What Black Friday copy teaches us about bad writing

Every November, a fascinating thing happens to the English language.

Businesses that spend eleven months communicating in perfectly reasonable prose suddenly discover a new thesaurus.

Sentences get shorter. Exclamation marks multiply. The word “unmissable” appears, despite being, technically, a word about perception rather than value.

And somewhere, in a subject line near you, someone is being urged not to miss out on something they didn’t know existed until forty seconds ago.

It’s worth paying attention to this. Not to mock it, exactly, but because Black Friday copy is a concentrated case study in what happens when writing stops serving the reader and starts serving the sender’s anxiety instead.

Adding urgency

Take urgency. Used honestly, urgency is just information: the sale ends Sunday, stock is limited, the price goes up at midnight.

That’s useful. The reader can make a decision.

But synthetic urgency, the kind that arrives pre-loaded with countdown timers and capital letters, does something different.

It tries to make the reader stop thinking. And readers, being human, can feel the difference. They may still buy. But they notice.

Sensationalism

I personally dislike vagueness dressed as enthusiasm. “Amazing deals.” “Incredible savings.” “Our biggest sale ever.”

These phrases contain no information at all. They’re the written equivalent of someone waving their arms.

The specific version of any of them, “30% off everything until Sunday,” “our lowest price of the year on X,” is both more honest and more persuasive.

Specificity signals confidence. Vagueness signals that nobody’s quite sure what they’re selling or to whom.

The lesson isn’t that Black Friday copy is uniquely bad. It’s that pressure reveals defaults.

When writers are rushed, or scared, or handed a template from three years ago, they reach for the first thing that feels like urgency, the first phrase that sounds like marketing. The genre has its own gravity, and it pulls hard.

Reader first and always

The counter to that gravity is the same thing it always is, think about the reader first.

What do they actually need to know? What would make them trust you enough to act?

Usually it’s less than you think and more specific than you’ve written.

Black Friday will do what it does. But the copy you put out in November is still copy.

It still either earns attention or wastes it. The inbox is a busy place in the last week of November, and “UNMISSABLE DEALS INSIDE” is doing nothing to help you stand out from the seventeen other emails using the same subject line.

Write like you mean it. Even in November. Especially in November.

If your content could use a clearer head behind it, whether that’s for Black Friday, the rest of Q4, or the January push that always sneaks up faster than expected, get in touch.