Your content sucks because you forgot one thing: to be human

The threat that one day a robot will take your job is very real for a lot of people. Truck drivers, retail assistants and personal assistants all work with the certain doom that autonomous technology will take over their livelihoods.

For those who make a living writing, the fear of algorithms advanced enough to create decent prose is far, far in the future. We still need organic, creative minds to generate our stories.

But as writers, I feel we may have already lost the battle to the robots.

When I see the content we are churning out, the endless parade of spit balls into the void and hoping they stick, I have to ask: "where is the soul?"

We are constantly questioning why our writing doesn't offer any real value and inspires nothing. It feels cold and dead. Kinda like if we asked a robot to write it.

Think of your favourite poem, book or novel and think about how it made you feel. When was the last time a bit of creative content marketing, a piece of writing from the perspective of a brand, really made you feel?

A piece of content and native marketing doesn't have to make you feel the same way as your favourite Young Adult series or hard fantasy trilogy. But it has to elicit something in you to take action or make a connection. Especially when content writing is the primary weapon for advertisers and brands to reach their audiences.

And it's not that we're not smart about what we write. Being smart is indeed the reason why we're so bad.

We're overthinking it.

As content writers, we're told to own our topic. Get deep and flesh it out. But I've rarely heard people say "what do you want people to feel after reading this? What are they walking away with?"

Ray Bradbury famously had a sign over his typewriter which read 'Don’t think!' "You must never think at the typewriter," Bradbury said. "You must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.”

Turns out Bradbury was on to some real proven science around writing. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker outlines in his work around communications that businesses, and those who write for them, suffer from "the Curse of Knowledge."

He describes this as "a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose."

Our job isn't to overwhelm with information. It's to do what good marketing should always strive to do: make a genuine connection.

More than 90% of what I see are attempts of never hitting a mark, never solving a solution or attempting to solve problems no one asked to be solved.

When you sit down and begin to write you shouldn't be thinking. If nothing comes to you then you don't know your topic well enough. You need to do more research -- talk to your audience, read what they read, and find the true pain points they are living with. Take it all in and absorb it into your bones. If you don't do that at the very least, then maybe it's time we bring in the robots.