Couplets, copy, and craft: 6 ways poetry taught me UX writing
I’ve had a lot of odd jobs. I’ve sprayed down cars at a car wash; decorated dessert plates at a restaurant; spent a summer as a nanny; and even taught karate for a while. The oddest vocation of them all, however, has been my more recent venture as a poet.
My poetry journey began in undergrad. A teacher showed me what poetry could look like, how alive it could be. In high school, you learn about dead white guys writing verse, but I had never been shown the thriving community of poets who create new content and push new boundaries in response to our modern world. I started writing poetry then, and wrote through and beyond graduation. I wrote, submitted, and wrote some more until I was finally accepted into an MFA program, where I joined the kind of living poetry community that inspired me in the first place.
After a year in my program, I thought it was time to branch out and diversify my skill set. That’s when I decided to become a UX writer.
I know what you’re thinking — that’s a big branch. And sure, you might be right. Poetry and UX writing are not the same thing. But in the twisted and tangled tree that is the writing world, I’ve learned that these two styles of writing are rooted together by the same basic principles.
1. Understanding language at its smallest scale
The best poems contain worlds. Sometimes, these worlds exist within a page, or even half a page, or even just a few lines. To write poetry, you have to love language at the molecular level. Poetry appreciates each individual word. When you’re writing on such a small scale, each word holds great importance. Poetry is language at its most condensed, concentrated, microscopic level.
And what is microscopic if not microcopy? When you’re writing small portions of UI copy, sometimes even a single word on a button or a label, every individual word matters. Using the wrong word in an error message can make an already frustrated user even more upset. Understanding how each word can affect your audience is crucial for UX Writers, which is why…
2. You have to be intentional
In creating a poem, knowing your goal is key. This doesn’t always happen in the initial writing stage; sometimes a writer must journey through a poem’s first draft to discover what the poem is truly about. A poem’s intent may not be discovered until later, and then the poem must be written in a way that reflects this purpose. How can this goal be communicated to your readers?
Writing for the user experience is the same. Understanding your user’s goals and tailoring your copy to them is an important part of the process. That error message from earlier? If your intent is to soothe the user, maybe riling them up with a joke isn’t the best idea. It’s important to know what your users need in order to choose appropriate words and language for your audience.
3. Crafting consistent voices and tones
An important part of crafting poetry is delivering voices through language. My favorite poets all have distinct voices that carry throughout their poems, no matter the topic, form, or style of a piece. Creating voices in writing generates artist brand and identity. It gives the audience something to rely on and recognize when reading their work. If you’re not into poetry, you can think about it in terms of musicians, too. The best artists always push their sound in new directions while keeping their voice strong, consistent, and distinguishable.
When writing content — whether you’re writing blogs like this, or tweets, or even microcopy for a web page — most companies create personas to connect with audiences. Brand voice is key in crafting these personas and gaining the trust of the public. As a UX writer, it’s your job to make sure that voice is consistent across these platforms. It needs to reach new audiences and push new boundaries while still aligning with your team’s branding and goals. The words you choose, how you choose to communicate them, and how they make people feel all create voice and tone. As UX writers, it’s important to make choices that connect users to your brand.
4. Being specific
I vividly remember one of my first poetry lessons. My teacher — anxiously pacing back and forth, waving his hands like he was on a rollercoaster — was emphatic in trying to explain to us the importance of specificity in writing. “You need to be specific,” he said, over and over, “because, oddly enough, the more specific you are in your writing, the more relatable it becomes.” The strongest poems always have a level of specificity, strong and clear images, that give the reader something to grasp on to. It’s a bit counterintuitive. New poets may assume that generalizing their words and experiences will help them communicate with a wider audience. But specificity tells a story and helps communicate a human experience; it shows us that the person behind the words is living a real life filled with tangible moments.
This Paradox of Specificity matters in UX writing, too. By creating content specific to one type of user, it’s likely that your writing will reach a wider and more diverse audience. Additionally, being specific with your examples and word choices helps your users understand that there is a real person behind the company delivering content to them. It helps users build a connection with a company who otherwise might appear faceless to them.
Specificity is also important to accessibility. In copy, being specific about what’s on the page or where your links lead to can assist screen readers’ ability to access and navigate your page. If a screen reader reads aloud a bunch of “click here” links on your page, the links will be indistinguishable to your users. By being specific about the content on your page, you’re making it approachable to all of your audiences.
5. Avoiding clichés
Instead of asking you to take a trip down memory lane with me, we’ll just jump right into another early poetry memory. That same poetry teacher also loved to pace while saying, “Good Family Feud answers make bad poetry.” For most poets — certainly for me — poetry is about the art of invention. It’s about communicating a human experience, which has been lived millions of times in lives both similar and different to your own, in a way that is uniquely yours. Even if humans share experiences, only you can communicate your own. Maybe you did wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and maybe your poem explores the gut-wrenching pain of having a terrible morning or how you made lemons out of lemonade and turned your day around. But poetry is about exploring these experiences with your own words and emotions, using image and figurative language to describe your experience as only you can. Clichés act as crutches or shortcuts to describe an experience, and using them sacrifices critical engagement with your own thoughts.
The UX apple doesn’t fall far from the poetry branch. While it’s easy to believe that using clichés will help you relate to a wider audience, clichés, in fact, narrow your audience. What is a common phrase in one country, or even in one region, may not be known or translatable elsewhere. Using clichés risks alienating crucial global markets. Also, while it’s often important to use common language and familiar, easily understood industry terms, clichés make your UX writing bland, forgettable, and voiceless.
6. Working within a community
If I hadn’t just written that previous section, I would say we’ve come full circle!
For me, community has been the most important part of my poetry journey. It’s what inspired me to start writing poetry and what has pushed me to continue and grow my writing. My peers, my friends, and my instructors are what make poetry so special to me. Writing doesn’t happen in a void — it’s a collaborative effort, building off of the writers who came before you and those writing alongside you. Whether in a workshop setting or in more informal chats, I know my people are critical to my success. In a way, my poetry is part of an open source community.
UX writing works best when shared, too. Working the open source way allows your copy the room to grow with guidance from people who are different from yourself. Collaboration brings in fresh perspectives and new ideas, pushing your copy to be the best it can be. Having a community-driven, open source mindset with your UX writing makes it stronger, more inclusive, and more thoughtful. And when more people share the work, more people become invested in it. Creating a community of writers and thinkers can improve team morale and company culture, empowering employees to be passionate, empathetic, and dedicated.
As a poet, my smooth transition into the world of UX writing surprised even me. In writing and reflecting on this, however, it’s easy to see how this happened. It turns out that I’ve been preparing for this UX role my whole life. And who knows, fellow UX writers — maybe your jobs have secretly been preparing you to write poetry.
Have a UX story of your own? Send your ideas our way. More writers and fresh perspectives can only make PatternFly’s Medium publication stronger.
