What Genetics Taught Me About Copywriting

In my genetics years, I learned that a single substitution — one letter in three billion — can be the difference between health and disease. It made me permanently suspicious of the word "almost".

Copywriting rewards the same paranoia. "Free trial" and "risk-free trial" are one word apart and legally very different promises. "Helps reduce" and "reduces" can be the difference between a claim you can defend and one you can't.

The discipline transfers

Lab work teaches you three habits that most writing advice never mentions:

• Control your variables. Test one headline change at a time, or you'll never know what worked.
• Trust the data over the feeling. The clever line you love is a hypothesis, not a result.
• Document everything. A lab notebook and a swipe file are the same instrument.

People are sometimes surprised that a genetics graduate writes copy for a living. I think of it differently: I simply moved from editing genomes I couldn't publish to editing sentences I could.