Every editorial site holds positions on how copy should be written. Most keep them folded into the advice without saying so, so a reader has to guess whether a rule is a settled principle or one writer's habit. We would rather state ours plainly, with the reasoning attached, so you can weigh it.
Why we set out where we stand
A position without reasoning is just an opinion wearing a house style. Where we take a view on a contested question, we say what the view is, show it against a concrete example, and explain what it costs to ignore. That is the same standard we apply to the rest of the site: a claim about copy earns its place by being demonstrated.
AI-assisted writing
We treat AI as a tool for producing a first draft quickly. It is fast at structure: a first pass at a page outline, a set of headline variants, a rough draft of body copy that gets the shape of an argument right. It is unreliable at anything that depends on knowing your product, because it does not know your product. It will invent a feature, a figure or a claim that sounds plausible and is wrong, and it will do so in the same confident register as the parts it got right.
Put the same brief through an AI tool twice and you will sometimes get a benefit invented from nothing, phrased as fluently as the true ones sitting next to it. The reader cannot tell the difference from the sentence alone, and neither can you, unless you check each claim against what is actually true of the thing you are selling.
Our rule: use AI to draft structure and rough phrasing, then check every specific claim, number and benefit against the real product before publishing, and rewrite any sentence that reads like a specification rather than something a person would say. What AI Is Good At, and What It Is Bad At, in Commercial Copy sets out the reasoning behind that rule in more detail, and Editing AI Copy: A Line-by-Line Pass shows what the checking looks like on an actual draft.
Long copy versus short copy
The right length for a page is the length it takes to answer every objection the reader has before they leave. A phone case costing a few pounds needs very little persuading: the reader can see the product, judge the price, and decide in seconds, so three sentences and a clear call to action do the job. A service costing several thousand pounds, bought once and lived with for years, carries objections the reader has not even finished forming: can this business be trusted, what happens if it goes wrong, how is this different from the alternative they were about to choose instead. Cutting that page down to match the phone case's word count does not make it sharper. It leaves the reader's questions unanswered and sends them looking for the answers somewhere else.
Length follows the size of the decision the reader is making. Write until the objections a reasonable reader would have are addressed, then stop. Padding a short brief to look thorough and cutting a long one to look disciplined are the same mistake, aimed in opposite directions. How to Write a Landing Page works through this against a single worked brief, and Copy Length Reference Tables gives typical ranges by format.
The Oxford comma
We use the Oxford comma in every list of three or more items, without exception. The usual argument against it is that it clutters a sentence that reads fine without it, and often that is true. But a rule that applies the comma only when a sentence would otherwise be ambiguous requires the writer to notice the ambiguity first, and ambiguity is exactly the thing a tired writer, or a reader skimming a page, is least likely to catch. A list such as 'the copy was reviewed by our editor, a proofreader and a client' can be read as two people or three, depending on whether the last two names one role or two. Add the comma before 'and' and the reading is settled before the reader has to work it out.
A punctuation rule that only sometimes prevents ambiguity is weaker than one applied every time, because the writer cannot always predict which sentence will be the one that needed it. We apply it consistently, in every list of three or more, so the question never has to be asked sentence by sentence.
Active and passive voice
We default to active voice with a named actor, because passive voice lets a sentence report that something happened without saying who did it, and in commercial copy that gap is usually where a weak claim hides. 'Your enquiry will be responded to' does not say who responds, or when, and the missing actor is doing real work: it lets the writer avoid a commitment that active voice would force into the open. Compare it with 'we reply to enquiries within one working day', where the actor and the action are both stated and there is nothing left for the reader to wonder about.
The same gap shows up in instructional writing. 'The subject line should be kept under 50 characters' describes a rule without saying who is meant to apply it. 'Keep the subject line under 50 characters' gives the reader something to do. Passive voice still has a place: where the actor genuinely is not known, is not relevant to the reader, or has already been named in the sentence before, passive is the plainer choice. What we avoid is reaching for it by habit, because it softens an instruction into a description and a claim into an observation. Run a page through the Readability and Clarity Checker and it will flag passive constructions on this basis, and Writing for the Web: Scanning, Structure and Microcopy covers where the exceptions genuinely apply.
None of these positions is a rule we expect every writer to follow without question. Where the craft is contested, we have said so and shown our reasoning. If you want to see the AI position applied to an actual draft, or the active-voice rule applied to a real before-and-after, the Copy Clinic works through examples line by line.