts, and maybe that's why they gave me the ick. I saw how a story like mine could be molded to suggest to you, dear reader, a successful arc. But it’s not how I felt on the inside.

And that's probably what I was reeling against.

It's a classic rags to riches tale.

So let's dig into this classic storytelling arc, why it’s a great framework for brand narratives, but also highlight its potential downsides.

A tale as old as time

For as long as people have told stories, this arc has been used. Think Cinderella, Gladiator, Aladdin, Jane Eyre. Any story that uses the trope of a ‘low born’ person who fulfills a prophecy and goes on to lead their people. A position normally only given by family status.

Our brains immediately understand this rising positive arc because so many stories are framed this way. It’s also a feel good story with a lot of forward momentum, so it’s easy to tell long (in a novel) or compressed into an Instagram caption.

It’s the American Dream

This is also the arc we use to tell the story of our country (if you live in America) or capitalism in general. We constantly see stories of successful Americans and entrepreneurs squeezed into this mold.

If you search up how many billionaires started their businesses in garages, the list is ridiculously long. In Silicon Valley it even has a name, the Garage Beginning trope. And do you know how many successful business owners were once homeless and ‘sleeping in their car’? Well it’s not as many, but it’s surprisingly a lot more than just one.

What’s worse is that these stories are often not true, just forced into the stereotype to sell. Take one of the most famous garage examples (and one of the richest men in the world), Jeff Bezos. While sure, he did start Amazon in a garage, he also had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the business by his parents. I worked for a client who had the ‘started homeless and is now a 7-figure coach’ story on their website and I do not believe the story for one second based on everything I saw inside the business.

Hiding the selling in plain sight

This 2016 throwback trend is being used by more than just businesses. We love to share how our life has changed, especially if it’s been for the better. It’s an ego thing and it’s the world we live in, whether we like it or not.

Even those people who wouldn’t normally just come out and brag about their personal evolution are using it. You can see that from the number of posts that start, “I wasn’t going to do this, but it seems everyone has jumped on the trend, so I will too . . .”

And styles have changed so much in ten years. Our clothes, our hair, our makeup, how we used filters, and social media in general. It’s fascinating to reflect on.

A huge advantage for business owners is that they can slide their brand rags to riches story in among a ton of other posts you are seeing from your favorite musicians and college friends and cousins. It allows an opportunity to sell without the reader realizing.

Why the 2016 throwback work so well for small biz owners

And while we can hide the selling in a story format that thousands of people are using, there’s no denying that the accounts that are sharing this trend are heavily small businesses.

Why? Probably because they either weren’t in business in 2016 (see my personal example) or they had barely started out. This allows for a much larger gap between the ‘rags’ and the ‘riches’ than a business who was doing pretty well in 2016 and is now making 7 figures.

Two thirds of businesses don’t make it to the 10 year mark. And when you factor in the large jump in online business creation during COVID — yeah, we have a lot of businesses that have had time to be successful but didn’t exist in 2016.

How can brands use rags to riches stories ?

So if the stereotype sells — why?

The reason it sells is why girls my age in Britain were falling over themselves with the idea they could be a future queen if only they attended the same university as Prince William. It suggests that luck (or hard work in the American Dream) is all you need to be top of your game.

We know the human brain assumes this jump to potential success when it hears this story. It allows us to hint at a guaranteed result without breaking FTC rules.

Open any Storybrand or branding website and you’ll learn how to use the rags to riches arc. I’m more concerned with how we can use it ethically in brand storytelling.

1. Were there really rags (or garages)?

With Jeff Bezos, no. He had over $300k in startup funds donated by his parents. He left his job as an investment banker to start Amazon.

The Microsoft story started in a garage, but Wozniak has dismissed this idea as a ‘myth’. But who created the myth?

Let’s start by telling the truth. You can have humble beginnings or be an outsider in your field and show that without resorting to the Garage Beginning trope.

2. And are there really riches?

Hyperbole happens on both sides of this arc. Because the bigger the jump from beginning to end, the more dramatic it feels.

But we all know (and some have been burned) by coaches who brag without bringing the receipts. When we copywriters see clients, ex-clients, and peers brag about their success, the shine can really dull because we know what actually happens behind the scenes.

