Professional & Technical Writing

We help hard-working businesses figure out how to talk to the world.

WANT MORE? LET’S TALK

You’re good at what you do. The right people need to understand that you’re right for them.

Thousands of businesses die of neglect each day. They aren’t neglected by the staff or owners. They don’t do bad work. They starve for a lack of paying customers—because people eager to work with them either can’t find them or can’t figure them out.

This is no time to be thrashing around and misunderstood.

You do good work.

But your ideal customers and clients—those people and organizations you can best serve—don’t know how you can help them. They might not even know you exist.

Through our writing, coaching, and consulting services Bold Words helps business and individuals find the best way to communicate with the people they most need to reach.

‘Powerful analysis and compelling presentation. Wish I had your gifts for incisiveness and clarity.’

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A Reliable Process

We have a proven process to help you uncover your authentic voice—one that suits your business, industry, audience, and clientele

Our “Write ’til it’s Right” Guarantee

  • We Write ’til it’s Right—No revision limits (provided “revisions” do not expand the project significantly out of scope). That said, we keep working until it’s right, even if that means trashing what we’ve got to take a new approach.
  • The Price is the Price—Once we’ve agreed on a fee for a project of a given scope, that fee is set in stone. No tack-ons, upcharges, or upsells.
  • No Drama!—Our goal is to find your authentic voice. We won’t let you move forward with a bad idea, but we’ll never insist it’s “my way or the highway.”

The Bold Words Four-Point Plan

  1. TalkContact us. We’ll discuss your business and project, then make a plan to move forward.
  2. Draft—Bold Words will conduct interviews and research (in consultation with you and your team), then draft an initial approach, focusing on your authentic voice.
  3. Revise—Some people like to be very hands-on, revising drafts together. Others prefer stand back, letting us use their feedback to trim and shape the copy. Either way, the “Write ’til it’s Right” Guarantee always holds.
  4. Finalize—We lock down the wording, my team does a final proofread, and then we package and deliver the copy in a format that works for you.

LET’S TALK

“Business Therapy”

You’re surrounded by patterns: Patterns in how you express yourself, how you structure your days, how you’ve built your business. Most of these are invisible to you. But they absolutely determine the direction your business takes, which people—clients, customers, partners, employees—you attract, and who you drive away.

Your business is no different from any other deeply personal aspect of your life: So close and ever-present that it’s difficult to see clearly.

In a “business therapy” session we’ll work together to surface your patterns, make them visible, and use them to find a genuine way for you to talk about and expand what you do.

‘He’d ask these follow-up question that at first kind of annoyed me, because I’d wonder: ‘Is this important?’ But after a while I saw the value, because he really understood what we were doing and why we were doing it. … Dave caught the little details. That’s because he spent the time either asking the questions—and not letting me off the hook with one or two word answers.’

… see more testimonials

BOOK YOUR SESSION NOW

About Me

I’m David Erik Nelson, an award-winning writer with decades of experience as an author, commercial copywriter, journalist, editor, copyeditor, and teacher. My clients include best-selling authors, noted academics, and Inc. 5000 CEOs. Let me help you find the best way to use the storyteller’s tools to communicate clearly and connect deeply with your ideal audience. 

Some Clients

Statement on AI and Generative Text

At BOLD WORDS we do not use ChatGPT or any other LLM (“large-language model”) to generate copy (i.e., “write”) for our clients. Aside from potential legal and moral hazards for our clients, the current generation of AI tools are just not very good writers. You are paying us for excellent work, not mediocre word salad.

Many copywriters and digital marketing firms are now using AI tools (mostly ChatGPT, or platforms built on top of the same core LLM) to “write” copy. They generally do so without disclosing this to their clients.

We don’t do this.

We have several reasons for not doing so:

  1. The writing produced by these tools is mediocre. Given how the underlying models are built and trained, they cannot create above-average writing.
  2. For similar reasons, these tools cannot create original or reliably accurate writing. No one relying on generative AI can guarantee the text they deliver is not plagiarized. It is likely that text written by AI tools cannot be protected by copyright
  3. Given the business models and habits of the companies developing and hosting generative AI tools, it is impossible for anyone using those tools to ensure that they are honoring client confidentiality or their own NDAs.

We do use AI-based tools for some intermediate/mechanical task, such as translation, transcription, and research. These tools currently include Google Translate, Descript, and Perplexity. We take measures to protect any potentially proprietary or identifiable client information when using these tools.

The originality and quality of our work is important to us. So is your privacy and protecting your business. Given the current state of the art, we will not be using AI tools to generative copy for any of our projects. If that changes, that change will be clearly explained here.