If you ever feel stuck writing copy, one of the easiest ways to get moving again is to look at the exact words your customers use. Your community is full of them. It’s basically a running transcript of how people describe their problems, frustrations, goals, and wins in their own voices.
So whether this is a reminder for you, your marketing team, or anyone creating customer-facing content, here’s why that language is so useful:
1/ People naturally use indexical language
This sounds like a technical term, but it really just means the kind of phrasing that only makes sense because of what’s happening in the moment. It indexes (or refers back to) the speaker’s exact situation, feeling, or environment. It’s how we talk when we’re in the middle of something and trying to describe it as we go, e.g., “I’m spinning my wheels” or “This part takes forever.” These lines land because they sound like someone thinking out loud. You don’t have to explain that someone is frustrated if you show them the phrase they’d blurt out when they are.
When we rewrite them, we tend to flatten the emotion into something abstract like “Users are experiencing workflow challenges.” Technically correct, but it removes the lived detail that makes it resonate.
2/ Our brains latch onto familiar phrasing
Psychologically, people react faster to language they already use. If something sounds like how I talk, my brain registers, “Oh, this is for me,” before I even finish reading.
When we switch into our “professional” or brand voice, we sometimes introduce overly formal or unusual phrasing, which creates distance and forces people to do more mental work because it doesn’t sound like their natural voice.
3/ It show you how people define their problems
When customers describe their situations in their own words, you see:
- what they call things
- what part frustrates them
- what they hope will happen
- what they fear will happen
- what feels urgent vs. what feels annoying
Their wording is a map that shows you how they understand the situation. Using their language helps your message line up with their reality instead of relying on your assumptions.
4/ Community language is more emotionally charged
Emotion is what gives writing tension. Communities are full of emotional cues, e.g., frustration, relief, delight, confusion, and overwhelm. When we rewrite for professionalism, we often strip out the emotion that made it compelling in the first place.
5/ Exact phrasing aligns with how people search and how they prompt LLMs
People search using what is already in their head. And with LLMs this is even more true as people type full, natural sentences or very specific frustrations.
LLMs work by recognizing patterns in language, so the closer your content is to the way people naturally talk, the more likely it is to match what they search for or ask.
When you sanitize the wording too much, you lose that alignment. Using the exact phrases your customers use keeps your content closer to how they think, search, and describe what they want.
All this to say: when we rewrite customer language, we usually end up sanding off all the quirks, emotion, and oddly specific details that made it good to begin with. Your community is full of this. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to someone narrating their experience in real time. And all of it is usable language. Your community is telling you what resonates. All you have to do is pay attention.
Bonus tip: the same goes for your reporting. A screenshot from the community can carry a lot. A spike in positive engagement, for example, resonates more when you can literally see people reacting to a new feature they love. You get the faces, tone, and personality that data alone flattens. That contrast is satisfying because it reconnects the metric with the humans behind it. Let the reactions speak for themselves. They usually say it better than we can.
