[Day 1 of 5] Everyone sounds the same 💔 (and we hate that for us)

Guess what??

It’s early access week for my Quarterly Copy Pass waitlisters!!

Alas, that isn’t you (stay tuned for next week for more on this ;-).

But I thought I’d still come in and share something useful. Namely, a quick n’ dirty 5-day series on AI tells in your copy that go beyond the em dash.

Since I’m the boss, I’ve even decided to give this an *official* name – Beyond the Em Dash: 5 AI Tells Sabotaging Your Copy.

(Name still TBD, maybe I’ll have it figured out by the end of the week who knows.)

((Also, I swear to the copywriting gods/[insert-entity-of-choice] if I hear one more complaint about the em dash, I’m going to scream. We love a good dash around here, and you can pry them from my cold, dead, former-English-lit-major-slash-academic-writing-brat hands. There’s already a gazillion “AI tells” lists that throw shade at my beloved em dash, so we’re going deeper in this series.)).

Okay, now that that much-needed Monday parenthetical/rant is out of the way, here’s your "Beyond the Em Dash" AI copy tell #1: it reads like it could belong to ~anyone.~

Between my Quick Copy Clinics (1 ticket left to next Monday’s event, btw) and Quarterly Copy Pass holders, I review a *lot* of copy every single week.

And the one piece of feedback I find myself giving again and again (and again): it all just… kinda sounds the same.

As in: if I were to remove my client’s name from the page, it could’ve easily belonged to 10 other people in their industry.

Unsurprisingly, if your website, sales page, or email could be swapped with a competitor’s and no one would notice… then Houston (or, er, ), we have a problem.

To be clear, this isn’t unique to AI-supported copy!

Made-for-everyone templates and generic copy advice have been giving the internet these same-same vibes for years. AI’s just managed to mass-produce this effect.

It’s ~almost as if~ AI, having been trained on the internet, keeps reaching for the same copy patterns that already exist everywhere else – which is a great way to sound polished and lifeless, and a terrible way to sound like you.

Yet as a business owner, there’s a real risk to this “everyone sounds the same” kind of copy.

One, it’s almost certainly not capturing what makes you great.

If your copy sounds like everyone else’s, that means it’s not capturing the stuff that’s uniquely yours – your perspective, your story, your unique way of doing things, the real-world experience behind your work.

Which means it’s probably also underselling exactly why someone should choose to work with you rather than whoever they have open on the other tab.

Which brings me to two, it’s definitely not helping you stand out.

Thanks to AI, pretty words on a page are a dime a dozen right now.

Anyone, anywhere with an internet connection can churn out perfectly “presentable” copy in seconds. (Your competition included.)

All that generic positioning and "industry standard" phrasing might feel safe ("if everyone else is using it, why wouldn't I?"). But safe doesn't build trust. And if we're being honest? It's probably boring your audience to tears.

Srsly, the bar is SO low for copy right now!

The tiniest tease of personality, the subtlest hint of voice, or the wispiest flicker of an actual point of view already puts you ahead – not just of AI-generated copy, but of most of your human competition, too.

Quick test for you to try, if you want to check your own copy: take a section of one of your pages and ask…

“Could I imagine this exact sentence on someone else’s website/sales page/email in my industry?”

If the answer’s yes…

More on that tomorrow (including some examples of how you can fix it).

~Nicole

P.S. Skipped to the bottom? You’re reading (or rather, skipping) day 1 of my 5-day email series called Beyond the Em Dash: 5 AI Tells Sabotaging Your Copy.

Feel free to scroll back up if you want the full story, or just stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment.