How a Ghostwriter Gets the Slang Right
Slang is one of the hardest parts of a client’s voice to capture, and one of the fastest ways to break the whole illusion if you miss it.
A retired Marine does not talk like a Silicon Valley founder. A chef from New Orleans does not use the same expressions as a hedge fund manager from Connecticut. Those differences go deeper than vocabulary. They carry where someone grew up, what industry shaped them, which generation they belong to, and how they relate to the people around them. Get it right and the book sounds like the person whose name is on the cover. Get it wrong and something feels off on every page, even if the reader cannot say what.
The interview is where you hear it
The interview is not just about extracting information. It is about listening to how the client delivers it. I record every session and review the recordings for speech patterns as much as content.
I am listening for the phrases they return to without noticing, the jargon they use fluently, the regional expressions that mark where they come from, the generational slang that places them in an era, and the informal language they drop into when they stop being careful about how they sound.
That last one matters most. Clients usually start an interview speaking formally. They know it is being recorded and will become a book. As the conversation deepens and they relax, the real voice comes out. The slang appears. The sentence fragments show up. The expressions they would never put in an email but use every day start surfacing. That relaxed voice is the one the book needs to sound like.
The kinds of slang a ghostwriter runs into
Industry jargon. Every profession has its own language. A tech founder talks about runway and burn rate. A developer talks about cap rates and getting to vertical. A veteran talks about boots on the ground and squared away. Strip it out and you sanitize the voice. Keep it in and the book sounds authoritative. The skill is calibration: heavy jargon works for an insider audience, but for a general reader it has to appear naturally and stay understandable from context.
Regional and cultural expressions. A client from the South might say “fixing to.” Someone from Brooklyn might say “deadass” for “seriously.” A British client might call a bad situation “a proper shambles.” These carry identity. In memoir especially, they are essential. A memoir about growing up in South Boston that reads like it came from nowhere in particular has lost something fundamental.
Generational markers. A client in their sixties uses different casual language than one in their thirties. “First-rate” versus “next level.” Neither is wrong. But a 65-year-old CEO whose memoir suddenly includes “that meeting was lowkey a disaster” will confuse everyone who knows him.
Rough language. Some clients swear constantly. Others never do. The book has to match. Someone who drops an f-bomb every third sentence should have a book with that energy, cleaned up enough to read well but not so sanitized that the voice disappears. I capture the full range first, then we decide together how much of it serves the book.
When slang does not belong
Not every voice includes much slang, and not every book benefits from it. A thought-leadership book in a conservative field may need a measured voice. A medical book for other doctors may run dense with technical language and no slang at all. The job is accuracy. If the client speaks formally, the book sounds formal. Injecting slang to make a reserved person sound casual is just as wrong as stripping it from someone who talks that way naturally.
Fifty-four books, fifty-four voices
Every client I have worked with had a different voice. Different industries, regions, generations, levels of formality. The retired officer did not sound like the entrepreneur. The chef did not sound like the financial advisor. Getting the slang right was part of making each book sound like the person on the cover.
That is the job. Not writing in my voice. Writing in theirs.
Richard Lowe is a professional ghostwriter and author. He has written 113+ books under his own name and ghostwritten 54+ more for executives, founders, physicians, and public figures, whose books have raised over $30 million in venture capital, earned TEDx invitations, and been adopted as university reading.
Thinking about a book? Start a conversation about your project or read the full version of this piece on my site: https://thewritingking.com/modern-slang/