I believe it is our responsibility to fairly represent our clients to their audience and not blind them with exaggerated shine that, when wiped for closer examination, comes off on the cloth.

3. What happened in the middle?

The middle of a story is always hard. In longer stories, we have time and space to show how a character developed the skills and mindset to move from one situation to another. In short brand stories, the timeline is compressed. In the 2016-2026 trend, we usually lose the middle completely. We just see struggle followed by success.

While there isn’t space to add a ton of nuance, I think it’s important to acknowledge that things happened in the decade in between the photos.

You weren’t unhappy then a 7-figure success overnight. And crucially, we don’t know what you did in between that moved the needle. I’m glad 2026 Gill is happier, but I could have achieved that happiness a number of ways, not just the path I ended up taking that led me here.

Sidenote, I’m not a coach coaching coaches . . .

So many of the carousels you see in this trend are from the coaches coaching coaches side of Instagram. They sell their life journey as the only way to obtain success. Just buy my $97 course and you’ll see exactly how you can end up like me!

Maybe instead of letting the assumptions of a rags to riches arc ‘do its magic’ you need to fight against it to point out that this is one path; it might have included luck; just because you do what I do does not mean you will end up where I ended up.

4. Why are we telling this story?

Or put another way, what call to action are you planning to use at the end!?

If you are putting the story out there to imply this success can be gained from that product or service, is it true? Is the story nuanced enough to cover all the issues? And if not, will these nuances be added before the reader clicks ‘add to cart’?

5. What brand values context can you add?

This story can actually be really helpful in explaining how you work with people, if you sit in the middle of the story for a bit. If one of your brand values is consistency, then explaining that for eight of those years you were barely making anything, but every week, you posted every week, you networked, and finally, the fly wheel started turning last year.

If your brand value is learning, you might share that as you started to make money, you put it all back into education. You never gave up learning and your increased knowledge is what gave you the authority you needed to be truly successful.

Now we don’t only position the hero as a success, we also show how they got there and why. Especially for service providers and coaches where ‘good fit’ is an important pre-qualification for working with a client, sharing brand values is a great way to do that.

If you’ve bashed out a rags to riches story for a client before and now you’re realizing you stuffed some questionable facts into the structure, don’t stress. You won’t be the first or the last.

But I hope this will help you think about how to mold future stories. Because molding is our job as writers. Story is how we make sense of a mass of data points. Being aware that this is what we are doing is an important first step.

And if you want help writing stories like these, then let me know! We can book a session or two to live edit and work through making brand stories like these resonate with audiences and attract good fit clients.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Science of Storytelling still. It is so good and I’m sure I’ll have more nuggets to share soon.

• 📻Who shat on the floor at my wedding? I love this irreverent take on a true crime podcast. It has been a lighter touch than business podcasts on my commutes to networking meetings.

• 📺 Heated Rivalry. This is a fantastic and ‘new’ take on a classic romance story and while there are a number of reasons you might want to watch (!), the plotting is an exceptional example of the genre.

It’s time for recess

What’s your rags to riches story?

And how did you feel when I suggested you had one? Spend 5 minutes journaling about whether you lean in or push against the idea of even having a rags to riches story.

Then document yours. Stuff what has happened in your business life into the mold, whether you think it fits or not. Notice what you have to leave out, dramatize, or add to make it work.

So if in the story something happens up in the sky, their eyes track upward. And if something is then described as happening in a dungeon, their eyes will track down to below the horizon.

Why does this happen?

It’s because our brains are master modelers and as we hear (or read) the words, we use them to build a mental model of the scene that we ‘see’ in our mind.

And why is that important to us copywriters?

Because the better we build these models in our mind, the more likely we are to feel the emotions described in the scene, which allows us to engage more deeply in the scene. The engagement keeps our attention better (and for longer) and we react to the emotions that are stirred up in us by taking action.

Now onto the cool part:

We create models in our minds as we listen to stories because . . . we make models in our mind to understand real life. Because, contrary to how it may feel, our mind doesn’t experience color or smell or touch. It experiences electrical impulses that pass on data about these things.

As neuroscientist David Eagleman describes it:

“. . . your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull.”

