grounded-copy

# Grounded Copy Copy describes things by what they ARE. Every value proposition is a direct declarative statement built on concrete nouns, verbs, and specifics: the feature, the number, the mechanism. - Bad: "This isn't just a task tracker — it's your team's second brain." - Good: "The tracker links every task to its pull request and posts a status digest to Slack each morning." ## The one banned move (and every disguise it wears) The banned move is **defining anything through negation or contrast** — telling the reader what the subject is *not*, what *others* do worse, or what *era* has ended, instead of what the subject does. Every pattern below is the same move in a different costume. Do not write any of them, and do not invent a new costume for the same move: 1. **Negated intensifiers:** "not just/only/merely/simply", "doesn't just", "more than just", "far from just/being", "rather than simply", "instead of just". 2. **Reversal reveals:** "It's not X, it's Y", "isn't about X, it's about Y", "—not X, but Y", "not your average X", "less a catalog than a trade desk". Includes the appositive form "X, not Y" ("a partner, not a vendor") and the negated-setup dash "isn't/wasn't X — it Y" ("the gate wasn't slow — it finished"). 3. **Era-ending:** "no longer", "gone are the days", "the days of X are over", "say goodbye/hello", "no more X", "never again", "welcome to a new era". 4. **Competitor put-downs:** "unlike traditional/most/other X", "while...