Who says corporate writing isn’t creative?

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By Dorothy Pomerantz | Fitch Ink Managing Editor

Sometimes, corporate writing can feel like the least creative form of writing. There are so many limitations to take into consideration. There’s often a marketing message that has to be inserted. Every story will go through multiple levels of editing, sometimes by people who think drier is better. Sometimes you’re writing about very technical or complicated topics that don’t seem to lend themselves to creativity.

But, I would argue that creativity does have a place in corporate writing. When we talk about creativity, we’re really talking about imagination: giving words to things that we cannot necessarily see, and problem-solving: finding the right words to use to easily and quickly explain something. Both aspects of creativity should be central to every piece of corporate writing.

Let your imagination fly

Let’s take imagination first. When you think about imaginative writing, you might think of a novelist or a screenwriter conjuring worlds and characters out of thin air. But the truth is that every writer needs to use their imagination to find the right words to move the reader in some way. Consider this lead from Amy Kover’s excellent piece for Mastercard about the Netflix movie, “Descendant”:

In 1860, more than 50 years after the import of slaves was made illegal in the U.S., wealthy businessman Timothy Meaher smuggled 110 people from West Africa to his plantation near Mobile, Alabama. He did it on a bet.

There are a million different ways Amy could have started the story. She could have talked about how Mastercard was sponsoring a screening for New York City children or she could have said the descendants of the people smuggled from West Africa were at the screening.

Instead, she led with a concise, two-sentence retelling of the story that grabs the reader by the throat and makes them want to keep reading. There’s so much good stuff in there. She gives the date, 1860, context by pointing out that it was 50 years after importing slaves was made illegal. By calling Meaher a “wealthy businessman,” she tells us so much that we need to know about him. And finally, by contrasting her long first sentence with the gut punch of her short second sentence, “He did it on a bet,” she leaves us horrified by the depth of depravity that can exist in a human soul.

Solve the word problem

Of course, not every story is going to be as dramatic as human trafficking. Another Mastercard story we recently worked on included a very complicated startup, Coala Pay, that is using NFTs to help speed aid to people in need.

You can probably already guess some of the challenges here. Writer Peter Beller had to explain the problem facing donors and recipients of aid around the world — and also how NFTs, tokens that exist on the blockchain and are more often associated with Bored Apes than with aiding people in dire circumstances, can help people in countries where there is little banking infrastructure.

To illustrate the problem, we crafted this sentence (after introducing the founder):

Along the way, she noticed a glaring problem with how money gets from donors to projects on the ground. Part of the challenge is that donors and recipients of aid define risk differently.

That might not seem super creative, but the phrase “define risk differently” helped ground the story and set the stage for Peter to more deeply show those different views of risk in the complicated money-transfer process. It gave the reader a reference point to understand the next section of the story.

Using my imagination and solving these tricky word problems are two of my favorite parts of my job. They feel more like play than work because they are essentially creative endeavors. I encourage all writers to honor the creativity they bring to their writing and try not to let that spark die in the face of corporate pushback. You will be happier, and your stories will be better for it.