One phrase hasn’t left me since I read it: “Someone who can not just police our writers’ work, but elevate it.”

That job description embodies a philosophy I’ve been practicing for over a decade.

At RPA, I was the creative lead on the agency’s most writing-intensive clients, while also overseeing all copy deliverables for the agency itself.

Southern California Edison spoke to an audience of 15 million customers. Every piece of copy passed before my eyes, and every piece had to balance regulatory complexity with human warmth.

Honda Regional Marketing had to speak in clear, persuasive terms to car shoppers comparing specs and offers. And since much of the work was done by interns and juniors, editing and teaching were inseparable.

On the RPA Marketing Committee, I was the agency’s writer-in-residence. The designated creative lead responsible for how RPA spoke to the world. Every RFP deck, case study and page of website copy came through me. Writing for your own agency, to an audience as savvy as your own industry, is its own discipline.

At The Book Shop School for Ads, I wrote the curriculum for both the Concept Development and Copywriting courses, and teach both myself. Over the course of an intensive nine-week boot camp, the Copywriting course covers the full range of deliverables a working writer faces: long-form, social, scripts, brand platforms, naming and even the fine art of deck setup copy.

A few principles I come back to, whether I'm in the classroom or the creative director's chair:

Cadence is emotion. The architecture of a sentence is a creative decision. A series of short declarative sentences creates one emotional temperature. A longer sentence that builds and withholds and finally releases its energy creates another. Most writers treat pacing as a byproduct. I teach my writers to treat it as an instrument.

Transitions determine flow. I can’t stress enough how many writers, especially junior writers, struggle with transitions. They know what they want to say, and they’re saying all the right things. But the seams are showing. The writing doesn’t feel woven together. The difference between copy that flows and copy that stumbles almost always lives in the transitions.

Pronouns are deceptively fraught. “We” and “You” are the most intimate words in a copywriter’s arsenal, and the most lazily deployed. A brand that overuses “We” to manufacture solidarity (“We all know the holidays are stressful”) can be seen as assuming an unearned intimacy. A brand that over-seasons its copy with “You” risks sounding salesy. Sometimes the most confident move is to step back from both: “The holidays are expensive. They don’t have to be stressful.”

The same vigilance applies to determiners. When reviewing copy, I ask writers to interrogate every "it" and "that." What exactly does "it" refer to? "The campaign launched during the holidays. It was a huge success." What was? The campaign, or the holidays? When a reader has to backtrack, you've already lost. Other times, “it” is just killing time: "It's important to note that our ingredients are responsibly sourced."

The feature isn’t the benefit. There's always a gap between "what's in it" and "what's in it for me.” Most writers default to the former without realizing it. I challenge my writers not to make the reader work for the payoff.

Tone of voice is the hardest principle to teach and the easiest to get wrong. I teach my writers that tone is an emotional contract between a brand and its audience. And like every contract, it's two-way. Whether a brand speaks with wit or gravity, warmth or whimsy depends on its relationship to its audience. In practice, tone is built on diction and syntax. There’s an emotional difference between “your finances” and “your wallet,” and between inviting the reader to “manage” and “take charge.” There's an equally significant difference between a brand that speaks in long, considered passages that acknowledge the reader, and one that speaks in blunt declarations without any color commentary. The wrong tone can make truth sound false. Getting tone right means having the discipline to subordinate your own voice and develop real empathy for the reader and real respect for the brief.

Great writing doesn’t require a conversation, but great writers do. I take the coaching aspect of my role seriously. Which means that even when it’s easier to re-route a copy deck with tracked changes and comments, a 10-minute conversation can have much greater impact. My Teams chat logs are full of back-and-forth workshopping, “How does this feel” followed by “Very nice! I just think we’ll need to take another look at the second module now that we’re leading into it with a more conversational intro.” I want my writers to feel comfortable coming to me with questions in the moment and not just buttoned-up work at the appointed review time.