A writing coach helps you communicate clearly and easily.

I’ve been helping writers become happier and more productive since 2001 – when I trained to teach writing as part of my PhD in English literature at the University of California at Davis.

That means that I’ve spent almost a quarter of a century helping writers. My formal training coupled with my extensive experience means that I can save my clients time and trouble by quickly identifying what’s holding them back and helping them find ways of writing better and more quickly.

But what's it actually like to work with me? Will I tell you how to write, give you fill-in-the-blank templates, or teach you to use AI? Read on to find out!

Will a writing coach tell me what to write?

Some will, but I won’t. I’m not here to teach you to sound like me or to say what I would say - your clients don't want my voice; they want yours.

So, my goal as your coach is to help you decide what message you want to get across and then give you the tools you need to get it out as quickly and easily as possible.

One of the ways I do this is by teaching you how to ask and answer questions to narrow down your topic and get your ideas onto the page and into your readers’ hands. You’ll find an example of how I do this in a post called ‘How do you decide what to write?’

This approach of teaching you how to clarify your thinking also makes the writing process faster and easier. I use this technique and others like it because as your coach, I see it as my job to help you trust your own voice and feel confident in sharing your own ideas.

Will a writing coach provide me with formulas to use or templates to fill in?

Just as I won’t tell you what to write, I’m not going to have you producing cookie-cutter content that sounds like everyone else.

Some coaches do offer those approaches and they get lots of clicks when they promote them – who hasn’t clicked on an ad claiming to give you the “87 emails my client sent to earn $10 million in just 2 weeks” (these numbers are, slightly, exaggerated to make a point)?

These things get clicks because they offer quick results, but those results don’t just sound too good to be true, they actually are.

I downloaded a few of the free bundles of emails and social posts that were recently advertised in such overblown terms. If I’d used any of them, I suspect my inbox would have been flooded with messages from loyal readers asking if I was okay.

If I ever start using exclamation points or emojis by the dozen or using cutesy terms to describe anything other than my kittens – you’ll know someone else has taken over my account.

On a more serious note, if I started using someone else’s words, my readers would know, and they’d lose trust in and respect for me. Your readers would feel the same about you if you started posting material that was in someone else’s voice.

If you’re thinking, ‘well then, it’s fine for me to use such forms if I’m writing for a new audience’, I’d still urge caution. When your clients finally meet you, they’ll be thrown by the disconnect between how you sounded in your content and who you really are – that’s not good for building trust.

Will a writing coach show me how to get AI to write for me?

Lots of writing coaches will, but I will not.

AI won’t capture your voice, and it doesn’t actually understand your business (or anything else for that matter). It works by looking at massive amounts of content and finding patters in it.

That’s great if your goal is to sound like a bog-standard business owner offering bog-standard services. But it won’t help you stand out. Nor will it help your audience understand why they need to work with you in particular.

I have lots of other reasons I won’t teach you to use AI in your writing. These include:

• It damages it the environment. An AI search uses about 10 times more electricity than a Google search. It also uses massive amounts of water and leaves behind poisonous waste.
• AI makes things up. If AI doesn’t have an answer to your query, it will create one. That answer will sound plausible, but you can’t trust it because it’s simply not true. This erosion of trust is bad for you as a business owner and for society more broadly.
• AI is bigoted. As I discuss in the post I just linked to, researchers have found that AI outputs are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist. When programmers have tried to correct for this problem, they have seen the overt bigotry improve as the covert bigotry gets worse.

The series of posts I linked to in this list will continue for at least a couple more weeks. If you want to make sure you see my other reasons for not using AI in my writing or my coaching, make sure we’re connected on LinkedIn.

Let me help you make writing easy

I know business owners turn to things like fill-in-the-blank templates and AI because they’re frustrated and time poor. I also know that writing can feel hard.

It’s not your fault if it feels this way. Most of us were taught to make writing hard at school. But it’s not your teachers’ fault either – they and you were working in a system that needed you to be able to write for exams, which meant your first draft had to be good enough to be your final draft.

Writing for exams means editing as you draft – doing that will create writer’s block.

The good news is that you’re not sitting exams anymore.

When you approach writing using my simple step by step process, it’s easy because you take it one step at a time. Let me show you how in my new, free mini course, Write Engaging Blog Posts the Easy Way.

Click the button below to learn more and sign up: