Notes for the Accidental Writer

You didn’t apply for a writing job. You’re a marketing coordinator, an SEO specialist, or maybe a project manager who “handles social media” among a dozen other responsibilities. But every time you craft a LinkedIn post, write an Instagram caption, or compose a company announcement, you’re committing a brazen act of professional writing.

Congratulations! All of this means you’re a writer. Now the focus should be on whether you can write well.

A Hidden Writing Challenge in Every Post

Social media (like the blog before it) has democratized publishing while disguising the difficulty of the task. That “simple” caption requires you to:

Capture attention in a crowded, distracted environment
Maintain brand voice across different platforms and contexts
Convey complex ideas in severely limited space
Drive action while building relationships
Balance professionalism with authenticity

This is more than just casual communication. Strategic writing under such constraints might challenge any professional copywriter, yet most people handling a company’s social media platforms receive little training in a craft that could consume a significant portion of their time.

Writing Short Is Harder than Writing Long

Mark Twain’s famous quip—”I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”—captures the central challenge of social media writing. Every word must justify its existence. Every sentence must advance your purpose. It takes time to make something short and good that’s easily consumed. In this way, it’s more like poetry.

“Well, our social media posts are nothing like poetry.” Fair enough. But consider the difference between these two approaches to crafting a company update:

Version 1: “We’re excited to announce that our team has been working hard over the past several months to develop and launch our new customer portal, which will make it much easier for our valued clients to access their account information, submit support requests, and manage their services all in one convenient location.”

Version 2: “Our new customer portal is live! Access accounts, submit requests, manage services—all in one place.”

The second version respects the reader’s time while delivering the essential information. Writing concisely requires understanding what truly matters to your audience and having the confidence to cut everything else. Without that kind of confidence, you’ll second-guess everything.

Most people managing a company’s social media don’t have that kind of confidence in their writing. They think of themselves as someone who “also does some writing.” This identity limits their growth. Can you improve at something you don’t claim as part of your professional identity? I don’t think so.

Try thinking of yourself as a writer who works in marketing, not a marketer who sometimes writes. Developing your writing skills will make you better at every aspect of your role, from internal communications to client presentations. Professional writers know that writing is never just about the immediate task, too. Every email, every caption, every announcement is practice for the next piece of writing.

Matt Bell, author of Refuse to Be Done, has a list of words he considers to be “the empty calories of sentence writing, little bits of filler that, while technically correct, either don’t add anything meaningful or prevent you from writing the best sentences you can.” He calls them “weasel words,” and near the end of his process, he works to remove these weasel words from his manuscripts.

Some weasel words are universal. Others may be specific to your industry, or even your company. Either way, giving them the boot will certainly improve your prose. Start making your list now.

The Skills That Matter Most

Clarity Beats Cleverness

Social media rewards clarity over complexity. Your audience is scanning, not studying. The goal is to help your audience understand what they need to know, not demonstrate how much you know. Practice the “so what?” test: after writing anything, ask yourself what your audience should do or think differently after reading it. If you can’t answer clearly, neither can they.

Voice Consistency

Your company’s LinkedIn presence should feel distinct from its Instagram account, but both should unmistakably represent the same organization. This requires understanding not just what your brand says, but how it says things. Study companies whose social media you admire. What makes their voices distinctive? How do they adapt their tone for different platforms while maintaining consistency? The answer usually lies in having guiding principles rather than rigid rules.

Audience-First Thinking

B2B writing serves different needs than B2C communication, but both require understanding the audience’s motivations and knowledge, as well as the broader context in which they may be encountering your ideas. A software company posting about a security update needs to balance technical accuracy with accessibility. A nonprofit sharing impact stories must inform without overwhelming. The best social media writers are like anthropologists of their audiences, studying not just what people say they want, but how they actually behave online.

Building Your Writing Practice

Read Strategically

You can’t write better than the level at which you read. If your content consumption consists mainly of social media posts and marketing blogs, your writing will—at best—plateau at that level. Diversify your reading diet. Read magazines that have nothing to do with your industry. Read poetry for its precision and economy of language. Read journalism for its clarity and structure. Every genre offers techniques that transfer to business writing.

Study the Masters in Your Space

Identify three companies in adjacent industries whose social media consistently impresses you. Study their approach. What patterns do you notice? How do they handle different types of content? What makes their voice memorable? Create a reference file of excellent examples. When you’re stuck, you won’t have to start from scratch. You can adapt proven approaches to a new and specific context.

Practice Ruthless Editing

First drafts get the ideas down into words. Subsequent drafts make the words (and ideas) better. The difference between adequate and excellent social media content usually happens in revision. Develop an editing checklist tailored to your challenges: Are you repeating words unnecessarily? Could two sentences become one stronger sentence? Does every word serve the reader’s needs or just your desire to be thorough?

Embrace Constraints

Platform limits are training tools. Remember when writing effectively on Twitter (R.I.P.) meant communicating an idea in only 140 characters? That kind of concision can now help you write compelling BlueSky or LinkedIn posts and engaging Instagram captions. Communicating efficiently is a skill that transfers to everything in your life. The executive who can write a 50-word summary of a complex initiative can probably explain it effectively in a meeting, too.

The Long Game

Social media writing skills compound over time. The ability to communicate clearly and concisely affects every professional interaction. The practice of adapting your message to different audiences improves your presentations and client communications. The discipline of consistent voice development strengthens your personal brand.

Most importantly, good writing is good thinking made visible. Unclear writing usually reflects unclear thinking. By improving how you write, you’re improving how you process and organize information, which matters much more than your tacked-on social media responsibilities.

Your Next Steps

You don’t need a formal writing degree. You need to recognize that you’re already writing—which makes you a writer—and should commit to getting better at it.

This week: Choose one piece of writing advice and apply it consistently. Maybe it’s creating an editing checklist, reading one excellent piece of writing outside your industry, or practicing the “so what?” test on something you intend to post.

This month: Start thinking of writing as a skill worth developing intentionally, not just something that happens between your “real” responsibilities. Get a copy of On Writing Well, or maybe watch a MasterClass course on writing.

This year: Begin to build a practice that makes writing feel less like a chore and more like a craft. The gap between where you are and where you want to be can be traversed with effort.

In the summer of 1998, I took a workshop with the short-story writer Lee K. Abbott at a writing conference in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Lee doled out a lot of useful advice that week, and I took almost all of it to heart. But one of his particular sayings has helped me more than all the others: “Every opportunity to write is an opportunity to write well.”

Your audience, your career, and your future self will thank you for taking that opportunity seriously.

Everyone can improve their writing with effort. But if you need professional content support or storytelling expertise, reach out—we can help.

Let’s Talk

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