The bastard rise of ‘human-centred’ copy

Somewhere along the long and winding road, the phrase ‘human-centred’ entered our lives and extinguished the sun.

Answer me this: who on earth were you writing for before?

The basic concept is sound, and designed to attack the B2B approach of copy. The thrust of the movement was: yes, we might be talking to decision-makers in a multi-million pound company that makes software – but we’re still really only talking to one person who has all the usual ‘human’ preferences. Do we really need to address them all that differently to anyone else?

It is, and has always been, a load of old tosh.

So, God help us, let’s get into it and see if we can salvage something.

Human-centred used to (loosely) mean something

Credit where it’s due. Writing for actual people rather than search engines, algorithms, committees or a vague homogenous blob called “the audience” – is obviously the right instinct.

Understanding what people want, need, fear, and struggle with should be the foundation of any decent piece of copy. The principle has never been the problem, but it all fell apart when that principle became a trend.

Once “human-centred” showed up in enough LinkedIn posts, it stopped being a way of thinking and became a way of writing.

And those are not the same thing at all, sunshine.

“Human” became a set of writing tics

Here’s what most brands adopted to make their humans sound more human for the consumption of other fellow humans:

• Short sentences.
• Contractions everywhere.
• Starting the odd sentence with “And.”
• A strategically placed em dash.
• Saying “you” every nine words.
• A rhetorical question to keep things breezy.
• A little joke. A smidgeon of corporate wit.
• And the reigning champion: “We’re not just X. We’re Y.”

Oh Lord, kill me now.

Human beings don’t have a tone of voice guide, they have personalities.

A style guide gives you consistency whereas a personality gives you a person.

Confusing the two is how you end up with a hundred brands that sound identical while insisting they’re all uniquely warm and approachable.

Friendly is not the same as human

Corporate copy went from:

“We provide innovative financial solutions to businesses.”

to:

“Running a business is hard. We get it. That’s why we’re here to help.”

The second one is friendlier, sure. But does it tell you a single thing more than the first?

No. It’s the same grey empty room with slightly softer lighting.

“Human” has become shorthand for warm, informal and gently empathetic.

The trouble is that we, humans, are a much stranger bunch than that.

We can be blunt, funny, awkward, arrogant, nerdy, dry, passionate, sarcastic, eccentric or spectacularly boring – all before lunch.

So when every business decides its personality is “warm, friendly, and approachable,” you ain’t making your brand human.

You’re making it interchangeable with A. N. Other.

The real problem: nobody’s actually SAYING ANYTHING

This is the bit that will have you reaching for the toaster when you’re in the bath.

“At [Company], we believe people are at the heart of everything we do.”

Sounds human. Means fuck all. You could paste that sentence onto a law firm, a cheese subscription, or a nuclear reactor and nobody would blink. The danger of the whole human-centred movement is that we’ve confused sounding like a person with having something a person would actually want to hear.

Real humans are specific

If I had to bet on one thing that makes copy feel human, it wouldn’t be informality. It would be specificity.

Compare these two:

“We understand that moving house can be stressful.”

And:

“You’ve got boxes everywhere, the removal van is coming in 5 minutes, and you’ve just realised you can’t find the housekeys.”

The second one feels human, and it’s got nothing to do with contractions.

It feels human because someone actually looked at the reader’s life and noticed something true.

Stop writing for “the audience”

Nobody in the history of the world has ever sat down and thought: “As a member of the SME decision-maker audience, I’d now like to consume some brand messaging.”

What they actually have is a problem. They’re busy. Or sceptical, because they’ve been burned before. They’ve got a boss who’ll ask why they chose this supplier. They’re terrified of making the wrong call and having to explain it in a meeting. They just want to know whether the bloody thing does what it says on the tin.

Write for that person. Not for “the audience.”

The moment you picture one specific, slightly stressed human instead of a demographic, you’re halfway home baby.

Good human copy should have a bit of friction

If your copy is engineered to please absolutely everyone, it will feel like nobody. Humans have opinions. They disagree. They use odd phraseology and have strong, sometimes irrational preferences.

Friction is a feature of being a person, not a bug to be ironed out to within an inch of its life.

If your brand voice could be approved by 14 people in a conference room without a single disagreement, it’s not human. It’s crap.

(And that’s exactly what approval-by-committee tends to produce, which is a whole separate problem worth its own conversation – which I’ve already had. With myself. Read it here: What 15 years of writing has taught me about approval by committee.)

AI has made all of this more urgent

Generative AI is very, very good at producing convincing human-sounding copy.

It has learned every trope going:

• “Let’s be honest…”
• “Here’s the thing…”
• “We’re not just X. We’re Y.”
• “At the end of the day…”
• “And that’s where we come in.”

All the little moves invented to make corporate writing feel human have become the most recognisable machine-written language on the internet. The tics that were supposed to prove a human wrote it are now the fastest way to spot that one didn’t.

So the checklist version of human-centred copy has doubled back on itself and is now eating its own tail like a stupid, stupid dog. If your entire strategy for sounding human is a handful of stylistic tricks, congratulations – you’re now writing in exactly the register a language model produces by default.

So what actually makes copy human?

If we’re binning the checklist, we need something better to replace it.

Five things do most of the work:

1. Observation. You’ve noticed something real about how people actually live and behave.
2. Specificity. You describe the actual thing instead of hiding behind generalities.
3. Personality. There’s a discernible character behind the words, not a committee.
4. Opinion. You’re willing to say something that isn’t universally agreeable.
5. Empathy. You genuinely understand what the reader is going through.

None of those require a conversational tone.

A formal, buttoned-up sentence can be deeply human if it’s observed, specific, and honest.

So never start with the tone or the style, always start with the point.

If you’ve got something useful, interesting, and unique to say – it’s going to come out (shock) sounding useful, interesting, and unique.