The brochure voice, and how to hear it
It has tells. Once you can hear them you cannot unhear them.
- Abstract nouns doing the work. "Solutions", "offerings", "experiences". None of them describes anything a person receives.
- Passive constructions that hide who acts. "Your project will be managed" — by whom? Say "I manage it" or "Sarah manages it".
- Superlatives with no evidence. Leading, premier, trusted, world-class. Every competitor says the same words, so they carry no information.
- The plural "we" for a business of one. This is the one I have the least patience with, having caught myself doing it on my own site. If it is you, say "I". It is not less professional; it is the whole product.
Specifics are the entire trick
Generic copy is a claim. Specific copy is evidence. Compare:
Generic: "We pride ourselves on fast, reliable service and attention to detail."
Specific: "I answer the phone myself. If I say Tuesday, I am there Tuesday, and if I am running late you will hear it from me before you have to ask."
The second is not better because it is warmer. It is better because it is falsifiable. It commits to something. A sentence that no competitor could copy verbatim is a sentence worth keeping; if every business in your trade could paste it onto their own site unchanged, delete it.
The thing no tool can produce
Your actual experience. The job that went wrong and what you changed afterwards. The customer who taught you to ask a question you now always ask. The reason you started this at all.
A language model can imitate the shape of that story. It cannot have lived it, and it will get the details slightly wrong in a way readers notice without being able to say why. This is not a romantic argument about the human spirit — it is that specific true detail is unfakeable and generic warmth is free, so only one of them is worth anything on a page.
If writing that paragraph feels excruciating, describe the event to someone else out loud and write down what you said. Nearly everyone is a better writer in conversation than on a page.
Where to let a machine help, and where not to
I am not precious about this. A model is a good first-draft machine and a very good editor of your own text. It is a poor author of anything that only you know.
Reasonable
Structuring a page you have not started, drafting alt text, tightening a paragraph you have rewritten so often the words have stopped meaning anything, generating the FAQ questions you forgot.
Not reasonable
Your About page. Your story. Any specific claim about results, credentials or experience. Anything you would not personally sign.
The failure mode is not that the output is wrong. It is that it is agreeable — smooth, tidy, beige, and identical to what your competitor got from the same prompt. Push back on that pull every time. Your voice is not a rough edge to be sanded off; it is the reason someone picks you over the nine other tabs they have open. There is more on this in what AI builders cannot do.