Write Gooder. Write Like A Damn Human.

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Read the last thing you wrote out loud. An email, a caption, a bio. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Did it sound like you? Like the actual person your friends know? Or did it sound like a press release from a company that doesn't exist?

Be honest.

Most writing sounds like the press release now. Somewhere between school essays, cover letters, and LinkedIn, everybody learned to write in a costume. Polished. Professional. Dead on arrival.

You know the sound. Call it slop. That smooth, confident, empty hum where every sentence is technically correct and not one of them means a damn thing. The internet is drowning in it. People smell it from a mile away, and they close the tab.

This guide is about taking the costume off.

I'm gonna hand you 24 rules. They're slop rules, not grammar rules. Your English teacher would hate half of them. Each one names a specific tell, the kind of thing that makes writing sound like nobody in particular, and shows you how to kill it.

One standard sits under all 24:

Write like your childhood best friend, even when a stranger's reading.

That's the bar. Your best friend says "this part's a pain in the ass, here's the fix." Warm. Plain. A little funny. Zero performance. Hit that bar and people trust you. Miss it and you sound like every other tab they already closed.

One more thing. This guide follows its own rules. Every single one. If you catch a sentence in here breaking a rule it teaches, I screwed up, and you should trust your eye over my page. That's kind of the point. By the end, your eye is the whole skill.

Let's go.

Act I · The Voice

The sound of a person talking. Get these right and the page starts sounding like you.

Have a Conversation

Notice how I keep asking you questions?

That's how talking works. When you explain something to a friend across a table, you check in. Does that make sense? You with me? You read their face and adjust.

Writing that sounds human does the same thing. It asks. It pauses. It leaves room for the reader to nod.

Writing that sounds dead just announces. Statement after statement marching down the page, no room for the reader anywhere. Nobody talks like that, so nobody wants to be talked to like that.

Slop"Effective communication requires clarity, consistency, and a deep understanding of your audience."

Human"You know when someone explains something and you nod along while understanding nothing? We've all been the nodder. Here's how you stop causing that."

Ask real questions. Check in when an idea gets heavy. Talk to the reader like they're sitting across from you. In every way that matters, they are.

Talk in Contractions

Simplest rule in the book. Use contractions. Always.

"It is" becomes "it's." "Do not" becomes "don't." "You are" becomes "you're." This sounds tiny. It's the single fastest way to flip a page from stiff to human.

Listen to anyone talk. Nobody says "I am going to the store, and I cannot wait." They say "I'm going to the store and I can't wait." The full forms only show up in legal contracts and ransom notes. Spelled-out words stiffen the whole page, and you can't always say why.

Slop"We are confident that you will not be disappointed, and we are certain it is worth it."

Human"We're sure you'll love it. It's worth every penny."

Read your draft and contract everything a person would contract. It's a thirty-second pass and it warms up the whole thing. The smallest edit in this guide. Maybe the most powerful.

Curse When It's Yours

I curse when I write because I curse when I speak. It's who I am. And here's a secret: your readers curse too.

Now, the lanes. Client work, brand work, anything wearing somebody else's name: keep it clean. You don't drop an F-bomb on a stranger's website. You don't know their crowd.

Your own voice is a different story.

A well-placed curse is one of the most human things you can put on a page. It's the sound of a real person who actually gives a shit. Polished writing won't touch it. Too polite, too sanded-down, too scared. So when you swear with purpose, you instantly read as a person instead of a policy.

That word "purpose" is doing a lot of work. Cussing every other word is just noise. The swear lands when it's rare and it's earned.

Slop"This strategy delivered exceptional results."

Human"This strategy worked like hell."

One curse. Right spot. Suddenly there's a pulse.

So know your two lanes. Somebody else's brand, keep it clean. Your own voice, let it breathe. And when it's yours, mean it.

Don't Say "SoCal"

I'm from Orange County, California. Which sits in Southern California. Which nobody who lives there calls "SoCal."

The word makes us cringe. It's a tourist word. The second you use it, everybody local knows you're just visiting.

Every group of people has words like that. Surfers, nurses, mechanics, gamers, moms running a school pickup line. When you write for people using words they'd never say, they can tell you're a tourist. That's what most corporate websites are: pages written by people who never met the reader.

