Lyra's alethiometer, in a museum display case.

31 January 2023

Written for kids, written by robots, writing about sustainability

Dry January? Only if you think copywriting, copy editing and web content are dry subjects. But you wouldn’t be reading this in that case, would you?

Written for kids

I loved this article in the Washington Post about a science journal that is peer-reviewed by its audience: children. “Kid-edited journal pushes scientists for clear writing on complex topics,” said the headline.

This made me think: don’t we all deserve clear writing on complex topics?

“Write so an 11-year-old can understand you” is a pretty good rule of thumb. If everyone did this, the world would be a better place. (If you don’t have the skills, find a good editor. You know where I am!)

Written by robots

I got a Facebook advert the other day that said: “Hate writing blog posts? This AI copywriting tool will do it 10x faster, without sacrificing on quality.”

I doubt it, I thought. Anyway, I love writing blog posts.

Everyone’s been talking about AI copywriting this month. I don’t want to add to the noise, so I’ll keep this short.

I’ve been seeing lots of social media posts saying “I asked ChatGPT AI to write … and this is what I got”. Here’s one of the more interesting ones (with a sustainability theme).

Generally, the results on display have all been similar: the sort of jargon-filled, personality-free, fact-light waffle that could have been put together by any business person who’s not a writer. Or a very cheap copywriter who’s not a subject matter expert. I suspect there’s a business opportunity in copy editing this stuff.

This is not to say that I have discounted working with AI. In fact, I attended a webinar last week, out of curiosity, called ‘Prompt crafting for AI writing tools’. It was run, unsurprisingly, by a company that sells AI writing tools. Or, as they put it, “generative AI”.

I learnt that, as with most things, the quality of what you get is dependent on the quality of what you put in. That the tools are better for generating ideas than for finished copy. And that they can come up with outlines for those pesky blog posts that I really, really don’t hate writing.

Word of the month

I’ve learnt another new word. You’ve heard of greenwashing. Now there is ‘greenhushing’ – when businesses choose not to communicate about their environmental plans.

Tweet of the month

Sorry, it’s AI again.

But I did like this tweet from writer Nick Parker: “Friends sent me this. Overheard on a Slack channel: ChatGPT is good for generating the type of content people don’t want to write, for others who don’t want to read it.”

I’m inclined to agree with some of the comments in the ensuing thread, which included “It’s great for stuff you can’t be bothered to do yourself, which shouldn’t include anything at all important,” and “if you’re amazed at how well ChatGPT can write something that sounds like your marketing copy, maybe your marketing copy wasn’t that great in the first place.”

By the way, I can recommend Nick’s Tone Knob newsletter, about marketing and tone of voice. It manages to be both insightful and extremely entertaining.

Dry work January

You’ve heard of “Dry January”; a fellow freelancer has coined the phrase “Dry work January”. This seems apt because winter can be a quiet time for those of us working on contracts for clients.

I was lucky because just before Christmas – it was up against the wire a bit, because the person who sent the original query had been off sick – I landed an interesting web writing contract for January and February. But I’ve got availability after that so if you have any kind of content project coming up, please get in touch.

Photo of the month

Props and costumes from His Dark Materials are on show at three Oxford museums until April. As a fan of the books and the TV adaptation, I had to go. Here’s Lyra’s alethiometer.

A museum display case with props from His Dark Materials, including Lyra's alethiometer and purse. You can see Lyra's daemon Pan in the background.

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