April 1991. The boss of the biggest jewellery chain in Britain stands up to speak to a hall full of business people. He's relaxed. He's funny. He tells them one of the decanters his shops sell is so cheap because it's "total crap". Then he says some of their earrings cost less than a prawn sandwich, and probably won't last as long.
The room laughs. The papers don't. Soon his name is a punchline, customers stay away, shops close and people lose their jobs. That's Gerald Ratner, and it all comes down to a couple of sentences.
If you ever write an email or a post with your name on it, this one's for you. It's about the weight your words carry, and how to make sure they still sound like you.
They wound sometimes
Cher sang it in If I Could Turn Back Time. Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes.
They can heal too. Every time you open your mouth or type a message, you get to choose. A single sentence can lift someone's whole week. Another one can stay with them for years. Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and changed the course of a country with words. Ratner wiped out a business with them.
Plenty of people will never stand up in front of a room full of business owners. Everyone is still choosing words all day long, in emails and conversations, and somebody on the other end is deciding what they think of you based on them.
Whose words are they?
Every so often someone asks me to write something for them. A speech, or a page for their website.
When I wrote this in 2018, I'd say yes on one condition. They had to be part of it. They wrote the first draft, I'd coach them through it, and they signed off the final version. The words had to sound like them, because they were the one who'd have to stand behind them.
The world has changed since then. Today you can type a one-line prompt into any AI and get a page of content back in seconds. I've been playing with AI since I programmed some at university in 1994, so I'm not about to tell you to stay away from it.
The problem is it won't sound like you. It will sound like everyone else who is using lazy prompts. Nobody reading the output they create will feel like they've met you. Worse still, more and more people will spot that it's AI and likely stop consuming the content as soon as they do.
Treat it like a new starter
Here's how I'd use it now. Treat AI the way you'd treat a junior employee on their first week.
You wouldn't hand a new starter one line and expect them to nail it. You'd sit them down, tell them what you're trying to say and who it's for, and give them everything you've got. Your message, your notes, transcripts of you talking about it.
Then you'd check they've understood before they start. Ask AI what it understands about the task and what it doesn't. Get it to explain the job back to you. Get it to ask you questions before it writes a word.
The same goes if you're paying a copywriter. Have a proper conversation with them first.
The more context you give, the more the words sound like you. A one-line prompt gets you everyone's words. A real briefing gets you yours.
Next time you write something that matters, give whoever's helping you, human or machine, a proper briefing first. Then read the result out loud before you use it. If it doesn't sound like you talking, change it until it does.
And if there's a sentence in there you'd be embarrassed to hear read back to you at a dinner, take it out.
First published April 2018.
