Why writing and editing is more important (and profitable) than ever

Published: June 2025

If you’ve seen our Win Report series, you might have noticed that almost every winning test includes some aspect of copywriting. Likewise, our Wins Database (18 years of winning tests) confirms that copy is the biggest single lever for increasing conversion.

Writing is more important than ever… and it’s changing.

Generative AI is transforming how content is created—and like many teams, we use it every day to speed up and support our work. It helps us move faster, explore ideas, and refine drafts. But we’ve found that standout copy still relies on something AI can’t replicate alone: human empathy, creativity, and experience.

When everyone can produce words instantly, it’s clarity—not quantity—that becomes the true competitive advantage.

AI is an amazing content assistant, but it’s important to understand that the models are often trained on average writing. If your goal is to stand out—not just to produce content but to convert—then the techniques in this classic article will help you hone your writing and editing, whether you work with AI or not.

The cost of confusing writing

When we ask website visitors why they didn’t buy, they often report that they were confused. They hadn’t understood the words on the website. And visitors can’t buy what they can’t understand.

So, with millions of dollars at stake, why are many websites confusing?

Because writing clearly is harder than it sounds. For example, read the following sentence by an otherwise great writer:

“Dance music aficionados can argue interminably over which of the legendary singles Frankie Knuckles produced in the late 80s—singles, you can say without fear of contradiction, that played a part in changing the face of pop music for ever—is the best.”

That sentence is free of typos and punctuation errors. And it uses sophisticated words accurately. According to many rules of English, it’s written well.

Yet most people struggle to understand it, let alone work out what’s wrong with it or how to fix it.

It’s hard to write clearly. In fact, it’s hard to find someone who can teach you how to write clearly. Schools tend to spend more time teaching students how to sound smart, or how to analyze Shakespearian prose, than how to be understood. Students are more likely to be told to memorize poetry than to carry out a readability test.

This is a disservice. Poetry can be life-enriching, but the purpose of almost all writing is to communicate information.

So if your school didn’t teach you how to write clearly, how can you learn?

This article describes techniques and resources to help you to write and edit for clarity. They have helped us to generate hundreds of millions for our clients, so it’s hard to overstate how useful they are.

Why so much content is hard to understand

First, let’s explore two common reasons why so many people struggle to write well despite their best intentions.

Reason 1: Many books teach you to avoid errors, but that’s not the problem

When most people want to improve their writing, they buy a book like “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” which is about how to avoid making mistakes. Such books describe rules like the following:

“When there are parentheses at the end of a sentence, put the period after the closing parenthesis (like this).”
“If your whole sentence is in parentheses, put the period inside the closing parenthesis. (Like this.)”

Such rules may be useful to know, but they make little difference to whether your readers understand what you are saying.

Reason 2: Many teachers specialize in sounding intelligent; if you follow their advice, your sales will plummet

Two bored-looking students. — Highly-converting websites *never* make their visitors feel this way.

Many teachers encourage writing in what Richard Lanham calls the “Official Style”—a style that sounds intelligent but that is hard to read. Lanham’s book Revising Prose teaches you how to translate Official-Style sentences into plain language. It contains a great example of how Warren Buffett, the world’s most famous investor, translated a fund prospectus into plain language. Buffett changed hard-to-read sentences like…

“Adjustments made to shorten portfolio maturity and duration are made to limit capital losses during periods when interest rates are expected to rise.”

Into easy-to-read text:

“When we expect a major and sustained increase in rates, we will concentrate on short-term issues.”

No wonder fellow investors hang on Buffett’s every word.

