Writing for Designers from A Book Apart lays out a process for designers to follow when writing copy along with some tips and tricks to help along the way. I found that the writing process outlined has many parallels with the design process and the advice in this book can be quite easily used when designing too. Here are my notes: 

Introduction

Choosing words and writing what appears in an interface forces us to name components, articulate choices, and explain things to the user. It’s part of design. 

Writing is part of design. Sometimes words get written off as mere “details” in our designs. True details can wait until the end of your design process. Words, however, are deeply integrated throughout the user’s experience of your design. 

Writing can reinforce how you want users to think about your design. Writing can explain the approach or philosophy that underpins your design. Writing can guide users through complex processes. Writing can even help cover for the quirks and compromises in our designs. 

The book covers three general categories of writing you might have to do to support your design work:

  • Interface copy: Often referred to as UI copy or microcopy, this is the text that’s deeply integrated within the interface, like labels for form fields, text on buttons, navigation labels on a website, error messages, and similar. It’s often made of single words or short phrases. If the interface would “break” or be extremely hard to use if you removed this text, we’ll call it interface copy.
  • Product copy: Writing that’s integral to the function of the site/product/app/experience, but not necessarily a direct part of the interface—the body of an onboarding email, for instance, or a description of updates to an application in a changelog. This is content focused on helping/supporting the reader. 
  • Marketing copy: Longer-form writing that is primarily filling a sales or promotional sort of role. This is content focused on persuading the reader. 

At the end of the day, writing is just thinking plus typing. 

Writing is more like design than you might think. Common design activities like framing the problem, identifying constraints, and exploring solutions are part of writing, too. Many of the methodologies one might use in UX work can be part of a writing workflow: stakeholder interviews, user research, content auditing, ideation workshops, critiques, and more. 

Prepare

There’s more to writing than writing, especially when it’s part of design. It’s easier to get the writing done when you thoughtfully and intentionally prepare to do the writing. Smart writers do prep work on every assignment. 

Do each of the following in order to fully prepare to get the writing done:

  • articulate the assignment
  • collect inputs
  • generate ideas
  • create structure
  • make space to write 

Taken together, your deadline, role, context, requirements, and scope will give you a complete idea of what you need to do to be done. That’s your assignment. 

Err on the side of capturing the above information information publicly, even if it seems like no one else cares, just to cover your butt. The header area of a task or ticket in your project management system is a great option, or even just an email to your team: “Hey friends, here’s what I understand about the writing needs on this project. Let me know if I’ve missed anything…” 

Later on in the project, you’ll be grateful to have a paper trail, so to speak, as reviewers and stakeholders start asking questions and trying to poke holes in your writing. 

Brainstorming: When brainstorming, avoid decisions of all kinds. Decision-making is a form of convergent thinking. It’s an act of limiting, reducing, filtering, choosing—editing. Making decisions, even small ones, brings the scent of criticism and closed-mindedness into the room that can spoil an otherwise productive brainstorming session. 

Freewriting: Freewriting is stringing words together for a set amount of time. It’s especially effective for longform product and marketing copy. 

Outlines: Clear thinking is powerful. With a strong outline, some of your writing will seem to write itself! 

Developers and designers know that there are some kinds of work that require you to build a bit of intellectual momentum, and that being interrupted, even briefly, can kill that momentum. Writing is that kind of work, too. 

Compose

Writing isn’t magic, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use a few tricks to make it easier. Those tricks revolve around two objectives: to write quickly and to write everything. 

Write quickly

You should write quickly, for two reasons:

  1. If you try to compose the perfect draft one perfect word at a time, you’ll never get the writing done.
  2. Good clear writing comes from good clear thinking. The less time your thoughts have to rattle around in your head, the more time they can spend in the clear light of day—and the better they’ll sound in your design. 

If you find yourself fussing with fonts and formatting before all the words are written, consider writing in a low-fidelity environment like a text editor. 

I recommend adopting a “lazy” mentality and occasionally asking yourself if there’s a faster or automated way to do what you’re about to do. 

Write everything

If you’re still lost on how to start or what to write, you may need to revisit your inputs and assignment. But more than likely, at this point, you just need to start writing. Pick something easy to get your fingers moving. (You don’t have to start at the beginning.) Continue writing, and get the whole thing written before you start perfecting individual parts of it. Editing comes later, and besides, what you write in one area might impact what you write in another area. 

