On Business Voice & Unintentional Mimicry {& Why the First Iteration of My Web Copy Sounded Like Someone Else}

Confession time.

{Better listen up. Public confessions are generally not my thing.}

The first iteration of my web copy for Abby Kerr Ink — which was over a year and three iterations ago, in case you were wondering — read nothing like it does now. It wasn’t written in my voice, although I myself wrote it.

It sounded {to my ear, at least} very much like the voice of Sarah J. Bray. Sarah had no clue. At the time, I followed her on Twitter {still do} and had commented a time or two on her blog, but she didn’t know me from Eve. She wasn’t watching for this. She probably didn’t even notice. And at the time, if someone had asked me outright, “Um, does this sound a little like Sarah Bray?” I might’ve said, “Oh, really? You think so? Wow, thanks. That’s a compliment. I love her voice.” But I wouldn’t, at that time, have realized that it was a problem if there were a resemblance. Because we were, after all, in different niches — still are — and our visual brand identities bear no resemblance to one another. My unintentional mimicry of her voice wasn’t a problem until it was. And then I fixed it. And I realized what the hell was going on. And what a really big frickin’ problem it actually is, not just for me, but for you.

What was going on with me when I sat down to write the first version of my site copy over a year ago?

I just copped to it, but in case you missed it, here it is again: unintentional mimicry.

I was unwittingly mimicking the voice, tone, and stylistic features of someone else’s unique writing style.

{I’ve never told Sarah this story before. She’ll be as surprised as I was!}

How did this happen? I’ll tell you in a moment. But first, some backstory and more on what I mean by ‘unintentional mimicry.’

I am a writer. I write across the genres and I write every day. It’s my craft, my mode for understanding the world and my experience of it, and it’s a big part of my identity.

One of the features of the way my writer brain is wired is a hypersensitivity to the nuances of voice.

Holy hell — I often think when reading someone’s latest — this post feels like a mash-up of the last five things this writer read. And how do I know that? The voice is the opposite of a revelation — it’s a re-percolation, like reheating day old coffee, doctoring it with sugar and cream,  and hoping to pass it off in a pinch.

I can hear this wavering, this not-quite-hitting-it-yet note, in my own voice, too, when it’s there. I know when my voice is off and when I’m in a period of synthesizing new information or finding my own language for my ideas. I don’t post during those periods. I’d rather be silent than imitative.

That last bit was not said to stymie you. Frickin’ A, you might be thinking. How am I supposed to go off and write now if I have to watch every word I use?

My answer: write as you. Free you. Sound like you.

What you do have, whether you consider yourself a natural born writer or not, is a voice.

You may not tap into your strongest voice easily through writing. But maybe your voice gets freed through photography or short film. Through cooking or through home styling. Through leading a yoga class or through making handmade goods. Through teaching children or through speaking from intuition. Through marketing a non-profit or through graphic design. Through curating an online boutique or through coaching business owners.

The voice of your creative business, whatever vehicle it comes through, creates the experience your right people have of you, with you, because of you.

The three {of you, with you, because of you} are conflated and that conflation is the most powerful aspect of voice. Your voice is inseparable from you and how you do what you do.

Which is why, when you step out of your voice for a moment or a blog post, or when you go through a period of feeling lost and ungrounded {we’ve all been there}, the whole thing feels wrong to you.

Your voice is as indelibly you in the world as is your fingerprint. It’s unmistakably yours. It passes the test. And anyone can tell from a mile away when you’re moving cleanly in it, or when you’re half-assing it, or when you’re downright faking it.

How mimicry in the digital entrepreneurial space starts.

Mimicry usually starts by imbibing so much of someone else’s voice, through consuming their content like crazy over a period of time, that it comes out your pores and onto the page.

Mimicry happens because you like or love someone else’s stuff, not necessarily because you want to emulate them, exactly.

Mimicry usually originates unintentionally, but the results can look and feel coy or plastic at best, and at worst, insidious.

Now back to me and Sarah and the first iteration of my Abby Kerr Ink web copy.

Here’s how the unintentional mimicry happened: for two months leading up to the launch of my site, I was eating Sarah Bray’s content for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A lot of her content at that time was focused on doing business as a digital entrepreneur and creating your own rules for a lifestyle that supports your work. This was the conversation I needed right then. So I was reading her, plus Danielle LaPorte, plus Copyblogger {interesting mix, I know} for hours a day for weeks on end. I read years’ worth of archives. {I learn well by immersion.} I absorbed nuance, verbal tics, sentence construction patterns, brand language, everything. My brain patterns in the languaging lobe were altered.

And when I sat down to write my own This Is Me and Is This You and Services pages, they came out sounding . . . like Sarah Bray. With a dash of Danielle here and there and plenty of Copyblogger’s best practices thrown in.

Yep, I was ‘doing it right.’ So I thought. My site sounded good. It read well.

Thing was, it just didn’t read like me. And the result of this: I attracted some clients in those early days who weren’t exactly my right people.

They weren’t bad people {nor are they necessarily Sarah’s people, so don’t think that’s what I’m suggesting}, they just were pulled in by something in my copy — and by extension, who they believed I was and how they believed I wanted to relate to them — that was other than the purest, most powerful expression of me, my best work, and how I wanted to be in the world.

All this from too much reading of other people’s stuff, you’re wondering?

It happened to me. And perhaps mine is an extreme case, because I have some serious linguistic absorption tendencies.

For you, unintentional mimicry might look like this:

• Leaning on someone else’s signature brand language to say what you mean rather than culling your own phraseologie. This is what you’re looking at when you see the same term floating through five or fifteen or twenty-five sites whose content all feels like it attends the same family reunion. The phraseologie was original to one person but others have appropriated it because they like it and it expresses something meaningful to them.
• Borrowing an entire concept or metaphor from someone else’s business and offering it to your people as if it were original to you. This happens when the content creator a} doesn’t understand intellectual property, or b} creates and ships too quickly after consuming.
• Openly referencing someone else’s work without giving them attribution, and the result is that newcomers assume the material is original to you. This is usually an oversight, but I’d encourage all bloggers and online content creators to practice some academic-style attribution and link back to your original sources. This is how we build networks of people and ideas.
• Mimicking speech patterns or ways of referring to an audience. This is usually born out of your great fondness for someone’s voice, or for the way someone else relates to her audience. The key to shaking this is to envision and cultivate the relationship you want with your own audience. And then work those particularities for all they’re worth. {Because they’re worth everything.}
• Creating an offer for your people {product, service, etc.} and marketing it based on three or four unusual words in the same order you’ve seen them in someone else’s marketing. Usually you’d do this because the original marketer’s language worked on you, you haven’t seen this kind of offer expressed more aptly/powerfully/specifically than this, and it feels like what you want to say. Watch out, though — this is intellectual thievery.
• Absorbing and parroting what you’ve learned from your teachers, mentors, and coaches before you’ve had the chance to put it into practice and get some real-in-your-own-life results. Especially worth watching out for if those you’re learning from are in the same niche as you. All the better to free your own voice and work your natural points of differentiation.

In my next post, I have an exercise to share with you that’ll help you see other people’s brand language and voice for what it is — theirs — and see yours for what it is — yours. Exciting stuff.

Have you caught yourself unintentionally mimicking someone else’s business voice, like what I did with Sarah? Or have you seen other people doing this and had thoughts about it? I want you to tell me about it in the comments.

P.S. to Sarah — Love you and your work! Thanks for being so inspiring. ♥