Writing coach + editor for authors, academics, & mission-driven small business owners

Have you heard this term before? It often shows up in debunking spaces, like anti-MLM content, wellness scam exposés, and cult documentaries. Political pundits use it to criticize a candidate’s debate performance—and they also use word salad in their own commentary. What a time!

Word salad can creep into your own writing, too—especially if you have a weird job that’s hard to explain, or you work in coaching, mental health, or wellness spaces where the results you deliver sound vague on the page.

Like everything else in the world of writing (and marketing), intention matters. So does honesty. But we’ll get to that.

Aside from being a beautiful little story about the connection between food and emotions, and an homage to anyone who sees cooking as a form of self-expression, it’s also a pretty great metaphor for any creative pursuit, including and especially writing.

In most writing mediums, your initial intentions and feelings are only part of the equation. The work is open to interpretation, and that dissonance, that gap, is what makes it art. I discussed this in a different Coffee Break.

But when you’re writing about your work (aka copywriting), there needs to be less of a gap. This is writing that has a very clear intended purpose, and for that reason it needs to be very close to the reader’s mental, emotional, and psychological state.

And that means, among other interesting things that we’ll talk about in future missives, that your reader will pick up on how you were feeling when you wrote what you wrote.