The best way to write also generates the best kind of writing: say just one thing at a time. Say one thing in your headings. Say one thing on your buttons. Say one thing in the tooltip text, one thing in the error message, one thing in each paragraph. Writers get stuck (and readers get lost) when the words are trying to express too much at once. Words are powerful, yes, but still bound by pesky constraints like “time” and “how brains work.” If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or the words are coming slowly, narrow your scope. Focus in and say just one thing. 

ACBs

Practice your ACBs The ACBs are a set of writing and editing lenses created by Ken Rand in his book The 10% Solution. The acronym stands for Accuracy, Clarity, and Brevity. The order of the lenses is as important as the lenses themselves. 

  • Accuracy: Start by writing something that is objectively true. The labels in our interface copy need to correspond with what actually happens when the user interacts with those elements. The features and benefits in our marketing copy need to reflect the actual product the user is signing up for, not an imagined or ideal version. The product copy needs to provide real, useful guidance. If what we’re writing is wrong, we’re already sunk.

    Accuracy in interface copy requires understanding how the interface actually behaves. If you’re not sure, ask! You might be surprised how often you’ll discover a button, link, or other element whose behavior is a mystery, even if you designed it. 
  • Clarity: After you have your facts straight, you want to focus on making your writing clear—that is, straightforward, simple, and easy to understand.

    To create clarity, look for opportunities to: replace resplendently fantastical fancy language with simpler language (and uncommon words with common ones) put things in a logical order add supporting information add examples and anecdotes to reinforce your point delete things that don’t support your main idea define concepts that users might be unfamiliar with

    Clarity is in the middle of this ACB sandwich because text can never be clear if it’s not accurate or too brief. 
  • Brevity: Brevity is last—it’s admirable, but it should never cause you to sacrifice accuracy or clarity. Short doesn’t automatically mean easier to read or understand.

    Designers can get stuck because they start with brevity. Sometimes they are trying to write text directly within the confines of a wireframe (and without accurate character constraints). Other times, a well-intentioned but ill-informed stakeholder is pushing them to “make it shorter,” because that’s the only advice they knew about writing for the web. “How do I make it fit?” is the right question at the wrong time. Start by writing out a complete idea, then refine and trim. 

Keep writing

Write quickly, with tools that make writing easier, in an environment conducive to getting the writing done. Repeat this until you’ve written a decent, complete draft that meets the requirements of your assignment. 

The draft is just the start. Next? We Edit. 

Edit

There’s a bit of a fuzzy line between composing and editing. Often, to reach that complete first draft, we’ll cut and paste words and phrases, rewrite ideas, maybe even scratch a whole screen’s worth of text and start over. “Tweaking” the text while we write will catch errors and improve phrasing, but it won’t elevate the consistency, clarity, and quality of the writing. 

Editing is about substantively improving the writing. Don’t confuse this with proofreading, where you fix typos and punctuation. 

The mental shift from writing to editing doesn’t happen automatically. If you’ve just finished your first big run through the Compose phase, job one is to take a short break. 

Track your changes

You need a system to track and manage revisions before you begin editing. 

  • You want to preserve your first draft for reference.
  • You want to be able to undo (and redo) changes that you and others make to the text with relative ease.
  • You want to keep track of the who and the why of any changes more seriously than correcting typos and spelling errors. 

Editing can be dangerous. Move too quickly, and you can lose the thread of what you were trying to accomplish—or lose good work altogether. 

Know why you’re editing

Editing requires an intention, a lens of sorts—an answer to the question “Editing for what?” You could rewrite a draft fifty times, but if you don’t have a goal in mind during those rewrites, how can you know whether it’s getting any better? Having a lens changes your mindset from merely reading the text to evaluating the text against particular criteria. 

Common editing lenses. 

Focus: Editing to make your writing more focused means cutting out stuff that isn’t related to the key goals and messages of your design. Writing is focused when every word—every word—is serving a clear purpose. 

Simplicity: If you feel like the writing is too complex and could benefit from being simpler, there are three key levers you can manipulate:

  • Structure: How it’s organized. Things that feel complex often feel simpler once they’re in the right order. It’s the same information, mostly the same words, but organized in a way that adds context and clarifies the meaning.
  • Language: The words you use. Many organizations strive to apply principles of plain language to their writing—using the simplest words possible in any given situation. Plain language doesn’t mean dumbed-down or boring; directness and clarity make room for your big ideas to pop.
  • Concept: The big idea behind the writing. Clear concepts keep things simple. If you’re explaining something new or complex, consider a metaphor that’s relatable for your primary audience. 

