Copy Editing

My #1 favorite editing tool

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Do you ever have a turkey on your table, a tired, beat-up, ugly old bird… but you still try your damnedest to turn it into a powerful and proud eagle?

You know what I mean:

You squint at the turkey, you look at it from the left and the right…

You primp the tail feathers a little to make the thing seem bigger and healthier than it is…

You tuck in that wattle to give your bird a more raptor-like profile… and then you watch with disappointment as the saggy skin expands again…

You’ve had all this happen, right?

Well, I’ve definitely had it happen. All the time. In fact it happened just last night.

Last night, I spent an embarrassing amount of time to write today’s email. This involved much research and thinking and shuffling of possible things I could say. The basic idea was an old personal story, which I was hoping to tie into a specific copywriting moral I had in mind.

And so there I was, tilting my head to the left, squinting a little, and trying to smile.

“It’s almost there,” I said to myself. “Just tuck in this saggy bit… fluff up up the end part here… and it will be great.”

But then, in a moment of weakness or maybe luck, I took a break. I checked my inbox. It turned I had an email myself — another copywriter’s newsletter.

“Let me just read it,” I said. “Maybe it will help me finish my own email.”

The other copywriter is someone I won’t name to protect my pride. But perhaps you’ll be able to guess who I have in mind.

His newsletter yesterday was making fun of people who tell lifeless stories as a way of drawing an uninspired moral.

He even included a short sample email he’d whipped up just to mock the kind of tired stuff he had in mind.

I shifted in my seat. I swallowed. Slowly, I took this mocking, fake email from the other copywriter’s newsletter… and I put it side by side with the email I was planning to send out. In parallel, I ran down both pages:

Same saggy wattle… check.

Same bony, unmuscled carcass… check.

Same scraggly tail feathers… check.

No, it wasn’t the exact same bird. But it was definitely the same species.

Which brings me to my copywriting moral, or rather, a piece of advice I keep repeating to myself.

I keep repeating it because I keep forgetting it, and I waste a ton of time as a result. Perhaps my reminder will be useful to you as well:

In my experience, the most powerful editing tool is the backspace key.

If a phrase, sentence, paragraph, section, or even entire email isn’t quite willing or able to fly, right now, as it is, without primping and massaging… then out it goes. The sooner, the better.

I have much, much more to write on this topic. In fact, I did write much more. And then, I threw it out. Trust me, this turkey — I mean this email — is better off for it.

“That’s fine for today,” I hear you say. “But what about tomorrow? Will that bird fly?”

I can’t say for sure. If you want to give it a try, you can join the club here.

Silver medal: Writing how you speak

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“A girl I knew was brought up by ‘higher thinking’ parents to regard God as a perfect ‘substance’; in later life she realised that this had actually led her to think of Him as something like a vast tapioca pudding. (To make matters worse, she disliked tapioca).”
C. S. Lewis, Miracles

I chuckled when I first read this story. But then I rubbed my chin a bit. And I held up a finger in the air, like a light bulb had just gone on in my head.

Our human brains cannot see words like development. Instead, we have to imagine a picture, a smell, a sound. Like a skyscraper being built… or the smell of wet grass in April… or Ravel’s Bolero.

But there are some dark clouds on the horizon.

Because without thinking, most of us for reach for words like development and substance all the time, like we reach for popcorn while watching a movie in a dark theater. We reach for these words, even though, like popcorn, they have no body to them.

My point is this:

Popular advice is to write the way you speak.

I say this will get you a silver medal at best.

But if you want a gold medal, then write the way you speak… and then take out words like substance and development. And instead, put in word pictures, of tapioca pudding or half-finished skyscrapers.

Because the bigger the weight you take off the shoulders of your reader, the more likely he is to follow you as you lead him down the sales page… and the more likely he is to add another dollar bill onto the stack of dollar bills that makes up your bank account.

I mean, if your bank account really were made of stacks of dollar bills, instead of bodyless numbers in a computer database. But I think you see what I mean.

Here’s something else you can see:

Each day, I write a little letter. I put it in an envelope and I send it to hundreds of people around the world. Some of these people read my letters… some even chuckle or rub their chins in thought. You can do the same. It’s free. You can sign up, with just your address, by filling out the form here.