The Official Style is prevalent in academic literature, too. On the website LOL My Thesis, graduates self-deprecatingly translate the titles of their theses from the Official Style into plain language—usually to comic effect:

Original title of thesis: “Environmental enrichment and the striatum: The influence of environment on inhibitory circuitry within the striatum of environmentally enriched animals and behavioural consequences.” Rewritten title: “Having toys and bright colours in their cages makes mice smarter in their brains!”
Original title of thesis: “Challenging ritual and exploring deposition within the canals of Chavín de Huántar.” Rewritten title: “Ancient Peruvians threw stuff down a drain: maybe it was ritual, probably just trash.”
Original title of thesis: “The Punch Brothers’ The Blind Leaving the Blind: how heterogeneous stylistic techniques provide new interpretations of genre.” Rewritten title: “A band that detests genre classifications is just gonna have to put up with it.”

The rewritten titles are facetious, and many of them omit useful information. But they also reveal a truth: The Official Style is like medieval armor. It defends you from attack, but people can no longer hear what you’re saying.

The Official Style lives on—not just in business and academia—but in much of today’s AI-generated content. This is one reason we must beware of blindly pasting AI content—especially if your goal is conversion. If you were to write your website in the Official Style, your conversion rate would bomb. Your visitors would leave confused.

Teachers and bosses may like intelligent-sounding text, but readers prefer text that’s easy to understand.

How to write and edit so that people will understand you

Faced with all this bad advice, how can you learn to write and edit well? Clear writing is a big subject, but we’ll describe a few techniques and ideas that we use daily.

A simple technique that helps you to write easy-to-read copy

By far the most effective technique for improving your writing is to carry out readability tests. A readability test is simply a user test on a piece of writing.

If you run readability tests on everything you produce, you’ll quickly become aware of how your readers struggle. Make a note of every point at which they falter, and then fix it. You can make the fixes during the test or afterward, depending on how much fixing there is to do, and how quick you are at editing.

(We make sure that at least three people have read every article we write, ideally out loud.)

Speak first, write later

If you struggle to write clearly, you will find the following workaround useful. One of our clients, a company called Moz, had a common problem. Moz’s founder, Rand Fishkin, mentioned that he could persuade almost anyone to sign up in seven minutes. So, face-to-face, Rand’s conversion rate was high, but he was frustrated that his website’s conversion rate was much lower.

We asked Rand to film himself saying what he would say during those seven minutes.

Rand Fishkin was masterful at selling his company’s service face-to-face—so we recorded him doing it.

We transcribed the video and then used the transcript as a template for the company’s new landing page. And we embedded the video itself into the page.

The new page beat the old one, with a 52% higher conversion rate during the A/B test. Rand reported that, in total, we almost tripled his company’s conversion rate. (If you’d like to learn more about this project, see the detailed case study we wrote about it.)

Many people find that their spoken English is easier to understand than their written English. If you are one of those people, try the following workflow:

Record yourself.
Transcribe the recording (which is easier than ever with AI). We highly recommend Otter.ai for fast, accurate transcription.
Edit your transcript and incorporate it into your website.
A/B test the new page to confirm that your changes have increased your profits.

Respect the reader’s memory buffer

A woman reads a webpage but looks confused.

To make your content easy to understand, there’s one principle above all others that you should understand: You should be constantly aware of the reader’s memory buffer.

As a person reads, their brain constantly processes and interprets the incoming words. In doing so, it loads the words into a short-term memory—a buffer—and then discharges them when the meaning has been understood.

The buffer memory is surprisingly small—it struggles to hold more than about fifteen words. Fortunately, most sentences contain frequent resolution points, at which the meaning can be understood and the buffer unloaded. In the following examples, we have labeled with pipes (“|”) the main resolution points—the points at which the words in the buffer can be interpreted. We have also labeled, in ever-fading shades of green, the points at which the short-term memory has gone too long without a break.

Dance music aficionados| can argue interminably over| which of the legendary singles Frankie Knuckles produced in the late 80s—singles, you can say without fear of contradiction, that played a part in changing the face of pop music forever—is the best.|

The pipes feel like points at which your brain gets to “take a breath.” When you read the faded words, you may get the same panicky feeling that you get when you are diving underwater and you are starting to run out of oxygen. By the time you reach the final pipe, your short-term memory is gasping.

