There's a particular voice that takes over when people write for their website. Sentences get longer. Words get fancier. "We help you" becomes "we empower stakeholders to leverage synergistic solutions."
Nobody talks like that. So why do so many brands write like that?
The brochure voice
It happens because writing for your own business feels high-stakes. You want to sound professional, established, bigger than you are. So you reach for the language every other website uses — and end up sounding exactly like every other website.
Here's the problem: your visitor's brain is running a pattern-matching machine. The moment your copy sounds like a template, they file you under "template" and move on. The brands people remember are the ones that sound like a person.
Plain is not unprofessional
The fear behind jargon is that simple language will make the business look small. The opposite is true. Confidence writes short sentences. Look at the copy of the most expensive brands in the world — it's plain, direct, and specific. "Just do it" is three words that took a billion-dollar budget to appreciate.
Plain writing is also more persuasive, because it's easier to believe. Specifics — real numbers, real outcomes, real client language — build trust in a way adjectives never will.
If you wouldn't say it out loud to a client sitting across from you, don't put it on your website.
How to find your real voice
Three exercises that work faster than any copywriting course:
- Record yourself explaining your business to a friend. Then write down what you actually said. That's your copy — it just needs editing, not translating.
- Steal your clients' words. Go through old emails and reviews and pull the exact phrases people use to describe what you did for them. Their language is your headline.
- Read it out loud. Anywhere you stumble or run out of breath, rewrite. If it's hard to say, it's hard to read — and harder to trust.
The rewrite test
Take your homepage headline and ask one question: would a real person ever say this sentence to another real person? If the answer is no, you've found the mistake. Fix that one sentence and everything under it gets easier to write — because you finally know what the page is actually saying.
