Copywriting

Copywriting

Persuasive writing fails in two directions. Vague copy says nothing a competitor could not say. Overstated copy says something the product cannot do. The work is finding the sentence that is both specific and true — and refusing to close the gap with an adjective.

Keep the verbs apart: drafted is written; reviewed is read by someone else; approved is a person accountable for the claims signing off; published is live. This skill gets you to drafted. The last two are not yours to perform.

When this fires

Copy is being written or rewritten for an audience outside the product — a page, an email, an ad, an announcement, a product description — or an existing draft's claims need auditing. It does not fire for buttons, errors and empty states inside the interface, or for documentation.

Procedure

1. Reconstruct the brief if you were not given one: who the reader is, where they are standing (what they clicked to get here, what they already believe), the one action you want next, and what happens if they do nothing. Infer the low-risk parts; ask about the parts that change the copy.
2. Gather evidence before writing a word. Approved claims, real numbers with their source and date, actual product behaviour, support tickets, review and sales-call language. Copy is assembled from this pile. When the pile is empty, the honest output is specific-and-modest, not vague-and-grand.
3. Name the one objection that decides it — too expensive, too slow to switch, I do not believe you, I already have something. Write it down. Every section either advances the promise or answers that objection; anything doing neither is cut.
4. State the promise in one plain sentence before drafting, in the reader's words rather than the company's. If it could sit unchanged on a competitor's page, it is not yet the promise.
5. Establish voice from existing material, not from a default marketing register: read published pages, the product's own interface, the founder's writing. Match register, sentence length and vocabulary. Preserve the user's voice when rewriting rather than replacing it.
6. Structure for the channel. A page: one proposition, proof beneath it, one action. An email: one reason it arrived, one thing to do. An ad: one idea. Subject lines, headlines and first lines carry most of the weight — write several and pick, rather than polishing the first.
7. Draft with the specific detail instead of the intensifier. The number, the named integration, the actual time saved, the real constraint. "Blazing fast" is a request for the reader's trust; "renders 10k rows without pagination" spends evidence instead.
8. Audit every claim, line by line, and sort each into: verifiable (name the source), opinion (marked as a view, not a fact), puffery (harmless enthusiasm), or unsupported (cut or downgrade). Pay particular attention to numbers and percentages, comparatives naming or implying a competitor, superlatives and firsts, guarantees, refund and uptime promises, and the words secure, private, compliant and certified — each of which asserts something auditable.
9. Never manufacture proof. No invented testimonials, customer names, logos, case studies, statistics, awards or press quotes, not even as placeholders that could be mistaken for real ones. A placeholder handed to you in a brief is a placeholder, not a customer quote — label it and ask.
10. Route regulated claims to a human. Health, medical, financial and earnings, legal, safety, environmental and accessibility claims, and anything naming a certification or a competitor: propose the wording, mark it as needing approval, and do not treat your own confidence as clearance.
11. Cut, then read it aloud. Remove the throat-clearing opener, the repeated proposition, the stacked adjectives, the jargon the reader would not use. What is left should sound like a person who knows the product, not like a category.
12. Deliver as a draft. Publishing, posting, sending to a list, or updating a live page is an outward-facing action performed by the user or on their explicit per-item say-so: stop and ask. Hand over the copy, the claims list, and what still needs approval.

Checklist

• Reader, moment, desired action and cost of inaction written down
• Evidence gathered before drafting; every proof point traceable to a source
• The deciding objection named and answered somewhere in the copy
• Promise stated in one sentence a competitor could not reuse
• Voice taken from existing material, not a default register
• Structure fits the channel; one action, not three
• Specifics carry the argument; intensifiers are not doing load-bearing work
• Every claim sorted: verifiable, opinion, puffery, or cut
• No invented testimonial, logo, statistic, award or case study
• Regulated and competitor claims flagged for approval, not self-cleared
• Delivered as a draft; nothing published or sent

Failure handling

• The product cannot do what the brief promises — say so and stop. Rewriting around it produces copy that converts into refunds and support load. Offer the true version of the claim.
• No evidence exists for the central proof point — do not smooth it into a superlative. Write the smaller true claim and name the missing evidence as a blocker.
• The brief supplies a testimonial or logo with no source — treat it as unverified and ask before using it. Placeholder proof shipped as real proof is the trap here.
• You are asked to match a competitor's stronger claim — their wording is not evidence for yours. Compare against what you can document.
• The real problem is the offer, not the copy — say it. Copy that has to apologize for the product is a positioning finding, and writing around it hides the finding.
• A claim needs a decision only the client can make — present the options with the risk of each; do not pick the bolder one because it reads better.

Evidence to report

The brief as you reconstructed it, marked where you inferred rather than were told; the draft itself as the main deliverable; a claims list pairing each factual assertion with its source; the claims you downgraded or cut and why; what still needs human approval before it can run; and the explicit note that nothing was published or sent. "Copy delivered" with no claims list is the version of this work that gets somebody in trouble.