The following text contains another example of the same phenomenon:

To pass the Bechdel test,| a movie must have at least two female characters| who are named| and talk to each other| about something other than a man.|
Pulp Fiction, all three movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, The Social Network, Avatar, and Finding Nemo reportedly fail the test.|

To understand where those resolution points (the pipes) lie, you could study linguistic parse trees. However, they are hard to learn. Fortunately, there’s an easier way. With a few minutes’ practice, you’ll discover that you can sense it just by reading a sentence word by word and noting the points at which your understanding resolves.

(Incidentally, dependency length is the number of words during which the reader needs to “hold their breath” before they can reach a resolution point.)

If you aim to go easy on your readers’ memory buffers, the following valuable rules of thumb emerge.

Keep sentences short

You can enforce resolution points by keeping sentences short. A period is a resolution point. As you become more sophisticated, you’ll discover that certain types of long sentences are fine, provided they have what’s called right-branched clauses, like this one, or this one, or even this one.

Get to the verb quickly

In each sentence, minimize the distance between the start of the subject and the end of the verb. In the example above, we mentioned the following sentence:

“Pulp Fiction, all three movies of the original Star Wars trilogy, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II, The Social Network, Avatar, and Finding Nemo reportedly fail the test.”

You could improve it by moving the verb fail to the start:

“The following movies reportedly fail the test|: The original Star Wars trilogy|, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II|, Pulp Fiction|, The Social Network|, Avatar|, and Finding Nemo.|”

Cut fluff

“Omit needless words,” advised Strunk and White. Buffer memory is the reason. Needless words don’t just waste time; they make ideas too big to fit in buffer memories.

Replace nominalizations with action verbs

Nominalizations are where verbs are stated as though they were nouns. So, for example,

Meet becomes a meeting.
Investigated becomes an investigation.
Tested becomes a test.

Nominalizations are bad because they require a (usually meaningless) verb like had, plus prepositions to link them:

Meet becomes had a meeting. (What was being had?)
Investigated becomes held an investigation. (What was being held?)
Tested becomes carried out a test. (What was carried?)

You can spot nominalizations by looking for verbs that aren’t really describing what’s happening (like had, held, and carried in the sentences above). The verb to be is the most common culprit. If you ever see to be (or variants like is and was), you’ll probably find a more action-ey verb hiding nearby, maybe inside a noun. Ask yourself, what is actually being done here? For example, when you see the following sentence:

My recommendation is to carry out an improvement initiative on the website.

The word is indicates that the verb is hiding elsewhere. In this case, the verb is recommend, and it’s hiding in the word recommendation. You should rewrite the sentence as follows:

I recommend we carry out an improvement initiative on the website.

But even that isn’t going far enough. In the sentence above, is anything really being “carried out”? No, the presence of the words “carry out” reveals that another verb is hiding somewhere. In this case, the verb is improve, and it has buried itself in the noun phrase improvement initiative. You should further rewrite the sentence as follows:

I recommend we improve the website.

And so, we have converted a twelve-word sentence into a six-word one. The readers’ memory buffers will thank us for it.

If in doubt, use the following sentence structure

The human brain is great at understanding sentences that have the following structure:

The woman threw the ball to the dog.

In other words…

A living entity does something (maybe to something else, preferably another living entity).

Next time you are struggling to write a sentence, try writing it in that format. For most conversion copywriting, the living entities should be you (the reader) and we (the company).

When you first try it, you’ll feel like it isn’t going to work. You’ll be surprised how often it does.

Why clear writing is still a key skill for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

The way we write may be changing, but what we write has never been more important. As our winning tests consistently prove, precise, targeted writing is a huge competitive advantage.

As more and more content is produced by AI, your ability to edit and craft that output is one of the most human, high-leverage skills you can develop. AI will help you move faster, but it can’t yet replace the insight and empathy that great writing demands.

So whether you’re writing from scratch or refining your AI-generated drafts, the tools and techniques in this article will help you rise above the noise.

If you write and edit for clarity, you stand a chance of persuading your readers.

If you don’t, you don’t.

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