The fix is research, the fun kind. Go where your readers already talk. Read the subreddits. Search "[your world] forums." Read the one-star and five-star Amazon reviews in your corner of the world. Better yet, talk to actual people. Write down the exact phrases they use when they complain and when they rave.

Then use their words.

Slop"Our fitness studios proudly serve SoCal's active coastal community."

Human"We've got gyms in Costa Mesa, Irvine, and HB. Come sweat."

Here's why this rule sits where it does. Everything ahead of you in this guide names a word or a pattern that no real person says out loud. That's the whole test, and it never changes: if a line couldn't survive a dinner table, it doesn't survive the page.

Act II · The Dead Words

Words that live on pages and nowhere else on earth. Every one costs you trust.

Kill the Word "Delve"

Some words never get spoken, only typed. The second a reader hits one, they stop hearing a person.

"Delve" is the king of them. No human being has ever said "let's delve into this" out loud at a dinner table. Same goes for "unpack." Nobody unpacks an idea. They unpack a suitcase.

These words feel productive. They feel like Writing. They're costume jewelry, thrown on to look thoughtful.

The fix is the word you'd actually say. "Let's look at this." "Let's break this down." "Here's the thing about that."

Slop"Let's delve into the data and unpack what it reveals."

Human"Let's look at the numbers and figure out what they're telling us."

Same meaning. Half the smell. When a word feels a little fancy for the room, it probably is. Swap it for the plain one.

Drop the Boardroom Words

There's a whole bin of words that only exist in meetings. "Synergy." "Leverage our learnings." "Holistic approach." "Circle back." "Move the needle."

Nobody talks like this anywhere except a conference room with bad coffee. But the internet is stuffed with corporate pages built from these words, so they leak into everything. Resumes. Bios. Birthday cards, probably.

Here's the problem. Every one of these words is a blur. "Leverage our learnings" means... what? "We'll use what worked." So say that.

Slop"We'll leverage cross-functional synergies to drive a holistic approach to growth."

Human"We'll take what worked last time and do more of it."

Trade every boardroom word for what it's actually trying to say. Say what worked. Say what flopped. Say what you're changing. Plain beats important every time.

If a word would sound insane at a bar, keep it off your page.

Talk Like You're Explaining It to a Kid

Big words don't make you sound smart. They make you sound nervous.

Somebody once scored how US presidents talk, grade level by grade level. The ones who reached the most people spoke around a third-grade level. Third grade. It's hard to be confused when someone talks to you like you're nine.

That's the goal. Aim for a fifth-grade reading level or lower. Your reader isn't dumb. Their attention is just precious, and your one job is to be understood on the first pass.

Nervous writers do the opposite. The second the stakes go up, out come the ten-dollar words. "Utilize" instead of "use." "Facilitate" instead of "help." "Demonstrate" instead of "show." Every upgrade costs you a little warmth.

Slop"We endeavor to facilitate optimal outcomes for our valued clientele."

Human"We want to help you win. That's it."

Read your writing out loud. If you'd never say a word to a friend's face, cut it. The shorter, plainer word is almost always the right one.

Big idea, small words. That's the whole trick.

Name the Specific Thing

You've read this line a hundred times:

"In an ever-changing landscape, businesses must navigate the complexities of modern growth."

What landscape? Whose business? What complexity?

You don't know. The sentence doesn't know either. It's a fog machine. Sounds like substance, says nothing.

Fog is what you type when you haven't decided what you mean. The big blurry phrase fits anywhere, and anything that fits anywhere means nothing anywhere.

Your job is the opposite. Get specific or get out.

Slop"We help brands navigate the complexities of an ever-changing digital landscape."

Human"Facebook changed its ad rules again. We rewrote your campaigns so you stopped lighting money on fire."

See the difference? One could be any company on earth. The other one happened to an actual person on an actual Tuesday.

Specifics are proof. Name the real number, the real day, the real screw-up, and the reader believes you.

So before you ship a line, ask one thing: could this sentence belong to anybody? If yes, it belongs to nobody.

Act III · The Momentum

Readers leave mid-sentence. Every rule here buys you the next line.

Push 'Em Down the Stairs

Your first line has exactly one job: get the second line read.

