I really love dogs but that would have helped me little last night, when a territorial black monster named Tony cornered me with apparent intent to tear out my liver.
Tony is the dog of a friend I’m visiting and is supposedly a German shepherd. I have my doubts about this lineage because
1) as mentioned, Tony is all black and not brown, and
2) Tony is about 50% larger than any German shepherd I’ve ever seen (he weighs around 100 lbs). In fact, if I ever ran into Tony in a dark forest, my first thought would be I’m seeing a wolf and I’m about to become a cautionary tale for naughty children.
Fortunately, I survived last night’s Tony attack because my friend, knowing Tony’s territorial tendencies, put a muzzle on Tony’s snout ahead of time.
So even though Tony charged at me repeatedly and got so close I could hear his jaws snapping, I was safe.
As I was lying in bed later, going over this exciting evening and trying to fall asleep, I summed it up as,
“Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” (suck it Tony)
This in turn reminded me of a great subject line technique I call inversion (others might have different names for it).
It’s when you take a saying, a well-known phrase, or a cliche and either turn it around (as with the “defeat” phrase) or take a key word and negate it (as in the Ben Settle subject line, “Why the customer is always wrong”).
This inversion style of subject lines works for two reasons:
First, it catches your reader off guard and it causes dissonance that the reader will probably want to resolve.
Second, it gives you an interesting angle to write about — assuming you write the subject line ahead of the email body.
Anyways, I’ll be staying with my friend — and Tony — for the next few days. And assuming Tony’s muzzle doesn’t slip off and I wind up in the ER, I’ll even try to get a bit of copywriting done. Specifically, some emails for a new health offer I will be promoting.
If you want to get a good idea of how I write such emails — and you can, too — then check out the following page: