Say it out loud

The fastest edit I know takes about thirty seconds and needs no skill at all.

Read the line out loud. To the room, to the person at the next desk, to nobody. Then notice what your mouth did.

Somewhere in the second sentence you will hear it. A word you would never say to a person. "Elevate." "Seamless." "Curated." A sentence that runs out of breath before it runs out of clauses. A claim that looked confident on the screen and sounds like an apology once it has to travel through the air.

Copy gets written in silence, on a screen, for approval by people who also read in silence. That is how it drifts. Nobody in the chain ever hears it, so nobody catches that it is not something anyone would say.

But the reader hears it. Not literally. Reading is a kind of listening, and the ear that decides whether to keep going is the same ear that would flinch at a stranger saying "unlock your best self" across a table.

This applies with extra force in Arabic, where the gap between the written register and the spoken one is wider than in English, and where a brand can sound like a ministry without meaning to. The test still works. If the line would be strange coming out of a person's mouth in the market you are writing for, it is strange on the billboard too.

I have watched good writers skip this step because it feels childish. It is childish. It also catches more than any style guide I have ever been handed.

If you cannot say it, they cannot read it.