If you thought January was depressing, really start contemplating this concept and wig yourself out. (It probably didn’t help that I discovered this while dosed up on flu meds.)

It isn’t real life, it’s a model

The fact that ‘reality’ is actually a model we create in our mind explains a lot of things, including hallucinations and paranoia. And why two people can see events (in real life or on video) in completely different ways.

There is so much data in the world. Our brains can only process so much of it. So we take the data that we think is most important, discard most of it, and build our model that way. How we decide what is important — well, that is a newsletter for another day.

David Eagleman has an amazing podcast episode about why it feels like time slows down when you fear for your life, including his own personal experience as a child. I highly recommend taking a listen, not least because it will help you truly understand why our brains do this, which is to allow more data into the model than normal.

This is why story is so important for brands. Instead of telling someone to buy, we can hijack the natural process our brains use to create models of real life and process emotions. Ones we naturally use when reading or listening to stories. And use them to persuade the reader to take action. (But we will only use it ethically, right? Right!?)

What’s grammar got to do with it?

Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging with that clickbaity title 🙃

If our brain is to model a ‘scene’ from the information it is receiving, then we have to give it:

• enough information

• in the right order

The first — that’s also a story for another day. Briefly, this is where the ‘show don’t tell’ of storytelling comes in so handy for copywriters. I cannot recommend highly enough reading and writing fiction if you want to understand how to quickly build scenes like this in readers’ minds.

But the second — the order of information — that’s basically grammar, baby. Think of grammar like the film director, deciding how the camera should move through the scene so the viewer spots the important information.

Because unlike you as the writer, who knows what scene you want to create and is working backwards to detail the information needed to do so, the reader can only start at the beginning of the sentence and build their model from there.

And they will. They start building the model from the first word. As best you can, think about how you build the following scenes:

John walked into the room to find his daughter Jane with her arms full of kittens.

Even if you weren’t fully aware of it, you had John walking, then you know he’s entering a room, then you see him interact with his daughter, then you fill her arms with kittens. Cute. But also, this is easy to process. It follows the standard English Subject Verb Object word order we know and love.

Now how about this one:

Kittens exploding everywhere, John’s daughter tried her best to wrap her arms around them as he walked into the room.

It’s hard to fully recreate this in a short sentence, but you see how it is harder to model this one because you have no context for where the people (or kittens) are until the last word of the sentence?

The most obvious example of this is active vs. passive voice. We prefer active (Subject Verb Object) because we can model the scene faster. My theory is that this is partly why we use passive voice — by making the scene (and therefore emotions) less available to the reader.

Emotion is king

One last cool example of why scene modeling is so important for copywriters:

There are some people who don’t ‘see’ scenes in their mind. These people have aphantasia, which affects about 1 - 4% of the population. (FWIW, the opposite is hyperphantasia, and based on the pop psych test I just took online, I definitely lean this way.)

In a study, participants were told a horror story and then shown a set of horrific visual images. Those with cisphantasia had a negative emotional response to both. Aphantasic participants had a negative emotional response only to the images — they had no emotional response to the story.

It is likely that because they couldn’t ‘see’ the scene, their brain did not stimulate emotional responses to it.

We know that emotion is a huge part of what makes people buy. Story is a great way to bypass the normal, skeptical objections of being sold to that can stop emotional responses. And the reason for this is likely because we are not aware that the modeling process creates those emotions in us as we receive story.

Should this change how you write copy? Not necessarily. I hope it lets you do a couple of things though:

• understand why story is important, even in conversion copy

• value and consume more story

• look for this kind of issue when a draft feels ‘off'‘

This is definitely something I have subconsciously done as an editor. If my ‘first time reader’ senses tingle reading a draft, it is likely something about it is not clear. It may technically be correct, but I don’t let that stop me try to find what is bugging me. Because emotionally clear copy will beat technically proficient every time.

*If you want coaching or support creating brand storytelling for clients, let me know! I can teach you some techniques to find (and tell) the right stories, or build a brand story guide for your clients that you can implement for them in copy and content.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr I know I mentioned it last week, but I’m still reading and loving it and if you particularly enjoyed this post, this should be on your TBR pile.

• 📻Inner Cosmos: Does time really slow down when you’re in fear for your life? I relistened to this and got just as much from it a second time around.