Readability

Readability isn’t about legibility in the design sense, but about what’s happening in a reader’s head as they process the words. 

If we want our writing to be readable and user-friendly, we need to do more work now so that our readers have less work to do later. For instance: Extract the most important point and put it right at the top. Clearly specify the next action the reader needs to take. State whom the information is for (or not for). Vary the lengths of sentences and paragraphs. (Rhythmic variety is easier to read.) 

Consistency

Editing for consistency means making sure your writing agrees with itself, and that it agrees with all of the other stuff it’s connected to. Little inconsistencies creep in everywhere: 

Part of your job is to ensure that the words you use to describe product features and interface components are consistent throughout the experience. One way to achieve this is through the application of a controlled vocabulary. Controlled vocabularies are like custom dictionaries. They can exist as a simple list of terms and definitions; you could even incorporate them as a layer in a design pattern library. 

Putting your ideas in the right order also adds impact and strength. In a first draft, you’re figuring out what to write as you’re writing it, which means that the most interesting idea—the one with the most impact—often ends up at the end of your sentence, paragraph, or flow. Move it to the top, 

Strength

Do the words make an impact? Does the writing feel strong, or does it feel passive? Passive voice is almost guaranteed to suck the strength out of your writing. 

Passive voice has no ownership—it feels weak—whereas active voice takes a stand—it feels strong. Compare, for instance:

  • Passive voice: “Mistakes were made.”
  • Active voice: “I screwed up. My bad.” 

Passive voice isn’t wrong, per se, but it has less impact than active voice. In active voice, there’s action, not just existence. 

Tone

Getting the right tone for your writing means that it’s emotionally appropriate to the audience and subject matter. It’s about finding the right “vibe,” the right “level” for the writing. 

There are a few specific angles on tone that often apply to business and design writing. 

  • Urgency 
  • Scale 
  • Emotion 

Do the editing

To effectively edit your writing, you need to introduce a layer of abstraction between you and the copy. That abstraction layer can be a hack, a tool, or another person (like an editor)—whatever you need to approach the work with more distance and objectivity. Choose editing tools that make you look closely and carefully at the actual words that have been written, not just your impression of what it says. 

Your pattern-optimized brain wants to make sense of whatever mess of letters it encounters, and it will lie, cheat, and steal to make that happen. That means that a quiet, in-your-head readback is not a great way to catch some of the more pernicious errors of grammar, spelling, and formatting that will plague your copy. There are smarter approaches to reading your work that will help you edit. 

Read it

Reading your text out loud (into the air, making actual sounds with your mouth) is one of the most recommended bits of editing advice for writers. 

An open-plan office is writer’s hell

While you’re reading, listen. Listen for anywhere that you trip up, anything that sounds funny, anything that’s hard to say, anywhere that you got lost. Mark those passages and consider them for revision. 

Read it out loud to a person. There’s also something magical about “performing” your text for someone—it engages a very different part of the brain. You may well surprise yourself with a creative improvisation as you’re speaking the words that wouldn’t have occurred to you as you were writing them. 

Have the computer read it to you. Text-to-speech is a wonderful accessibility tool, and just so happens to be handy for writers, too.

Have a person read it to you. Readers who are not you might put the emphasis in unexpected places, revealing potential ambiguities. You can hear where they hesitate and where they speed up. 

Ask for feedback

Stakeholder reviews—for both design and writing—are often built into our processes. What doesn’t occur to many writers, however, is that they may be able to ask stakeholders for feedback before asking them for approval. 

How you frame your invitation matters. Dropping a meeting invite on someone’s calendar called “Review onboarding text” sets a very different tone than sending a message asking if you can borrow a few minutes of their time at the end of the day to run some preliminary approaches by them. 

Be clear what kind of feedback you’re looking for, and ask specific questions. For example: Does this include all of the information we need to communicate to customers? We’re trying out a lighthearted tone. How would you feel if the final draft ends up sounding something like this? I’m focusing on structure right now. Is this the right order to tell this story? I want to know what questions you think customers will have after reading this. 

