# Copy Guide — Writing as Design Material

Words appear in a design for one reason: to make it easier to understand, and therefore easier
to use. They are design material, not decoration — bring the same intentionality to copy that
you bring to spacing and color. Copy can make a design feel as templated as the visuals can.

## Headline discipline

- **The litmus test (hard gate):** seeing ONLY the headline, does a visitor know exactly what
  this is? "Build the future of work" fails. "Invoices your clients pay in one tap" passes.
- Specific beats clever, every time. Numbers, nouns from the subject's world, and verbs the
  audience uses beat abstractions ("platform", "solution", "workflow", "supercharge").
- The headline is written from the visitor's side of the screen — what they get, not what the
  system does.

## Voice rules

- Write from the end user's side: name things by what people control and recognize, never by
  how the system is built. A person manages *notifications*, not *webhook config*.
- Active voice by default. A control says exactly what happens when it's used: "Save changes",
  not "Submit". An action keeps its name through the whole flow — the button that says
  "Publish" produces a toast that says "Published".
- Plain verbs, sentence case, no filler. Tone matched to the brand and audience, then held
  consistent — the vocabulary of an interface is its signposting.
- Let each element do exactly one job: a label labels, an example demonstrates, nothing quietly
  does double duty.

## Failure & emptiness are direction, not mood

- Errors state what went wrong and how to fix it, in the interface's voice. They never
  apologize and are never vague ("Invalid input" is banned; "Card number is 15 digits — Amex
  cards start with 34 or 37" passes).
- An empty screen is an invitation to act: what this space is for + the one action to fill it.

## Anti-slop copy sweep (polish pass)

- Kill averaged-SaaS phrasing: "all-in-one", "seamless", "supercharge", "unlock", "empower",
  "take X to the next level", "built for the modern Y".
- Kill rhythm tells: em-dash triads, "It's not X, it's Y", three-benefit drumbeats.
- Every feature name says what the user gets, not the implementation ("Search that reads
  handwriting", not "AI-Powered OCR Engine").
- Read every sentence asking: could this appear on a competitor's page unchanged? If yes,
  it isn't copy yet — it's filler.