• 📺 The Making of Stranger Things 5 I absolutely love seeing BTS of TV shows and movies and listening to the creative choices that had to be made and why.

It’s time for recess

Let’s build a model!

I mentioned above that you shouldn’t actively think about this technique when writing copy. But it’s a great exercise to think about when you’re playing around.

So let’s write a short scene. You could pick a current problem that a client’s ICA experiences, or your own ICA experiences if you prefer.

Close your eyes and picture it like a movie playing in your mind. Maybe run it a few times and see what changes as it becomes more clear to you.

Now write it down. What do you need to introduce and when for your reader to build this model. You are the director and it is your job to guide them through it so they can build their model with least friction.

BUT, attending a business-focused event less than 36 hours after landing from a new year transatlantic flight . . . . oof. Three weeks in Scotland was a delight of cramming in every family and friend and mince pie and glass of wine I could, but it sure wasn’t a vacation.

Cooking for 8-10 in a different kitchen every night (and the related grocery shopping and clean up) is not for the faint-hearted (or those hoping to do some biz reflection and goal setting over the holiday period).

As I sat in the BNI meeting plus jet lag and minus coffee (I had left it on the kitchen counter in the rush to leave) we went round the room to give our standard ‘commercials’ of who we are, what we do, and who we can help.

“And don’t forget to add your New Year Resolution or Word of the Year!” the chair delightfully added.

Gah. I almost thought I’d get away without having to admit the copywriter hadn’t thought of her word yet.

I was last, which meant I got to hear each resolution, thoughtfully chosen word and the reason why, and with each one I sank lower in the uncomfortable plastic chair. Could I make one up on the fly? Would anyone be able to tell if I just whipped out ‘intentionality’ or something!?

And then, just a few people before me, our realtor stood up and said:

“I don’t do New Year Resolutions, they’re bullshit. Because it’s winter which is a time for hibernating and I don’t have the energy right now to plan things out for my business. I’ll do it in the spring.

And why are we letting some pope from the 16th century determine when we do anything, anyway? Jan 1 is just a random date on the Gregorian calendar.”

And I exhaled all that angst and panic. I didn’t need to pretend. I didn’t even need to accept the notion of failing at this because I could choose to pick a different date or no date at all.

And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Because the realtor and I, our commercials were largely the same as the ones we gave in December. They were about who we help, unlike the others who spent a long time talking about their goals and what mattered to them. In fact, I got a referral slip right after the meeting, meaning a project in my pocket (and a gold star from BNI). Could the others say the same?

So, we’re ditching business goals, then?

Now, is it wrong to plan business goals? No, not at all. I still plan to do this sometime, date to be determined.

BUT so many people set goals:

• in a rush

• because everyone else is and they feel pressured to do it

• because of some dude who determined the start of the calendar year was in the depths of winter

And they forgot something key — what sits underneath all that goal setting.

New offers and content series, starting a podcast or YouTube channel or Substack (yes, I did do that last January 🙃) can be great for your business. But only if they are connected to and informed by your core messaging.

This is for you, dear copywriter, but also for your clients.

• If a client is panicking because they haven’t set new content plans and offers, remind them that the core of what they do and for who and why is still relevant and will bring in business when used consistently.

• If a client is on the New Year New Goals bandwagon and is asking you to create deliverables for a new offer or content series, ask them how it connects to what they do and for who and why. Because in these times when any old AI could spit out some content for them, it’s your job to be the sage strategist and keep them on course.

And, if they don’t have a course set yet . . . that’s where you come in!

Why 2026 is the year of brand messaging

My prediction for 2026 is that small businesses will invest more in brand messaging. AI can do the output for them but this only makes it clear that strategy is necessary and comes first. And while you can prompt AI to help with that, I don’t think it can do it well.

If you’re a copywriter who hasn’t been doing brand messaging, a) you’re wrong, you probably have been doing it and don’t realize it and b) you should start learning about it so you can offer it to clients.

Unfortunately this isn’t a neat segue into offering you a course teaching brand messaging (because I haven’t done my goal planning yet, duh!) but if you’re interested in learning more, let me know. If there’s interest, I’d love to look at setting something up.

