TAL .009: Create Better Writers in One Hour Per Week

This letter is about getting more out of your copywriters and content writers. It’s a double issue – two exercises you can start using with your team today.

1. The Problem

Writers are often treated like factory machines – workhorses constantly writing for the same brand in the same style about the same things.

But repetition leads to ruts.

The more you stay in the same mental rut, the deeper it gets, and the less creative you become.

The problem: creativity is essential for good writing.

Without it, you may as well use a brand-voice-trained AI to craft your marketing collateral.

You need a way to preserve your writers’ spark.

2. The Solution

Build cognitive restoration sessions into working weeks.

Treat these differently to mental health/wellness breaks (like going outside or power napping).

Instead, cognitive restoration aims to jolt your writers out of their ruts by breaking the pattern.

There are lots of different exercises you can use during cognitive restoration.

Two I like: register revision and input diversification.

Register revision = rewriting a particular sentence or paragraph using different registers (formality levels).

Register is one of the four components of brand voice, so this exercise can help strengthen your writers’ consistency too.

Input diversification = moving away from the standard inputs (like industry content, LinkedIn, SMEs, customers, and other marketing collateral) and embracing alternative sources (like novels, poems, plays, or investigative journalism).

We can’t innovate if we don’t have new sources of information.

Diversifying your writers’ inputs helps them think about language in fresh ways, leading to better outputs.

3. Implementation

Tech Needed: None

Ease of Uptake: Easy

1. Set aside an hour per week for each of your dedicated content writers and copywriters.
2. Choose a different exercise each week.
1. If you choose register revision:
1. Get your writers to each pick a sentence from a book, a blog, a website, or another publication.
2. Ask them to work out which register their sentence currently is (casual, informal, neutral, formal or ceremonial).
3. Then get them to rewrite it in the remaining four registers.
4. Focus on the differences in sentence complexity, word choice, active/passive voice, idioms and slang, jargon, and contractions. Don’t change the meaning.
5. If they get stuck, your writers can use ChatGPT to help them by using prompts like ‘Rewrite this in a more formal way’.
6. Repeat up to 10 times. Make sure your writers choose sentences from a variety of sources.
2. If you choose input diversification:
1. Find a publication with writing that is good on a technical level. Don’t worry about the ideas – just focus on the actual sentences.
2. Get your writers to spend their hour reading it.
3. Ask them to be mindful of the language and syntax, but don’t get them to take notes. They should passively absorb what they’re reading without being pulled out.
4. Choose different inputs each time. One week might be an Animalz article or a peer-reviewed paper; the next might be a Tao Lin novel or an Undark report.