The second line's job? The third line. That's the entire machine. Every line grabs the reader by the collar and hands them to the next one, all the way down the page. I call it pushing 'em down the stairs.

Most writing does the opposite. It clears its throat. It warms up. "In this post, we'll cover a few thoughts on..." The reader left before the stairs even started.

Open with the thing that makes somebody go "wait, what?" A weird fact. A confession. The end of the story, first.

Slop"In this article, we will explore several factors that contribute to an effective morning routine."

Human"I stopped setting an alarm six months ago. It fixed my mornings. Here's the weird part."

Then keep the promise. Every line either pulls the reader forward or hands them an exit. Write like every sentence is fighting for the next one, because it is.

Say What It Is First

Watch how so much writing likes to open:

"This isn't about working harder. It's about working smarter."

Feel the stall? It spent the whole first half telling you what it's NOT. You sat there holding nothing, waiting for the actual point to show up.

That's a stall dressed up as depth. The writer builds a fake wrong answer just to knock it down. It feels deep. It's just slow.

Lead with the thing. Say what it is, right away, and let the reader have it.

Slop"It's not a diet. It's not a quick fix. It's a complete lifestyle transformation."

Human"This changes how you eat for good."

See how the human version just hands you the point? No throat-clearing. No fake setup. The thing, first.

Here's the test. Look at your first sentence. If it's busy telling the reader what something isn't, delete it and start with what it is. They'll thank you for the time back.

Ditch the Fancy Punctuation

Two little marks give the costume away faster than anything: the em dash and the semicolon.

You know the em dash. That long stretched-out line that shows up mid-sentence to sound literary. Term papers love it. Real people texting their friends almost never use it.

The semicolon's worse. Nobody has ever said a semicolon out loud. It's a mark built for essays, not for talking.

Here's the fix, and it's stupid simple. When you want to pause, use a period and start a new sentence. When two thoughts are close, use parentheses (like this) or just let the period do the work.

Slop"The launch went well; the numbers were strong, and the team was thrilled, however, one thing surprised us, our biggest day came from email."

Human"The launch went well. The numbers were strong. But the thing that surprised us? Our biggest day came from email."

Shorter sentences. Harder stops. It reads the way you'd actually say it.

Periods are free. Use a ton of them.

Stack Your Lines Short

Open any book you loved as a kid. Now open a terms-of-service agreement. Feel that?

A wall of text makes the reader tired before they've read a word. The eye needs somewhere to land. White space is a courtesy, like pauses when you talk.

So break it up. One to three sentences per paragraph, then air. Let a big line stand alone.

Like this.

Slop"There are many important considerations to keep in mind when developing a content strategy, including audience analysis, platform selection, tone consistency, publishing cadence, and performance measurement, all of which work together to determine overall effectiveness."

Human"Know who you're talking to. Pick where to say it. Say it the same way every time. That's the strategy."

Short stacks are a courtesy to the reader. They glide instead of climb. And a reader who's gliding keeps going.

If You Can Delete It, Delete It

Plenty of slop is grammatically perfect. The trouble is it's filler. Sentences that take up space and carry nothing.

You learned this in school. The essay had to be a thousand words, so you stuffed it like a suitcase. The habit stuck, and padding has a flavor. Readers taste it.

Here's the rule. Go sentence by sentence and ask: if I deleted this, would the reader lose anything? If the answer is no, it's gone.

Slop"It's important to note that, at the end of the day, quality really does matter when it comes to producing good work."

Human"Good work takes quality. Obviously."

Look at everything that first version wasted. "It's important to note." "At the end of the day." "When it comes to." All filler. All deletable. The real point was four words long.

Write your draft. Then hunt the deadweight and cut it. The piece gets shorter and stronger at the same time. That's the only edit that does both.

Boring Is the Only Sin

Somewhere along the line, somebody told you to keep it short because people don't read anymore.

People read constantly. They read 400-page novels and three-hour Reddit threads about a stranger's divorce. What they don't read is boring.

Length was never the sin. Boring is the sin.

If a reader stops, that's a you problem, and owning that changes everything, because now it's fixable. When something matters, take the space to tell the whole thing. Give every detail that earns its spot, and cut the ones that don't (the rule right before this one handles those).

Slop"To respect your time, we've condensed our story into a few key takeaways."

