5 patterns that make LinkedIn posts sound generic (and how to fix them)

Generic posts are usually not badly written. Grammar is fine, structure is fine, the advice is even true. The problem is that the post could have been written by anyone, about anyone, which is a different failure and a much easier one to fix. You are not learning to write. You are learning to stop deleting the parts that were yours.

1. The universal opener

"Most founders get this wrong." It commits to nothing, names nobody, and could sit on top of any post in your feed. It survives because it feels safe: broad claims are hard to argue with.

Replace it with the moment that made you want to write. "A founder sent me a deck at 1am on a Sunday and apologised for the timing." Now the reader is somewhere. Specific openers work because curiosity beats agreement. A reader who agrees with your first line has no reason to read the second one.

2. Advice that never cost anything

"Hire slowly." "Talk to your customers." True, and free, and therefore weightless. Advice becomes credible when it comes with a price tag: what you tried first, what it cost, how long you kept doing the wrong thing before you noticed.

The rewrite is mechanical. Take the advice, then add the sentence that starts "I learned this because." That sentence is usually the actual post, and the advice is just the headline for it.

3. The list with no friction

Five tidy bullets, all pointing the same direction, none of them in tension with the others. It reads as complete and lands as nothing, because there is no decision in it. Nobody has to choose.

Add the item that contradicts the rest, and say when you break your own rule. Tension is what makes a list worth reading twice, and it is also what gets quoted back at you in the comments.

4. Borrowed vocabulary

If a word appears in every third post you scroll past, it has stopped carrying meaning. Unlock, journey, needle, game-changer, at scale. They feel professional, which is precisely why everyone uses them, which is why they signal nothing.

Use the word you would use in a meeting with someone who could interrupt you. Plain words survive that test. Decorative ones do not.

5. The summary ending

"So, focus on the fundamentals." You have already made the point, and repeating it lowers the energy right where the reader decides whether to comment. Endings are the highest-leverage line in the post because they are the last thing in mind when someone hovers over the reply box.

End on the sharpest sentence you wrote, or on a question you genuinely want answered. Real questions get real answers. Rhetorical ones get ignored, and readers can tell the difference instantly.

Why these five keep coming back

All five are the safe option under time pressure. Generic phrasing is faster to produce, harder to criticise, and impossible to be wrong about. That is a decent strategy for internal email and a bad one for a feed where the cost of being ignored is much higher than the cost of being disagreed with.

Post Check flags these patterns in the draft, so catching them takes a minute instead of a rewrite, and so you catch them on the busy weeks too, which is when they actually appear.