The way you open, connect, and close a piece can make the difference between “good enough” content and work that actually engages readers and earns client trust. This three-part series focuses on the small but high-impact elements — introductions, transitions, and calls to action — that shape how a piece feels from start to finish.

Why We Created This Series

If you’ve been writing content for a while, you’ve probably developed your own rhythm. You’ve got a toolkit full of proven ways to open a piece, move between ideas, and wrap things up. And for a long time, that’s served you well. But the rude truth is that LLMs have learned from those same patterns. They’ve been trained on content that looks and sounds a lot like what many of us have been producing for years. They read what we wrote, even if our family and friends didn’t...

That means even well-crafted work can start to feel generic — not because it’s bad, but because it’s now everywhere. Clients have noticed. Meanwhile, they’ve gotten more sophisticated. They’re niching down with their products and how they’re targeting their ideal customers. Their budgets are shrinking (great writing is free with ChatGPT now, right?), and at the same time, marketing teams want more out of their content. They want it to sound specific to their audience and goals. They’re increasingly quick to call something “machine-like” if it feels too templated or predictable. For writers, it’s getting exhausting out there.

We feel you, because we’re feeling it too. So we’re trying to help with a few specific resources created to address the client feedback we’ve been hearing the most so far this year. This isn’t about throwing out everything you know. It’s about noticing where habits have turned into autopilot, and making small, intentional tweaks that can do a lot of heavy lifting. We’re not talking about doubling your workload — just reframing, rethinking, and sometimes gear-shifting into a slightly different approach. These line-level craft tweaks might require you to burn a few extra brain calories, but we’re hoping it shouldn’t be that much harder. And ideally, you’ll get that time back in fewer client revisions.

You’re Writing for Three Audiences Now (and Only One’s Paying You)

Sad but true: not every reader is going to read every word you write. A lot of them are dropping in through a Google jump link straight to the section they care about — or, if we’re really lucky, from a backlink on another site. Even when we’re writing for the target audience, we have to accept that they’re skimming, skipping, and cherry-picking via good ole Control+F.

Now add the LLM factor. We’re not just writing for humans anymore but also for the models that might summarize our work in an AI overview, which is increasingly what brands are actually after, now that people are less likely to click even the top-ranking results. We know the articles Google pulls from and cites are the ones with more self-contained chunks, clearer sectioning, and snippets that make sense when read in isolation; they’re just easier for the LLMs to read and repackage. It’s a brave new world and, yeah, a bit of a bummer sometimes. You can end up writing a ton of words that no human ever actually reads top to bottom.

But you know who is reading every word? The client. They may or may not be part of the brand’s actual target audience, but they’re reading on that audience’s behalf — and they’re reading like marketers under lots of pressure with shoestring budgets. They’re being asked to justify the return on the money they’re spending to outsource blog content to freelance writers instead of straight to ChatGPT. They’re on edge, and they’re noticing if something feels phoned in, templated, or stitched together without real flow, without a point of view, without enough differentiation from the language patterns we know the LLMs like to use and overuse. And right now, these three areas — intros, transitions, and CTAs — are where we hear the most feedback.

The challenge is writing in a way that works for all three audiences at once: the scanners, the machines, and the client who’s footing the bill. This series focuses on the small, strategic shifts in these high-impact areas that can help you hit all three without burning out.

How These Resources Can Help

The three sections in this series — focused on introductions, transitions, and calls to action — aren’t just about polish. These are three areas clients are most likely to complain about, but they're also three of the levers you pull to shape how readers experience your work, where making small changes can make a big difference in client satisfaction. We built this series to give you tools, examples, and a reality check or two, so you can keep doing high-quality work that feels fresh, human, and worth getting paid for (at Compose.ly and elsewhere in your careers) — even as the landscape shifts.