Read it Like You're Not You
Inviting you to be a bit narcissistic when you proofread your copy
Have you ever Googled yourself? Or gone back to look at a post you made on your personal social media and try to view it as if you’re your ex or a potential new friend you just made? Maybe that’s just me 😅
But lately I’ve been using that narcissistic tendency to proofread the posts I’m writing for my clients. I’ll read the captions and emails I’ve written for them as if I am their customer, doing my best to put myself in their brain. Where am I when I’m reading this post? How does the post make me feel? Am I interested right away, or is it a bit of a snooze?
This change in perspective almost always shows me what needs to be cut or rewritten.
The words we choose shape how our customers see us, but not nearly enough of us spend time proofreading our shit before we hit post. I mean… we might do a cursory run through Grammarly to make sure there aren’t any egregious misspellings or grammatical errors, but tools like that really only get us so far. They’re really limited in how they convey voice and flow.
This matters especially if you’re using AI to help you write your content.
I can usually tell when a post or email was written with AI because shockingly few wineries edit it to sound more natural. They are usually just throwing in a very basic prompt and then copying and pasting what their robot overlord gives them. The copy ends up sounding super stiff or overly flowery. Not to mention the overuse of grammatical tools, like em dashes. Even now, as I’m writing this for you, my beloved Grammarly wants me to use terms like “such as” instead of “like.” But I am not a fancy-pants robot and (I assume) you aren’t either.
I wrote a whole article about this issue of wineries not editing their AI-generated copy, which you can read here, but the long and short of it is that if you choose to use AI, you need to use it as a tool rather than a shortcut. I know it’s so tempting to pop in a prompt like “write an educational post about budbreak,” but you need to remember that all the other wineries that are using AI are putting in an almost identical prompt and because AI learns from content that is put out in the world, it ends up recycling the same kind of shit over and over again.
People on the internet these days are particularly discerning when they are viewing content, and they lose trust if they feel like what they are reading was written by a robot rather than a person. Even I, someone who has used AI to get my posts started, am becoming even more disillusioned by its siren song.
Proofreading’s in the Pudding
The TL;DR is that proofreading your copy as if you were your own customer forces you to ask some hard questions about what you’ve written:
Would this make sense if I didn’t already know the backstory? Does it give enough context?
Is it clear, or is it overly clever and buried in superlatives?
Would I care enough to stop scrolling and engage?
If you can answer those questions honestly and put yourself in your customers’ shoes, your copy becomes more effective. Full stop.
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So true. I think its also key that the brand has a very clear point of view and voice so that they actually can generate copy drafts that's are on brand. I have to generate a lot of content in my role so use of AI has sped up my delivery—but my brands have a clear point of view and tone so I know how to take what I'm given to spin as our own.
It's one of the most useful bits of advice for any writer to read what they've written, out loud. And as for using AI for copy, that's a dangerous line to walk as if I get a whiff of that in any text, that company/writer is dead to me, forever.