What I Feel When My Text Gets Adapted for a Landing Page (And Loses Its Voice)
I’ve always believed that good writing should sound like someone, not something.
It should carry rhythm. Texture. The fingerprint of whoever put it together, however imperfect. That’s what makes a piece resonate. That’s what allows it to speak.
But then comes the landing page.
The Trimmed-Down, Streamlined Version of Me
It usually starts with a message in Slack or a comment in Figma.
“Let’s make it punchier.”
“Remove the nuance — it’s too subtle for landing copy.”
“We just need the key value prop above the fold.”I get it. Really. Landing pages aren’t essays. They’re not essays for a reason.
They’re meant to be fast. Clear. High-converting. Every word is a call to action — or a distraction. And yes, users skim. Bounce rates exist. Conversion rates are trackable. I understand the constraints.
But even so, I can’t help but feel a strange sense of grief every time one of my texts gets adapted and... flattened.
What Gets Lost When Voice Disappears
Here’s the thing: voice isn’t just decoration.
When I write with a voice — my own, or a brand’s — I’m not just adding flair. I’m embedding meaning in the rhythm of the sentences. I’m shaping how something feels as much as what it says. And often, that feeling is what lingers. It’s what persuades, what differentiates, what makes someone stay.
When that voice is removed or diluted in favor of “clarity,” we risk losing more than just style. We lose:
Contextual nuance. The subtle framing that sets tone and intention.
Brand trust. Yes, ironically — stripping too much personality can make a message sound like generic ad-speak.
Emotional resonance. That moment when someone reads a line and thinks: That’s exactly how I feel. How did they know?
In adapting copy for a landing page, it’s easy to forget that people don’t just convert because the headline said “fast, affordable, scalable.” They convert because they felt understood.
The Writing Voice as a Form of Empathy
A lot of writing is just listening in disguise.
When I write, I try to get close to what the audience is feeling, not just what they want, but what they fear, what they doubt, what they tell themselves at 2AM when they’re not sure they’re good enough. That’s where good copy lives.
It lives in the shifts, not just the selling points. In the moments when the reader lets their guard down not because the product is amazing, but because the message didn’t treat them like a number.
When we adapt for landing pages, we often try to “optimize” too early. We strip the emotion, the humanity, the weird little quirks that make a sentence sound like someone is actually talking to you. And that feels — to me, at least — like a small betrayal of the trust we’re trying to build.
Why Landing Pages Tend to Flatten Voice
There’s a structural reason this happens.
Landing pages follow patterns. Hero section, value props, social proof, CTA. Maybe a feature block. Maybe a comparison grid. These modules are standardized for a reason: they work. They’re predictable. They reduce cognitive load.
But writing voice is inherently unpredictable. It bends. It pauses. It might open with a question that seems unrelated, or use a metaphor, or deliberately break rhythm. And that doesn’t always play well inside a three-column layout with limited character space.
So the tension is built-in: we want to write like humans, but we’re building for systems.
And too often, the system wins.
When Adaptation Becomes Erasure
I’ve had moments where I barely recognize my own writing after it’s been “adapted” for a page.
The words are still there technically. But they’ve been chopped, reordered, optimized into something algorithmically sharper but emotionally blander.
It reminds me of those machine-translated restaurant menus where you can still trace the original meaning, but the soul of the dish is gone.
And the irony? Sometimes those optimized versions don’t convert better. Because they’ve lost the trust, the intrigue, the friction that makes someone lean in.
The writing is correct — but it no longer connects.
What I’ve Learned to Do (Instead of Just Being Annoyed)
For a long time, I just felt frustrated. Defensive. Like something personal had been taken away from my work. But now I try to treat those moments as signals.
If my voice keeps disappearing in landing copy, I ask:
Did I write for the right medium in the first place?
Maybe what I loved was actually a blog post pretending to be a headline.
Is the brand voice defined enough to survive adaptation?
If not, no wonder every editor trims it down to basics.
Can I build a bridge between clarity and personality?
Sometimes it’s not about keeping every metaphor — it’s about keeping the feeling.
I also try to get more involved in the collaborative part of adaptation. I ask to sit in on design reviews. I offer alt versions of the text for different layouts. I give my own cuts before someone else takes the scissors.
Because the worst feeling isn’t being edited. It’s being edited by someone who doesn’t know what the original voice was aiming to say.
Voice and Conversion Are Not Enemies
There’s a dangerous assumption in marketing: that creative voice is a luxury — something you can afford after you’ve optimized for performance.
But it’s the wrong framing.
Great voice is performance. The right sentence, in the right tone, at the right moment, can outperform five bullet points that say the same thing more “efficiently.”
Think of brands that have stayed with you: Mailchimp. Duolingo. Notion. Figma. None of them got there with just clarity. They got there with consistency, tone, warmth — a recognizable sense of self.
People don’t remember copy that follows the rules. They remember copy that feels like someone made it for them.
The Real Goal: Letting Voice Adapt Without Disappearing
I’m not against adapting copy for landing pages.
I’ve written enough landing pages to know how powerful a great structure can be. I’ve cut my own headlines in half. I’ve removed whole metaphors. I’ve even rewritten myself out of my own paragraph.
But I think we owe it to our words — and to the people we’re writing for — to adapt with care.
To ask: does this still sound like us?
To check: will this still feel like someone is talking to the reader?
To remind ourselves: editing isn’t about removing personality. It’s about refining it, focusing it, letting it breathe inside a new format.
That’s what I want.
Not a perfect version of my original draft, but a version that keeps its soul intact.
