Writing & Voice
I started as a writer and have never stopped. Below is a selection of work organized by form — brand voice and verbal identity documents, essays and thought leadership, editorial features, and executive voice work. The writing here spans B2B enterprise content, luxury design editorial, and brand launch copy, which is a range I'd argue is harder to build than depth in any one of them.
WHAT IS HEARTFELT SERVICE?
Think of heartfelt service as your very best pair of trainers: they become your best friend over the course of your runs. We will play that role for our Sporters and Spectathletes and be there for them from the very start of training all the way through to smashing the race and beyond.
WE GO THE EXTRA MILE
Go faster, go further. Push beyond your personal best. The same principles that drive our training should be applied to the way we treat our participants. We will do anything and everything we can to help them reach their goals. We’ll be a coach to everyone. No question is too silly or request too small.
WHAT IS OUR TONE OF VOICE?
Fun, enthusiastic, friendly, provacative, and sporty. It’s pretty tough to be all of these things all the time. Our voice encompasses a wide spectrum, but when it comes to customer service we want to emphasize simple and straightforward while providing a breath of fresh air and a dash of Virgin’s trademark wit.
Written eight weeks before launch to establish the brand's language from the ground up — tone of voice, word choices, editorial philosophy, and the specific ways Virgin Sport could be warm and irreverent without tipping into either.
Campaign copy written for London's tube network, double-decker buses, email acquisition sequences, and the Virgin Sport website ahead of the Hackney Half launch.
See the full case study →We love challenges. The best part about working in the A+D industry centers on the numerous challenges that present themselves to us every day, whether they come from clients, our subconsultants, or within our own teams. Our creativity thrives on homing in on ways to decode these challenges with new and out-of-the-box approaches that spur innovation and help everyone involved move toward the future.
Creating great spaces that overcome these challenges relies on great people. Our team of problem solvers represents the core of our firm—a design collective comprising researchers, strategists, planners, architects, interior designers, graphic designers, and behind-the-scenes teams who help our business run like clockwork: administrative, marketing, finance, and IT. More than 200 team members work together with our clients every day to deliver the most innovative, forward- thinking, financially responsible results.
Our mantra celebrates this team of smart, determined thinkers without whom we could not foster close client relationships or produce the best work. We strive to provide a platform for our people to continuously develop, take risks, and push their limits while having fun. As a firm we have only one overarching ethos: to move our people, our clients, and our work forward. We relish gathering data, experimenting endlessly, and formulating innovative, unprecedented solutions for our clients to make working easier, more efficient, and flexible enough for the unknown that tomorrow brings.
Every few months, another wave of anxiety moves through the writing world: AI is coming for the job. I understand the fear, but I think it's pointed at the wrong target. The danger isn't that AI will replace writers. It's that it will quietly replace difference — the thing that makes one brand's voice distinguishable from another's — and that almost nobody will notice until it's already happened.
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Reported and written from interviews with executives at Pack Health, UCM Digital Health, and Smile Direct Club — translating complex patient outcomes and business results into narrative features for Dreamforce and Salesforce World Tour audiences.
See the full case study →The hardest thing about writing in someone else's voice is resisting the urge to make it sound like yours. A leader's voice has specific tells — the words they reach for, the way they build an argument, the things they find interesting versus the things they find obvious. Before I write a word, I interview. Not to gather information, but to hear how they think. The writing comes from that, not from a template.
I've ghostwritten executive bylines, keynote narratives, Dreamforce presentations, and CEO talking points at Salesforce, and press and CEO communications at Virgin Sport and TPG. Shareable samples available on request.
The Real Risk Isn't That AI Replaces Writers. It's That It Makes Everyone Sound the Same.
Every few months, another wave of anxiety moves through the writing world: AI is coming for the job. I understand the fear, but I think it's pointed at the wrong target. The danger isn't that AI will replace writers. It's that it will quietly replace difference — the thing that makes one brand's voice distinguishable from another's — and that almost nobody will notice until it's already happened.
Here's the mechanism. Large language models are trained on the average of everything ever written. That's not a flaw; it's the whole design. Ask a model to write a product description, a mission statement, an email subject line, and it will give you something fluent, grammatically clean, and statistically unremarkable — the linguistic equivalent of a mean. It's not bad. It's just median. And median, repeated across thousands of brands making thousands of similar requests, doesn't stay median. It becomes a flattening force. The same rhythms. The same em-dash-heavy sentence structures. The same three adjectives doing the same emotional work. You can already feel it if you read enough brand copy in a single sitting — a kind of sameness that has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with origin.
This is the actual risk for any brand with a voice worth protecting: not that the writing gets worse, but that it gets less specific — less recognizably itself. A model can write a perfectly competent paragraph about craftsmanship. It cannot tell you why this brand's relationship to craftsmanship is different from the one down the street, because that distinction doesn't live in the training data. It lives in a decision someone made, on purpose, about what this brand believes and what it refuses to say.
That decision-making is the part of writing that doesn't scale through prediction. Good brand voice isn't a style — it's a set of commitments. It's choosing the plainer word over the impressive one, or the impressive one over the plain one, and being able to explain why, every time, in a way that's consistent with every other choice the brand has made. It's knowing which sentence to cut not because it's wrong, but because it's almost right, and almost right is its own kind of generic. AI is extraordinary at generating options. It has no mechanism for conviction. It doesn't know what a brand should sound like; it knows what brands, in aggregate, have sounded like before.
This is where I think the writer's job is actually changing, rather than disappearing. The most useful thing I do with AI tools day to day isn't asking them to write the finished sentence — it's asking them to generate ten mediocre options so I can see, by contrast, what the real one isn't. AI is a genuinely good sparring partner for figuring out what you don't mean. It's a poor judge of what you do mean, because meaning requires a stake in the outcome that the model doesn't have and structurally can't have.
So the writers who get displaced in the next several years probably won't be the ones who refuse to use these tools, and they probably won't be the most "creative" ones in some abstract sense either. They'll be the ones who can't articulate what their brand's voice is actually for — who were producing fluent, professional, interchangeable copy before AI existed, and are now competing with a tool that does the same thing faster and cheaper. The writers who matter more, not less, are the ones who can hold a clear, specific, defensible point of view about what a sentence should do and why — and who can recognize, instantly, when a draft (AI-generated or human) has drifted into the comfortable middle instead of saying the one true thing only this brand can say.
The question worth asking isn't whether AI can write. It obviously can, often well. The question is whether anyone is still doing the harder work of deciding what's worth saying in the first place — and whether brands will notice the difference before they've all started, gradually and politely, to sound like each other.