by Brinda Gulati
I studied writing as a discipline for five years, and it’s impossible to divorce the art of content from the art of original thought.
When self-expression through the written word is flattened into a grammatically perfect formula, the excitement—the novelty—of reading something truly original proportionally decreases.
And that’s a big problem.
Because being divorced from community while also being hyper-informed of it through parasocial digital relationships has fractured how we sound to each other, which has, therefore, made us a whole lot more B-O-R-I-N-G.
My curmudgeonly manifesto
We’re living in the age of the great botoxification of content—everything nipped, tucked, and pulled to give you the illusion of perfection while remaining completely devoid of emotion.
I’m sick to the gills talking about AI. Yet, here I am, talking about AI.
The point is, that being chronically online is just not fun anymore, you know?
We’re living in the age of the great botoxification of content—everything nipped, tucked, and pulled to give you the illusion of perfection while remaining completely devoid of emotion.
Everything—and everyone—sounds the same. If AI is making content for AI to then read and rank content, what are we doing in this self-fellating machine?
That’s the premise of the dead internet theory. More or less.
The second you think of optimizing content to its fullest extent, it stops being content.
You’ve got a pastiche of clauses that look and sound like they mean something but are spiritually barren.
Meaning is derived, not merely generated.
I mean to say / I mean I keep meaning to / I mean amending / I mean correcting /I mean qualifying / I mean collecting / I mean X + X + X and so forth / I mean all possible values / I mean adding / I mean and also / I mean pileups happen when you can’t see where you’re going…
And you might not feel it just yet, but that homogeneity in language is making us all smooth-brained.
Now, let’s talk about how we fix it. At the heart of content you and I enjoy reading is the triumvirate of accessibility, relatability, and specificity.
The ARS framework
A quick little origin story: I came up with this framework about two years ago when I was rubber-ducking with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini simultaneously, and ALL three models tripped over the same things in forming coherent arguments.
- The language was inaccessible: Big words do not guarantee a cogent argument.
- The writing was unrelatable: No one I know says “leverages synergies” in daily, casual life.
- The theses were unspecific: I’m not going to believe who said what, when, where, how, and why just because you tell me to.
And therein, in a fit of desperation—with executive pressure to unilaterally “use more AI”—my fingers flew over the keyboard—”CAN YOU JUST BE MORE ACCESSIBLE, RELATABLE, AND SPECIFIC????”
Et voilà.
I sat back and thought, “Wait, those three adjectives are the heart of what I look for in the writing I read, too.”
I have a checklist of questions for each node.
The more you interrogate your own thinking, the more these become a subconscious editorial roll call.
A is for accessibility
If something can be said simply, is it being said simply?
Is there a micro-example to buttress the definition/workflow/pain?
Are we prioritising reader comprehension over our own literary hubris?
“A ChatGPT productivity app typically refers to one of two things:
1. A custom GPT built inside ChatGPT for a specific workflow (e.g., writing assistant, meeting summarizer, research analyst)
2. A connected integration that brings other workplace tools into ChatGPT
This guide is about the second one.”
Source: Jotform
Notice it defines the term before assuming you know it.
R is for relatability
Do we have case studies and/or quotes from businesses/people who’ve been there, done that?
Can we drop in a quick demo video/explainer if something is not immediately clear?
In language, examples, and statistics—how are we “talking” to the reader?
“Email is more cockroach than dinosaur—far from dead. This guide to ecommerce email marketing proves why it’s still the Jason Bourne of digital marketing—someone’s always trying to kill it, but it can’t be done.”
Source: The Retail Exec
Cockroach, dinosaur, Jason Bourne—three references in two sentences, and none of them about email. Yet the reader knows exactly what email is doing.
S is for specificity
Are we successfully isolating the pain point and then quantifying or visualising it within the first 150 words?
Do we have data points that can support our claims?
Are we swapping out fustian jargon for words/phrases that speak directly to our readers in terms and situations they encounter?
“For many enterprise brands, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) is less a growth engine and more a cost center.
We’re not telling the story—the numbers are: four months to implement, 16 months to see ROI, and a cost perception that’s four-dollar-sign expensive. This is a burden for enterprises, and often out of reach for small businesses.
Even giants like Mattel felt the strain, until they switched to Shopify.”
Source: Shopify
Notice that no adjective is asked to carry the weight a number could carry instead.
My last two cents
You can’t un-botox content from the outside, but you can stop injecting your own.
If the machine can write it, you shouldn’t. ■
Brinda Gulati is a fractional content marketer who writes easy-to-understand, informative content for humans. She has two degrees in Creative Writing from the University of Warwick, and believes that, above all, stories are a deeply human endeavor. That’s why Shopify, Jotform, Whatagraph, Userpilot, Dock, and Dash trust her with their content.
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