Emergent language is exciting, beautiful and at times profound, yet as much as we need new words to express the complexity of our situation (and the way through it), there's a danger with poetic and academic language that we speak only to ourselves.
Have you considered who's really listening when you talk about symbiosis, paradigms, connectedness, biophilia, mycelium, regenerative, degrowth, metacrisis, and collapse?
As someone who comes from brand copywriting, I observe a kind of creative 'rebellion' – especially in regenerative circles – against reductionist audience metrics, simplicity, attention spans, reading ages, and writing for the algorithm, which is completely valid. For what it's worth, I moved into this niche myself because I feel the same way.
But sometimes I think it goes too far. I pick up an undercurrent of resistance to talk of branding or marketing; a discomfort with tying human voice writing to the known skills of commerce and capitalism, which risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Any kind of storytelling (marketing or otherwise) is a relationship, which means your voice needs to be understood as well as heard. And as with commercial writing, successful thought leadership aims to convert. In other words, we must always remember our audience.
This means understanding when we're bringing people in from outside the circle and when we're talking to people inside it, and writing accordingly. For those outside, we help them across. We write stories that slowly unfold new ideas and new words; we create guides, glossaries and footnotes; and most importantly, we build connection by writing from the heart.
Don't let your original ideas – which are so important for building a better world – get lost by only talking about them to people who don't really need convincing anyway; that's preaching to the converted. The work is with the people who haven't joined us yet. Build a bridge not an ivory tower.
Do you want to learn more about how to construct that bridge? This is what I’m here to do. Send me an email or find me on LinkedIn.
