A company I worked for some 20 years ago had writers who mostly thought about the "happy path". When things went wrong, the error messages were left up to the programmers.
I discovered this when I tried to install our product on an old Mac and got this message:
Your hard disk is too small
Wait? My what is too small?
Later, on Windows, I got this popup:
You are not here
WTF?
I searched for this message and found it came from a function called CantHappen(), which was kind of like an assert(false). Something you throw into a code path just to note a place that you really know the code can never reach. Until it inevitably does.
I went on a rampage through our code, finding all these crazy messages and updating them - and when possible, fixing the code so the error messages wouldn't be needed.
My manager and his manager, to their credit, knew how bad our messages were, and they helped me pull together a little team with a writer and translators to fix these up. And we did. Our messages got a lot better, easier to understand and more helpful.
All because our Mac installer told me my hard disk was too small.
To understand the problem, consider two things.
First, imagine another word that rhymes with "disk". I will just call it "di*k" here.
Second, the problem wasn't that my hard di*k was too small. I could have the biggest hard di*k in the world, but if it didn't have enough free space, there wouldn't be room to install Acrobat.
So the message had an admittedly slim chance of being misconstrued, but more importantly it was just plain incorrect.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/ibm-announce...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...
Edit: Also have to note that education in language or literature doesn’t make person a good UX copywriter automatically. It’s a cross-domain job with multiple career paths towards it. You were lucky to work with someone who really excelled in it.