What a Ghostwritten Page Sounds Like

Nobody accuses you of it

Readers do not finish a page and conclude somebody else wrote it.

What happens is quieter. They finish it having learned nothing they could not have found elsewhere, and they carry forward a slightly weaker impression of the business than they would have otherwise.

No complaint is made and no feedback arrives. The page simply fails to do the one thing it was published to do, which was to make the reader think you know your subject.

This applies equally to pages an outside writer produced and pages written internally by somebody without the knowledge, so the label is about the result rather than the arrangement.

The first tell: no numbers

Somebody who does the work quotes figures without effort, because they are in their head.

Roughly a day and a half. About four hundred dollars in materials. Two out of ten come back needing an adjustment. Usually within a fortnight, longer in spring.

A researched piece contains ranges, qualifications, and it varies depending on your circumstances, because the writer had no figures and could not invent them responsibly.

The absence of any number in twelve hundred words is the single clearest indicator, and it is the easiest thing to fix.

The second tell: no limits

Real expertise knows where it stops.

A practitioner naturally says this does not apply above a certain size, or that they would not attempt a particular case, or that one common approach works badly in a specific situation.

Researched writing avoids limits, partly because the writer does not know where they are and partly because a brief rarely mentions them.

So the page is uniformly positive about everything, which nobody with experience of anything actually is.

The third tell: uniform enthusiasm

Everything described as important, valuable, essential, and beneficial, at the same level throughout.

Somebody who does the work has strong feelings about two of the twelve things on the page and is indifferent to the rest, and that unevenness shows.

They will spend three paragraphs on the thing that goes wrong constantly and one sentence on the step everybody thinks is the hard part.

Flat emphasis across a whole page means the writer had no way to tell which parts matter, which is exactly the knowledge that separates a supplier from a search result.

The fourth tell: knowledge that stops where the public sources do

• The process described correctly and no failure modes.
• Standards named but never applied to a real situation.
• Advice everybody gives, with nothing contested.
• No mention of cost, anywhere.
• No account of anything that actually happened.

Each item is the boundary of what an hour of reading produces, and a knowledgeable reader recognises that boundary immediately, because they crossed it in their first year.

The fifth tell: the wrong words for the trade

Terms used slightly incorrectly, or the formal term used where practitioners use a different one.

Words applied a little too broadly, or a piece of equipment referred to by its catalogue name rather than what anybody calls it.

None of this is a factual error and all of it is audible to somebody in the field, in the way a foreign accent is audible without being wrong.

This is the tell that survives careful editing, because the person editing usually does not hear it either.

A worked example

A roofing company published twelve commissioned pieces over a year and found they generated traffic and almost no enquiries.

Reading them back, the owner noticed there was not a single price, timescale, or quantity anywhere in twelve articles.

There was also nothing about the two things he spent most of his time explaining to customers, both of which concerned when a repair is not worth doing.

They rewrote three, adding real figures, a section in each on when not to proceed, and one paragraph per piece stating a view that a competitor would dispute.

Those three now produce more enquiries than the other nine combined.

The writer had done nothing wrong. Nobody had given him a single number or opinion to work with.

Fixing a page you already have

Faster than rewriting, and it works on commissioned and internal pages alike.

Add three real numbers, taken from actual jobs.

Add one limitation: a case where this does not apply or where you would advise against it.

Add one opinion that somebody in your field would argue with.

Add one specific thing that happened, even briefly, with the identifying details removed.

Four insertions, perhaps twenty minutes, and the page stops sounding like a summary of the subject and starts sounding like a business that does it.

The version that is fine

Ghostwriting itself is not the problem and there is no obligation to type your own sentences.

A piece built from a recorded conversation with the practitioner, containing their figures, their limits, and their opinions, is not detectable as ghostwritten, because in every sense that matters it is not.

Somebody else shaped the sentences, which is a craft skill you are entitled to buy, and the knowledge in it is genuinely yours.

The tells above are symptoms of missing knowledge, not of a missing author.

The counter-case

Not every page needs a voice, and applying this everywhere wastes effort.

A returns policy, a delivery information page, or a specification sheet should be clear, complete, and impersonal. Adding opinion and anecdote to a page somebody is scanning for a fact makes it worse.

Some businesses also sell precisely on being standardised, and an idiosyncratic voice undercuts the promise that any branch will do the same thing.

The test is what the page is for. Where it exists to demonstrate judgement, it needs the specifics. Where it exists to state a fact, it needs to state the fact.

The check before publishing

1. Count the numbers. If none, it is not finished.
2. Find the limitation. If there is none, add one.
3. Find the contested claim. If everything is agreeable, add one.
4. Check the emphasis is uneven, as real knowledge is.
5. Have a practitioner read it for wrong-sounding terms.
6. Ask whether anybody else could have written it.

The final question is the whole test, and if the answer is yes there was no reason to publish it.

Briefing so this does not happen is covered in getting somebody else to write it.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.