A Personal Observation
I'll be honest with you. As someone building a copywriting and storytelling company while staying deeply connected to the UX writing community, I've been noticing something that's starting to bug me. Most of LinkedIn post I scroll past, listed conference panel, and UX writing workshop that lands in my inbox — they all seem to revolve around the same topic.
voice and tone.
Don't get me wrong. I understand why it matters. The difference between "Oops, something went wrong" and "We're having trouble loading your page" isn't trivial. But what's nagging at me is.. is this, really all we have to offer as a field?
Are voice and tone guidelines the extent of our professional discourse?
Why Voice and Tone Took Over
I get why this happened. Voice and tone are the easiest parts of our job to explain and defend. You can run a workshop on it in two hours. You can create compelling before-and-after slides that make stakeholders nod approvingly. It feels strategic while staying comfortably in "safe" territory. Well, it sure is, because we don't need to dive into technical implementation, wrestle with messy data, or navigate complex design systems.
For stakeholders, voice and tone feel familiar. They sound like branding, which is territory they already understand. A CMO can look at voice and tone guidelines and immediately grasp their value. It's much harder to get excited about content operations or internationalization workflows.
This has created what I call our professional comfort zone. We've found something that's easy to teach, easy to sell, and easy to showcase in portfolios. So we've made it our primary identity. Well if you won't admit it, let this be my personal existential crisis as a writer.
What Gets Ignored
But while we're debating whether our error messages should be "friendly" or "helpful," we're ignoring the harder, less glamorous work that actually moves the needle in product development.
When was the last time you saw a conference talk about content operations? About versioning systems, governance frameworks, or workflow optimization? Or what about content in code — the unglamorous reality of working with strings, variables, JSON structures, and making copy work within the constraints of actual development?
Accessibility gets lip service, but how often do we dive deep into language patterns for screen readers, ARIA label strategies, or WCAG compliance beyond basic reading levels? And measurement, the holy grail of proving our impact remains frustratingly surface-level. We track sentiment surveys instead of task completion rates or conversion funnels.
Then there's localization and cultural nuance, which most of us treat as an afterthought. We write for English-first products and hope translators or 'local contributors' will figure out the rest, completely ignoring how language shapes user behavior across different cultures.
These topics are harder to workshop. They don't make for pretty slides. They require us to get technical, collaborate more deeply with engineers and PMs, and admit that writing good copy is only part of our job.
The Consequences of Staying Stuck
Here's what worries me, and it means really worries me, if we keep positioning ourselves as the voice and tone experts, we'll forever be seen as surface-level decorators. Product organizations will treat writing as a one-off brand exercise rather than recognizing it as an embedded part of product development.
Worse, we're training new writers to think their job ends at choosing the right adjectives (UGH, IT'S NOT). They graduate from bootcamps thinking UX writing means making things sound friendly, not understanding how copy needs to function within technical constraints, accessibility requirements, and global user bases.
We're creating our own professional ceiling. While engineers talk about architecture and scalability, while designers discuss systems and behavioral patterns, we're still debating whether to use "Sign up" or "Get started."
A Call for Expansion
Look, friends, I'm not saying we should abandon voice and tone entirely. These fundamentals matter, and they should remain part of our toolkit. But they should be our starting point, not our end goal. Or, yea maybe you're the agencies or experts that offering voice and tone services ONLY, then that's okay I guess.
But yea, back to it.
What if we started sharing more about the messy realities of our work? The late-night Slack conversations with engineers about character limits and dynamic content. The spreadsheets we build to track copy across different user flows. The compromises we make when legal requirements clash with user-friendly language.
What if we talked more about collaboration, not just "how to work with stakeholders" workshops, but the actual technical knowledge we need to be effective partners to engineers and product managers?
What if we discussed content tooling, documentation systems, and data-informed writing decisions with the same enthusiasm we bring to brand voice?
And what if we started addressing the systemic issues in our field? Like why English-first approval dominates product copy even in non-English markets, or how our Western-centric writing patterns create barriers for global users?
My POV as a Practitioner
From where I sit (comfortably, right now), UX writing is beyond crafting and polishing words to sound clever. It's how we can ensure content functions as part of the product — technically, inclusively, and at scale.
It's also about understanding that good copy communicate clearly, works within code constraints, serves diverse users, scales across cultures, and drives measurable outcomes. That's a lot, alright.
Until we start talking about these deeper, harder layers of our work, we'll keep circling around voice and tone like it's the only thing that defines us. And honestly? We're more interesting than that. Our field is more complex than that. We just need to start acting like it.