In this blog post, I’ll show you how you can use Watch Words in VT Writer. This will help you flag terms and phrases for review.
As writers and editors, we often have to guard against categories of language. For example;
- Discontinued product names.
- Language that doesn’t reflect well on our brand.
- Legally risky terminology.
Consider an example;
Assume you’re actively working on a credit card promotional campaign that’s in development. Here is your latest copy for the promotional launch;
“The Advantage Plus credit card offers an introductory rate of 3.25% for the first 6 months and along with our family of Life Plus credit cards we guarantee the best rates in the market, so hurry and submit your application today.”
Let’s scan this for readability;
That copy comes in with a grade level 18.5. That’s too high and risks damaging the effectiveness of our planned campaign. Let’s improve the readability that will make the Call To Action (CTA) easier to read and understand.
Based on suggestions from the AI scan we have made some edits to the copy.
“The Advantage Plus credit card offers a starting rate of 3.25% for the first 6 months. Along with our family of Life Plus credit cards we guarantee the best rates in the market. Apply today.”
Now let’s re-analyze to see how the copy has improved.
Much better, we have managed to adjust it down to grade 5.6. That’s a grade level accessible by approximately 80% of the population, great work!!
But wait, we have also picked up on 4 Watch Words that need reviewing.
The AI scan has picked the following areas that we need to guard against;
- Discontinued Product Names
- Advantage Plus: The Product team has just re-branded “Advantage Plus” as “Advantage+”.
- Similarly “Life Plus” has become “Life+”.
- Product Misinformation
- We also have Brand damage & Risk issue. This is because leadership has announced we no longer support a 3.25% intro rate for any credit cards. We must use the new rate of 3.75% instead.
- Legal Risk
- The word “Guarantee” implies a contractual obligation. What are we guaranteeing? We need to re-phrase this if possible.
WatchWords are a really great way to flag these types of issues in real-time. Now we simply click edit and make the required changes to the WatchWords. This is what the text looks like now.
“The Advantage+ credit card offers a starting rate of 3.75% for the first 6 months. Along with our family of Life+ credit cards we offer the best rates in the market. Apply today.”
When we complete the rescan, our analysis shows that our copy is in great shape for launch.
To enable WatchWords in VT Writer, simply select settings, and go to the menu option as shown below. Here you can easily add new terms to flag for any number of scenarios that could damage credibility. These scenarios can often be found in the organization’s style guide. Examples include tone of voice, bad language, and cliches.