Human"This part's long. It's also the part where everything went wrong, so get comfortable."

Interesting can go for pages. Boring can't survive a sentence.

Act IV · The Performance

Patterns that sound like Writing with a capital W. Real talk doesn't perform.

Stop Starting With "Moreover"

Open a paragraph with "Moreover," and the costume is back on.

"Moreover." "Furthermore." "Additionally." "That said." "Importantly." Essay writing glues these to the front of paragraphs like stitching, because a billion term papers all did it the same way.

People don't talk like this. When you tell a story to a friend, you don't go "Furthermore, the waiter was rude." You go "and then the waiter was rude."

Cut the transition word and start with the actual thought. The paragraph almost always reads better naked.

Slop"Furthermore, it's worth considering the long-term impact of this decision."

Human"And this one haunts you for years. Here's how."

Drop the formal hinge. Walk straight into the point. Your writing speeds up the second you do.

Write Sentences, Not Slides

There's a shape you've seen everywhere. Bold word, colon, explanation.

Lines of labeled boxes stacked up like a PowerPoint slide pretending to be a paragraph. It looks organized. It reads like a form.

This format kills your voice because it chops everything into labeled boxes. People don't think in labeled boxes. They think in sentences that flow into each other.

Slop:

Speed: We ship fast.

Trust: We keep our word.

Care: We sweat the details.

Human"We ship fast, we keep our word, and we sweat the details until they're right."

Write it like you'd say it. One thought leading to the next. Save the bold-colon slides for an actual slideshow.

Quit the "Not This, But That"

There's a sentence shape the internet can't quit. "It's not X, it's Y."

"It's not a job, it's a calling." "It's not about the money, it's about the mission." "This isn't a product, it's a movement." The first time you read one, it sounds deep. By the thousandth, you feel the gears turning. It's a formula, and formulas read as fake.

The move wastes half your sentence building a thing just to swat it down. You don't need the swat. Say the real half and trust it to stand.

Slop"This isn't just coffee. It's a moment of calm in your chaotic day."

Human"This coffee is the best five minutes of your morning."

The human version doesn't need a villain. It says the good thing straight. When you catch yourself writing "it's not... it's...," delete the "not" half and see if the sentence is stronger alone. It usually is.

Say It Once

There's a rhythm tic where a writer says the same thing three times in a row and calls it style.

"Not for the timid, not for the lazy, not for the faint of heart." "It's bold. It's brave. It's unapologetic." Little stacks like that sound punchy. One stack, fine. A stack in every paragraph turns into a chant, and chants don't sound like people.

One clean statement hits harder than three echoes of it.

Slop"This is for the dreamers. The doers. The believers. The ones who never quit."

Human"This is for people who actually finish things."

Hear the difference? The stack sounds like a movie trailer. The plain line sounds like a person. Pick your one best version of the thought and cut the echoes. Repetition is a crutch dressed up as emphasis.

Adverbs Are Hiding Something

When a writer isn't sure a word is strong enough, they bolt an adverb to the front and hope that fixes it.

"Quietly underscores." "Deeply resonates." "Truly transformative." "Absolutely essential." Look close and the adverb is doing damage control for a weak word behind it. "Quietly underscores" means nothing. It's two foggy words holding each other up.

Strong writing trusts the verb. If the thing is important, say it's important, or better, show why. Skip the adverb costume.

Slop"This deeply resonates and truly highlights a profoundly important shift."

Human"This matters. Here's why."

Hunt your adverbs. For each one, ask if the sentence is stronger without it. Nine times out of ten you delete the adverb, pick a better verb, and the line snaps into focus. The crutch comes off and the writing stands on its own.

Act V · The Point

You can follow every rule above and still say nothing. This act is the nothing detector.

Have an Actual Opinion

The safest dodge in writing is to point at something and refuse to have a take on it.

"This signals a shift." "This underscores the importance of..." "This highlights a broader trend." Read those and ask yourself: what does the writer actually think? You don't know. They pointed at the thing and ran.

Writers hide behind "signals" and "underscores" because opinions can be wrong. The words sound like analysis and commit to nothing.

You're allowed to think something. Say what happened, then say why it matters. In your own words. With your own neck on the line.