The best way to start is to put it into practice with your own brand! And if you want help with that, a POV Finder Session would be a great place to start, especially as you can use my templates and process with your own clients. So if you’re thinking about dipping your toes into strategy for the first time this year, this might just give you the confidence to offer it knowing you can find your way your first project.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr I love books that look at the neuroscience of storytelling. This one has great connections to writing story to sell. Will be writing about this soon.

• 📻Whoa!! A surprise episode??? by Lingthusiasm. Another thing I will write about soon! This episode is on how we express surprise in oral and written form.

• 📺 Stranger Things. We missed all the episodes released from Christmas Day while in Scotland and finally have time to catch up.

It’s time for recess

If you have felt pressured into setting goals for your business by that crusty Pope, it’s time to see if you can connect them to your brand foundations. No pressure if you don’t think you know what brand foundations are, that may actually make this easier.

Set a time for 10 minutes and free write on why you think you chose your goals. If it helps, look at clients and projects you worked on last year and which ones you loved (and hated) and why.

Can you see any cross threads? What’s the pattern that emerges and how does it connect with what goals you set?

And if you realize you might want to shift your goals while you do this exercise, that’s okay, I give you full permission. You’ll still have your goals set earlier than me!

“The word of the year is two numbers, we are so cooked.”

As soon as I heard that 6-7 was the word of the year, I laughed and girded myself for many conversations with people who wanted to tell me just how much they hate it.

I think they are actually bemoaning the fact that words which are in common usage by some demographics (and probably not theirs) are moving from an informal usage into being recognized formally.

I see us copywriters as at the forefront of how these trends move from informal to formal acceptance. Which is probably why I love to see these words and am excited to see the shortlists

When I’m editing for copywriters, I often find words or phrases that aren’t in dictionaries. Which doesn’t make them wrong, it just means the dictionaries and style guides haven’t caught up with how everyday people are using language. (I joke that I have to don my hazmat suit and open the Urban Dictionary far more often than I’d like.)

And one of the things that delighted me as I transitioned from being a lawyer writing contracts to a copywriter reflecting voice of customer phrasing and brand voice is that I jumped from being behind the curve (aforementioned, anyone!?) to being on the crest of the wave.

This year’s Words of the Year:

• Slop (Merriam-Webster)

• Rage Bait (Oxford)

• Parasocial (Cambridge Dictionary)

• 6-7 (Dictionary.com)

• Vibe coding (Collins Dictionary)

Why do people hate the WOTY so much?

If anyone brings upthe Word of they Year, chances are it’s to tell you about how much they hate it. These words don’t seem to get any love (but they sure generate plenty of headlines). I’m only willing to get into a discussion on linguistic prescriptivism about 50% of the time, so I often laugh and nod and avoid the topic altogether. But here are the main two reasons people generally hate it (and why they’re wrong):

They’re old

Because the WOTY is picked based on how often a word is used online and looked up in the dictionary, it is often a word that has just started trending. Which means anyone over about the age of 40 doesn’t use it (unless they are chronically online, like me 🙃).

I’m fairly certain my mum has never used the phrase ‘vibe coding’ and that while my dad would understand ‘rage bait’ he would be rage baited into telling you how much he hated it if you talked to him about it.

This is a particular type of linguistic prescriptivism that says ‘language may have changed in the past, but it shouldn’t shift from what I currently use.’ Which is obviously a weird argument to defend. Just because you don’t say ‘slop’ doesn’t mean it isn’t being used on a daily basis elsewhere.

It’s not a word

This level of pedantic prescriptivism amuses me no end. Rage bait is two words, not one, 6-7 isn’t even a word, it’s numbers, and two at that!

I love to see this level of analyzing how and what people are looking up in the dictionary. In 2015, dictionaries enraged old people everywhere because Merriam-Webster picked the suffix -isms and the Oxford University Press picked the emoji 😂.

But I think this is fascinating. The rise of '-isms’ tells us not just what people were searching for, but also how the world felt at the time:

“It was “the year we obsessed over identity,” as New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris wrote, a year where news stories about racism and feminism gained prominence. It was the year Americans became more frightened of terrorism than they’ve been at any time since 9/11.”

