I no longer believe in perfect copy

There was a period in my career when I genuinely believed we could eliminate every mistake from a printed publication. I believed this with the kind of confidence only someone deep in editorial workflows can have: armed with style guides, tracked changes, and the increasingly fragile hope that one final proofread would somehow catch everything. 

This belief persisted through late editing sessions, multiple rounds of approvals, and at least seven occasions where twenty highly competent adults reviewed the same document over and over again—only for us to send it to print with 17 typos anyway.

At a certain point, you stop blaming the people. Personally, I started blaming InDesign. I remain convinced there are design elves living inside Adobe whose sole purpose is to move punctuation marks the moment you export a final PDF.

You can proof every sentence twice, triple-check every heading, and stare directly at the page until your eyes stop focusing, only to discover after printing that a comma has vanished and a line break has relocated itself for reasons known only to software and chaos.

I have, reluctantly, made peace with this.

And strangely, over the last few years, I’ve become unexpectedly fond of the occasional typo online. Not because I enjoy mistakes. But the internet increasingly feels over-polished, over-automated, and just slightly uncanny in a way that screams artificially generated. Now I'm wondering if I should sneak a typo or two into this piece to make my point...

Every platform is optimised now. 

Every sentence is sharpened. Every social post sounds like it passed through a strategy meeting, a content calendar, and an AI prompt requesting something “clear, persuasive, and aligned with brand voice.” The result is often technically fine.

It is clean, well structured, strategically phrased—and forgettable.

You can feel when something has been polished so aggressively that all the texture disappears.

I like the odd awkward phrasing. Give me a tiny imperfection. Let's see the evidence that an actual person wrote it while juggling deadlines, second-guessing a headline, and counting how many times they’ve used the word “synergy” in one paragraph. Accurate is not the same as trustworthy.

Perfect grammar does not automatically create credibility, and polished copy does not automatically create connection. 

In some cases, both create distance. We are surprisingly good at sensing when something feels frictionless in a way that reads more like performance than communication, we're not great at voicing why it feels that way (yet—LLM abuse is providing plenty of practice). 

Humans are messy communicators. We interrupt, we rewrite halfway through a sentence because we’ve thought of a better example. We notice the typo two minutes after publishing and briefly consider deleting the entire post before any human sees it. Most people who write regularly have had some version of that experience and readers understand that instinctively.

A typo doesn’t make weak writing stronger.

Clear thinking still matters. Editing still matters, accuracy matters more than ever, because "you could have run that through Grammarly". But perfection has quietly become a goal in places where it doesn’t necessarily deserve top billing.

Readers rarely connect with content because it looks immaculate. They connect because it feels useful or relatable. Personally, I'll trust any piece that says something clear, offers something real, or explains something in a way that helps them think differently, and especially if it cites a source or two. A missing apostrophe in thoughtful writing rarely changes that. The same goes for a perfectly polished paragraph with no substance.

There’s a difference between quality and sterility, and I think brands increasingly confuse the two. One builds long-term trust because it respects the reader and offers something valuable. The other performs competence so aggressively it is entirely unrelatable.

I still care deeply about editing and clarity. Please continue using spellcheck before submitting a post to Write Wiser! Adobe already creates enough drama on its own.

But I no longer believe perfect copy is The Thing. Instead, I'll write with enough care that people might trust the ideas, and enough personality that they can still feel there is an actual person—a wisened or at least sceptical writer—on the other side of the screen.

And if a comma disappears along the way, I’m willing to let the design elves have one.

If you find this as thought-provoking as we did, leave us a comment.