Writing Better Copy
“If you want your story to make it to the final edition, make it easy to cut”
The first time I ever got compensated for writing was back in the 2000s. There was once an “epinions”-style product reviews website in the UK and the format was upvoted user-generated content mixed with pre-myspace social media.
The site was not without issue or inter-user drama but it at least held to a single solid principle: good text should be (and was) rewarded.
I used my teenage earnings from that site to buy the first game I ever bought with my own labour: a dual box set of Fallout 1 and 2. Said site is indirectly responsible for this substack, because it started me on a path towards my first major job as a copy editor in news media.
Two decades on, various people and corporations have continued to pay me to type words on a screen. So, to close out the first year of this newsletter, here are some things that help me when writing copy.
Consider the audience
Who is this elusive creature, the reader? The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds—a person assailed by many forces competing for attention. At one time those forces were relatively few: newspapers, magazines, radio, spouse, children, pets. Today they also include a galaxy of electronic devices for receiving entertainment and information—television, VCRs, DVDs, CDs, video games, the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, BlackBerries, iPods—as well as a fitness program, a pool, a lawn and that most potent of competitors, sleep. The man or woman snoozing in a chair with a magazine or a book is a person who was being given too much unnecessary trouble by the writer.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (p. 8). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Who are you writing for, aside from yourself? This isn’t meant as a meaningless platitude or part of a fancy SWOT analysis slide: if you don’t know who that is, find out. Run surveys. Ask your people what games they’re currently playing and what genres they like. If you don’t yet have much of an audience for your own game or too small of a sample size to work with, turn your attention towards those titles you aspire to. Look at your competitors. What are their audiences interested in? What are their social media feeds posting about? Are you familiar with the associated tropes and the terminology? If you as writer have no background and little interest in the subject matter, this will become blatantly apparent in the end result.
Once you’ve found out who the audience is, put yourself in the audience’s place. Write your text in a way that is not you speaking – or as some often like to write “We just did x!” – I, the audience, really don’t care about that. I care about what I can do. It’s your job as the writer here to tell me what that is. For instance, if your title has gone through a round of balance changes, don’t just list out the values of things that have changed. Contextualize them in a way oriented around the player as buffs or nerfs, or quality of life changes that directly affect me the player.
Please don’t let the ghastly “Bug fixes and optimization” make it to a storefront. At best, it’s a great way to get people to never read your patch notes ever again; at worst, it’s code for “Our F2P title needed to update its ad tech so we could serve you more ads”.
Consider the medium
On September 11, 2023, the Steam patch notes for v1.02 of Armored Core VI were unintentionally “reelased” in the barebones manner you see above. It got fixed quickly, was clearly unintentional and provoked several amused comments in the time it was still live. This was a very rare case of a mess-up being positive news and generating buzz, which can happen when you have banked enough goodwill as a developer.
As someone familiar with Steam’s content management system (CMS), I felt a pang of sympathy for whoever was responsible. It’s clear to me that the version initially posted was a hasty draft sitting in the backend, which would look something like this:
Making a draft in this way is standard procedure, with the idea being that you populate the fields containing temp text with the actual content at a later time. I type out my posts in MSWord or a google doc rather than in a CMS, because they autosave frequently and my experiences with CMSes are universally poor. How many times in your life have you spent 20 minutes typing out a forum reply, only to find out upon hitting post that your session somehow ended in the interim and no, the client doesn’t cache text there, so all that effort is now gone.
Since you are unlikely to be the owner of any of these platforms or apps, you are always at the whims of whatever way they choose to handle the content you wish to publish. This means you should preview your stuff a lot. Does your article contain images? Test those uploads in a private window. Hyperlinks? Double check they work in the same method. Sending out a monthly newsletter to subscribers? Inspect a draft in a smartphone browser before you send it out.
There are many bugbears to contest with but your two biggest enemies are character counts and, in the case of link previews, culling. Despite being wholly oriented around text, things like social media feeds and email clients have a paradoxical habit of cutting things short. Apple’s app store in particular is guilty of this.
So list out the places you intend to post on and crosspost to, and test how your text appears on all of them beforehand. Treat it as a form or proofreading. It will initially be a headache but with time and repetition it will become second nature.
Consider the consistency
Be consistent not just in the tone of the texts you produce but also when you put them out. Too often I see brief flurries of activity in one feed or scattered posts in another only to discover later that the authors became exasperated because their content “never took off” and so they either quit doing it, or worse pivot to a much more complicated format like YouTube or TikTok only to run through the same motions.
Assuming we’re talking about organic marketing (i.e. not “paid” via ads), expecting an audience to spring up from nothing is fallacious. Once you’ve started posting content, congratulations, that’s half the battle won. The next half is to keep doing it. Part of the problem is inherent to social media platforms themselves.
Social networks are a big business whereby we, the consumers, are trying to transact on rented land. Think of Facebook like you would a casino – nobody knows the house rules better than the house. Nobody can beat the house at its own game.
Gil, Carlos. The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI (p. 29). Kogan Page. Kindle Edition.
Much like gambling establishments, social media platforms actively incentivize their users to both produce and consume within their platforms over and over. You might know this behavior as “engagement” which is a nebulous term that encapsulates any person participating (even passively) in any sort of media online. You won’t be able to control the house, but you can control your own output, so have a schedule of content and stick to it.
Also, figure out what tone you are going for. I don’t mind if your copy is informal and uses personal anecdote – but I do mind if, going from one post to the next, it pivots into an academic treatise bogged down with page-long sentences littered with semicolons. Quoting Zinsser once more:
Unity is the anchor of good writing. So, first, get your unities straight. Unity not only keeps the reader from straggling off in all directions; it satisfies your readers’ subconscious need for order and reassures them that all is well at the helm. Therefore choose from among the many variables and stick to your choice.
Zinsser, William. On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction (p. 50). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Think not of consistency as a trap, but as a set of rules to abide by that will keep you and your readers on the same path. Though books like Strunk’s Elements of Style or the Chicago Manual exist and loom large, they don’t have the final say on what you should and shouldn’t write. You do.
Above all else: read. Assuming you got this far, thank you for doing so. See you in 2024.
[Subtitle quote is Adelstein, Jake. Tokyo Vice (p. 27). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.]
Excellent advice, applicable to pretty much any kind of writing too. Looking forward to reading more in 2024!