Vox, Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year . . . Is Not a Word

Looking back it all makes sense

While there always seems to be pushback to a new word, if you look back over the last 20 years of WOTY, what seemed odd at the time we now use without thinking:

• emojis are in daily usage in texts but also all across the internet (even if 😂 identifies you solidly as a Millennial or Gen X)

• Blog (2004) and selfie (2013) wouldn’t garner even a shrug from most people

• GIF might be slightly more niche, but it’s a word used in my professional capacity on a daily basis

We play with language and get paid for it

Copy has a peculiarly specific job — to feel like a conversation between one seller and one (potential) buyer. We are writing for hundreds or thousands of people to read but we want it to feel like we are talking just to them.

So compared to news articles, journal pieces, even sometimes blogs, we want it to feel like a chat with someone who understands you and what you’re going through. Which means using Voice of Customer data, the language people are using everyday to talk about the problems they have and how they feel about them.

We get to turn nouns into verbs and move these building blocks around in ways that would make our 6th grade English teacher shudder. While most people are wincing at the words these Gen Zers are using in the classroom, I can’t wait to hear what phrases my 10 year old brings home next.

So next time someone wants to moan about a ‘new’ word — push back! How does the word get used, why don’t we have another word to represent this concept properly, and who is using it?

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia This was a fun book to dip into on the plane(s) to Scotland this week. Part encyclopedia, part miscellany, there are all kinds of interesting details about the usage and etymology of words.

• 📻 Medieval Roots of the Modern Alphabet by Gone Medieval. It was super enjoyable to run the old roads of Scotland listening to this one!

But this leads me to think about two related concepts:

• how do you document and prompt voice in a way where the output is as close to brand voice as it can be?

• what is the default AI voice if there are gaps in your prompting?

I spoke last week about how copywriters can switch voices when writing for different clients. One of the key points I wrote about was ‘voice leakage’: that your voice will come through at certain points whether you’re aware of it or not. Knowing your voice helps you combat that and also fix it during editing.

And it’s the same for AI; it has a default voice. If we don’t prompt ‘correctly,’ whatever that means, then the AI will fill that gap with it’s own voice. And you can be sure it won’t tell you that it did so, because we all know that AIs have the overconfidence of a white male Boomer.1

Documenting brand voice - same as it ever was

When it comes to documenting brand voice to feed to the AI, well that job is fundamentally the same as it was when we documented for humans. This is good news for us brand voice specialists!

And this is where the automated voices that a lot of AIs offer don’t go far enough. Because the documentation of voice doesn’t come from within the brand. It was a template a program offered to overlay on top of it. In years past, this was accepting a copywriter’s voice overlayed onto a brand’s sales pages, websites, and socials.

For many small brands, that templated voice is just as good as the templated website and brand colors they chose. Great!

But some larger brands will be irked by the stylistic choices that result from the templated voice. And that’s when you can explain why documenting from their internal brand foundations and choices rather than imposing from above will result in more ‘on brand’ copy.

I have been learning Markdown and looking at ways to ensure the documentation is read and used by AI consistently. These approaches are always changing and I do my best to follow them, but another thing AI is terrible at is telling you when it can’t read the source material and just guessing what might be there. (I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself.) So checking that it is following the brand voice documentation is crucial.

Prompting — I’m not an engineer

I’m not going to get into the details of this because I don’t know enough about it. (If you do and you’d like to explain, I’d love to hear in the comments!) But I think that ‘not knowing’ is what’s important here.

I don’t solidly understand (and I’d wager most brands don’t either) whether my prompt will ensure the AI adheres to the designated brand voice for all of the output it creates. And I know it won’t tell me if it has shifted.

I also believe that even if you stay on top of prompting development, there is always a lag between changes in the AI models and when we learn about them. So we should all be aware of the potential that our prompts are not doing enough.

AI’s idiolect — they also have a brand voice

I hope that you are aware of your own voice, either because you’re a brand voice nerd like me or because you read last week’s post and started to think about it.

And it should be no surprise to us (and yet it seems to have shocked lots of people) that AI models have unique voices that are different to each other.

Research came out this summer about the idiolect of AIs.2 Idiolect is a forensic linguistic term that suggests that every person has a relatively stable linguistic fingerprint that identifies them. (Think of it as brand voice + pronunciation.)