It helps to articulate for stakeholders where you are in the process, and to assure them that, yes, they’ll have a chance to see the final text, yes, it’s going to go through legal, yes, someone is going to proofread it, yes, they can see it before it goes live on the website, etc. 

(Never assume that a stakeholder will remember what they told you when it comes time to approve the final text. Keep your receipts!) 

Collaborate with others

Sometimes, for whatever reason, you just can’t quite figure out how to say what you’re trying to say. Or you’ve said it, and it’s blah. Time to bring in a fresh pair of eyes. Collaborating with colleagues can be one of the quickest and most effective ways to help you get unstuck—or to unsuck a particularly rough passage. Even brief conversations can yield big outcomes. 

A handy framing device for these collaborations is to ask, “How would you approach this?” That’s more freeing than “What’s the best way to write this?” and more forward-looking than “What’s wrong with this?” 

Lock it in

Sometimes, the hardest part about editing is stopping. It can feel like there’s always more to improve upon, more people you should run the copy by, more of the word count you should trim away. 

This is part of why we plan our writing workflow—editing rarely feels “done,” but if we’ve completed our workflow steps, it’s done enough. Eventually, you have to say: “This is the text. These are the words. We are moving forward with these words.” 

Clearly articulating the assignment, as we did in the Prepare phase, lets you know when you can finally put your pencil down and step away from the role of writer, even and especially if the design itself is not yet done. This last phase, Finish, includes all of the steps big and small you need to take care of to complete your writing assignment, including approvals, hand-offs, reintegrating it into the design, and reflecting on your work. 

Finish

Getting the writing approved

As the writer, there are some things you’ll want to be prepared for during these final approvals. They will probably be familiar from your experience as a designer:

  • The swoop and poop: A clear assignment and a well-maintained changelog can help serve as your umbrella, since sometimes the pooping is motivated by a mistaken belief that everything about the writing is arbitrary. Identifying important stakeholders early and integrating them into your process can help alleviate this; people are less likely to poop on something if they feel like they were part of making it.
  • Goalpost shifting: You wrote the text to accomplish X, and yet someone is complaining that it doesn’t do Y. They’re evaluating your writing against a different (or more ambitious) goal. It could be that the project’s goals have changed; it could also be that they are having a flight of fancy, or pre-launch jitters. Again, diligence in the Prepare phase (and a good project manager) will help you navigate these conversations.
  • Scope and role creep: This is anything that puts you on the hook for more work beyond what everyone agreed to at the beginning. You might be able to guess what I’m going to suggest now as a remedy: diligence in the Prepare phase. Fight these battles early on to articulate a clear role and clear assignment. This helps you avoid looking like the defensive jerk who can’t be a team player toward the end. 

Do the finish work

Most of the trades (think: plumbing, carpentry, painting, woodworking) draw a distinction between rough work and finish work. 

Finish work is all the stuff you save until the very end to make sure you won’t have to redo it. 

Keep everything you’ve written, even if it got thrashed to pieces during editing or review. All that stuff you wrote during this assignment can serve as an input for you on the next assignment. Mindmaps, interview notes, and alternate earlier drafts can all be very valuable. 

Prepare for the future

Write down what you’ve learned 

So. How did it go? Whether you use a formal postmortem process with multiple participants, or just a bit of “Remember this next time” journaling on your own, you should reflect on a few key things: What changed between articulating and finishing the writing assignment? Why? What tools worked well? What tools didn’t work well? Why? How could you have gotten this work done faster? How could you have improved the quality of the writing? What do you wish you’d known at the beginning that you know now? What is the number one thing you would do differently next time? 

Rituals are a way of telling yourself: “The assignment is finished, and I did my best. Good job, me.” 

You can always get the writing done with a good plan and a bit of perseverance, and by following the four key phases: Prepare, Compose, Edit, and, finally, Finish. 

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed along the way, remember these truths:

  1. Writing is part of design. (And being a designer!)
  2. Writing is always hard. (I feel your pain.)
  3. Workflow gets the writing done. (It ain’t magic, just planning.)
  4. You can write. (And you did!) 

Resources

 “The Grammar of Interactivity” introduced me to the “Wilty Wilt test” for evaluating the clarity of interface copy.

Mary dash’s writing advice on plainlanguage.gov covers a lot of good stuff on active vs. passive voice, modifiers, verb choice, and other writerly matters.