Slop"The price drop signals a strategic shift in the company's market positioning."

Human"They cut the price because they were losing. This is them panicking."

One of those is afraid. The other one has a pulse. Be the one with the pulse.

You're Not a LinkedIn Coach

There's a voice that sounds caring and means nothing. Call it the corporate therapist.

"A powerful opportunity for growth." "Lean into your strengths." "Foster a culture of excellence." It's warm, it's soft, and it's hollow. It pats you on the back without saying a single real thing.

The voice is everywhere because it's safe. Nobody argues with "foster a culture of excellence." Nobody remembers it either.

Real talk has edges. It says the specific, slightly risky thing instead of the smooth nothing.

Slop"This is a powerful opportunity to lean into your strengths and unlock your full potential."

Human"You're good at this. Do more of it and quit apologizing for it."

One sounds like a poster in a dentist's office. The other sounds like a friend who actually knows you. Be the friend.

Write to Be Felt

Quick test. Name one statistic from the last article you read.

Struggling? Now think of a story somebody told you years ago that you still carry around.

That's the whole lesson. We've been wired for stories since campfires, and feelings are the only thing anybody remembers. Facts wash out. The specific moment stays.

So when something matters, tell it as the story it was. Put the reader in the room. What happened, who was there, what it felt like when it went sideways.

Slop"We are deeply passionate about quality and craftsmanship."

Human"The first 200 bags came back with crooked stitching. We unpicked every seam by hand and missed our own launch. That's what quality costs."

Tell the real story, with the embarrassing parts left in. The embarrassing parts are the proof.

No Bow on Top

Watch how safe writing ends. It reaches for a closing so generic it could be stapled to anything.

"In conclusion, the future is bright, and the possibilities are endless." "At the end of the day, it's all about passion and hard work." You could paste those lines onto a shoe ad, a wedding toast, or a funeral. That's the problem. A closing that fits everything belongs to nothing.

Endings get bows because writers think endings need them. They don't. A good ending lands one real thought and gets out.

Slop"In conclusion, with dedication and the right mindset, anything is possible."

Human"So go do it. That's the whole pep talk."

End on something only you would say. A real line. A specific gut-punch. Then stop typing. The bow is for gift wrap.

The "So What" Test

Here's a test that catches slop nothing else does. Read a paragraph, then try to say its point out loud in plain English. If you can't, the paragraph is empty, no matter how good it looked.

Plenty of writing passes the eye and fails the ear. It's got rhythm. It's got fancy words. Summarize it and you get nothing back. There was no point in there to find.

Slop"In the modern era, leveraging the power of connection allows individuals to align their goals with their values in meaningful and lasting ways."

Try it. What did that actually say? People who care about the same stuff get along? Maybe? It's mush.

Human"Work with people who want the same things you do. You'll fight less."

After every paragraph, ask the dumb question: so what did that say? If you can't answer in one plain sentence, you don't have a paragraph. You've got stuffing. Cut it or fix it.

That's the Whole Toolkit

Twenty-four rules. Read them once and they're just a list. Use them three times and something better happens. They disappear, and what's left is your eye.

That's the real prize here. Not the rules. The taste underneath them. The little flinch you'll start to feel when a sentence sounds off, before you can even name which rule it broke. That flinch is the skill. Almost nobody has it, and every reader can feel when a writer does.

One more thing before you go.

You've probably got a robot doing half your typing these days. Everybody does. And you've noticed it writes like a term paper that grew up on LinkedIn. Of course it does. It learned to write from people, and most people write in the costume.

So here's the move, and it's one move: hand these same rules to your AI. Paste all 24 in and say "write like this." Then edit what comes back with the same flinch you use on your own drafts. Same rules, same fixes, same bar. The robot's a fast learner. It just needed a better teacher.

That's the new job, whether the first draft comes from your hands or the machine's. You're the editor now. Every line gets run past the only standard that matters:

Would my childhood best friend recognize this as me?

If yes, ship it. If no, you know exactly what to fix. You've got all 24 reasons sitting right here.

Now go make something sound like you.

Write Gooder is a free field guide from the Bockenstette Workshop. If this lit something up, there's a whole universe of it next door. The same eye that catches a dead sentence is the one that turns an idea into a world. That's the work I do here. Come see it.