In the case of the Unabomber, for example, an FBI linguist (a job I would die for) and sociolinguist (I’d take this as a close second) uncovered clues about his identity based on his writings.

The 2025 AI idiolect research analyzed the difference between Gemini and ChatGPT and used a dataset of hundreds of texts on diabetes, written by both AI models. By comparing trigrams (groups of 3 words commonly found together) the research found that Gemini uses much more informal and less academic language than ChatGPT.

The difference that is most easily identified in the paper is that ChatGPT uses “glucose” and Gemini uses “sugar.” But there are other less obvious reasons that the language in one is more formal than the other.

If you’ve read this post then you’ll remember the difference between Latinate and Anglo Saxon verbs. Between “elevate” found in the ChatGPT version and “high” in the Gemini version, for example.

The research tells us that the idiolects are noticeably different and that Gemini “indicates a preference for simple, accessible language.” I’m telling you that the way it is doing this is by favoring Anglo Saxon verbs over Latinate ones.

Which default AI voice should you choose?

Obviously the ideal is that you’ve programmed your chosen brand voice into the AI model so well that you don’t need to worry about the default voice. But see above for why I question that.

Just as I want to know when and how I might fall out of brand voice into my own idiolect, I want the same thing when I choose my AI. I know my sentences are far longer than average. When I write for a brand with short sentences, I know to check for any sentences that are too long, where my voice may have taken over.

If I’m checking Gemini output for a brand that is more formal, I would want to check if it used too many Anglo Saxon verbs. And vice versa for ChattyG.

I may even choose one over the other to ensure the default voice didn’t stray too far from the brand voice. Or I may intentionally choose a mismatch so I could spot when the output fell out of brand voice and quickly identify where I need to take over in the edits.

If you’ve spotted big differences between voices of AI models, let me know, I’d love to keep track of this!

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I would not advise reading this while taking any mind-altering substances. It has made me aware of how I think and then put that into words and I both love and hate that in equal measure. If I am talking to you and then stop like my AI-brain glitched, it’s because I am thinking about this book.

• 🎧 What brains tell us about politics. This paired amazingly well with the metaphor book (IYKYK.)

• 📺 Stranger Things. I’m going as Karen and her wine for Halloween next year.

It’s time for recess

Playing with AI

I always approach AI with trepidation, but what if we had fun with it?

Write a paragraph squarely in your own voice. If you’re not sure what that is yet, don’t worry. You could write about your ideal client or the services you offer. You want to imagine you are writing for your business audience and about something you know well, so the writing will flow without stopping to research. Your voice will naturally appear in a piece like this if you don’t overthink it.

Now open all the AIs available to you (it’s probably a wild number, Gmail will use Gemini to redraft your emails as you write, if you wish) and ask them to ‘improve’ your text. If possible, don’t give them parameters beyond that, we want to find their default voice, if we can, so also don’t do this in projects or conversation threads or anywhere you have saved info on your brand voice.

What do you see when you compare all these drafts. When do they use Latinate or Anglo Saxon verbs? Which ones feel like you and which don’t? Is there any phrasing you would like to keep?

I think the reason I connect with brand voice so strongly is that I spent a decade or more writing fiction and also reading and critiquing others’ work as a fiction editor before I became a copywriter.

And what really intrigues me is that fiction authors see voice in a completely different way to copywriters. They develop their own authorial voice. (If you can spot a Margaret Atwood or Ursula LeGuin when you read it, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

But they also understand that their dialogue needs to sound like the character and that it needs to be different from character to character.

Talk about head spinning. They need to use 4, 5, 6, maybe more different voices in any one piece of fiction. We copywriters change voice only when we shift projects (and I know plenty don’t do much shifting at all, unfortunately).

How do you change voices?

I find this relatively easy to do and can write for multiple clients in different voices a day, no doubt due to my fiction background. But I know this can feel hard for copywriters.

The answer for me, for both fiction and copywriting projects, is to really sit in the head of the character/brand. The word, sentence, and paragraph choices represent the character’s worldview, attitude, personality, education, and experience.

Take a personal project I’ve been working on recently. I’m writing from the POV of the current time period main character and getting stuck. So I started writing in two other historical POVs to shake things up:

• A Pictish princess from about 60AD who saves the day

• A laird’s son watching a servant at his castle in the 1650s as she saves the day

(Spot a theme here? Guess what happens in present day . . . )

And I was absolutely fascinated by what changed as I moved to writing in these older time periods. My sentences got longer. For both, but interestingly, mostly for the 17th-century diary entries.

My word choice changed. I stopped using dates in the Pictish story and used phases of the moon and thought about the land she could see around her. (It doesn’t hurt that the fictional castle present in all POVs is based on one I visited all the time as a kid, so I can see it so clearly in my mind.)

I didn’t do any of these things consciously (I don’t think, at least not super consciously) but the cadence, word choice, and word order changed.

How can copywriters change brand voice?

I think this shift is easier in fiction. We use far more description and metaphor. When it comes to ad copy or even social media posts, we’re usually writing in plain language with less room for these embellishments.

But I do think that sinking into the POV of the character can help us write in a way that keeps the consistent flow of voice all the way through the funnel. It might not be important to get it exactly right at every touchpoint but it sure as hell is essential not to get it wrong.

So here are a couple of things I try when I’m struggling to get into brand voice:

• take 5 minutes to write something fictional and descriptive in the POV of the client. It could be how they felt when they woke up that morning, how I think they would sound talking on a discovery call when they are most passionate about what they do, or how they talk to the kids about the problems in the world that their business solves. The more descriptive and emotional I can be, the better, especially if the copy is not going to lean that heavily on those techniques.

• listen to the client talk. I will listen to podcast episodes or recordings of our calls. Something where I can hear the musicality of the cadence.

• re-read their archetype notes. In most brand voice guides I include details about their archetype or personality. I love archetype specifically because it helps me think about the role they play for their clients.

• think about how my voice is the same/different to theirs. The truth is, it can be really easy to slip into our own writing voice. Just like fiction authors who have a strong voice but don’t differentiate for character dialogue, you need to know your voice to be sure you’re not slipping into it for clients.

Know your own voice first

Otherwise, as much as you try to differentiate for clients, your voice leaks out a little around the edges, subtly changing a client’s voice.

And they notice. Although they can’t always explain what’s wrong, they know something’s up. And they don’t like it.

To properly defend a marketing choice you made in your copy, you need to be able to justify the voice choices you made (try saying that 3 times fast).

Clients need to feel confident it sounds like them, especially if they don’t feel super comfortable with selling themselves as their solution.

And you need to feel confident justifying your choices. Even more so when clients are skeptical that maybe you just got AI to churn out that work they paid you for.

So this is your friendly reminder to analyze your own writing.

You can do this in a couple of ways.

Plug your copy into Verbatim (a free tool I love).

Set up a coaching call with me. We’ll find your voice tells and talk about where you might fall into them unwittingly when writing for clients. We can do this in as little as an hour if you understand the fundamentals, or we can set up multiple calls if you need more guidance.

Stuff I’m reading-watching-listening to

• 📖The Night Watcher by Tariq Askanani. This is a fab detective thriller set in Scotland. I will be discussing it’s plot structure in a future newsletter so if you love this kind of genre and me geeking out about story structure, go read it!

• 📺Stranger Things, obviously. I’ve only watched a couple of episodes, so haven’t formed an opinion yet. Loving the Henry character, though, and intrigued to see where his motivation will go.

• 📻 Scotland’s Stone of Scone - this is a Gone Medieval episode. I’ve always loved the story of the Stone of Destiny (it appears in that Pictish story I’m writing that I talked about above). Not copywriting related at all, but if you like Scottish history, you’ll probably find this fascinating.

It’s time for recess

Let’s try on some voices

Before you start, identify a couple of clients or famous personal brands that you admire and read/watch a lot.

Starting in your own voice, write about how your day started and what you’re looking forward to later in the day.

Next, use the same exact scenario and describe it as if you were each of the clients or personal brands. If you started your day with cornflakes and coffee and a school drop-off rush, then pretend that’s what they did (ignore whatever content you’ve read that they start their day with 5am cold plunges and meditations).

How do you feel as you write in these different personas. What changes about the emotions, the words you use to describe what you see and do, and possibly how you feel in your body as you write it.