How to develop your voice even if you don’t have one

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I came across the following question today:

So this is one thing I’ve been trying to explore and develop.

I can write and convey ideas or messages, but it mostly comes out pretty dry (I’m a pretty boring person overall).

But I often read that punchy and upbeat copy, where you can really hear ‘voice’ and character come through.

Has anyone got any tips or articles or videos or professional quote makers they can recommend to develop this side of my writing?

Or should I just focus on writing dull informative stuff?

I’m also a pretty boring person, so this is a question I used to worry about as well. But I don’t worry about it any more. It seems to have taken care of itself. I asked myself how.

​​Here are a few ideas that came out — maybe they will be useful to you:

1. Write more. Swagger comes from lots of walking, up and down the same street.

2. Write faster. You’ll find stuff on the screen that makes your eyes pop out. “Where did that come from?”

3. Show and then tell. Punchy and upbeat copy is less about how you say it than about what you say. And it’s less about what you say than what happens in your reader’s head as a result.

4. Copy other writers for a while. I once read that Henry Miller would type up entire books by his favorite authors.

5. Self-consciously work on developing your voice. Invent your own phrases. Your own twists on cliches. Your own spelling. Most of it will be stupid. Most.

6. Infuse your own interests into your copy. Comedian Andrew Schulz: “Who cares if they relate to it? Make them relate to it.”

7. Get enthusiastic before you write.

8. Limit your editing. This is the second half of #2 above, for after you’ve finished writing.

9. Write more casual than you think is ok. You can always edit later.

10. Inject more drama. This goes back to #3 and #6 above. Your voice, like your writing in general, is more about what you say than how you say it.

And here’s a bonus #11:

Consciously do stuff that you know is wrong. For example, listicles like I’ve just written — they violate the Rule Of One, right?

​​Right. You probably won’t follow any of my ideas above, or even remember them come tomorrow. Even so. The more sacred a writing rule is, the more important it is to break it on occasion.

But here’s a rule that’s too sacred to break:

If you’re writing sales copy, you have to have a call to action. Otherwise the whole message was pointless. And in that spirit, my CTA to you is to sign up to my email newsletter about marketing and copywriting. If that’s something you can relate to, here’s where to go.

Some snob tells me how to write better

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A few days ago, I came across a list of 36 rules for writing well. The list was put together by Italian novelist Umberto Eco, best known for a book that became a 1986 movie starring Sean Connery.

(Roger Ebert: “If the story had been able to really involve us, there would have been quite a movie here.”)

If I sound a little bitter, it’s because Umberto Eco is directly attacking me and my writing with his stupid rules. Here are a few of them:

1. Avoid alliterations, even if they’re manna for morons.

13. Don’t be repetitious; don’t repeat the same thing twice; repeating is superfluous (redundancy means the useless explanation of something the reader has already understood).

17. Don’t write one-word sentences. Ever.

22. Do you really need rhetorical questions?

30. Do not change paragraph when unneeded.
Not too often.
Anyway.

I’ve covered many of Eco’s rules in this newsletter. Except my advice was to do the things Eco warns against.

I guess the difference is that Umberto Eco has snobbish taste on his side, while I have numbers. Because things like alliteration work to get people’s attention, and even to make sales.

If you don’t believe me, look at the curious case of The Big Black Book.

This was a book of consumer tips that sold like crazy, through a sales letter, to a list of infomercial buyers of an audio cassette program on reprogramming your subconscious.

What?

Why did people who bought a bunch of tapes… by watching TV… about reprogramming your subconscious… want to buy a book, on an entirely unrelated topic, sold through a different format?

Easy.

Because that audio tape program was called Passion, Power, and Profit. Get it?

Passion, Power, Profit… Big Black Book.

Crazy as it seems, these buyers bought mostly on the strength of alliteration in the product name.

Same thing with words.

Umberto Eco’s rules don’t mention amazing, secret, or magic, when used as an adjective. But based on his other rules, I bet he would think those words are cheap, overused, and ineffective.

Wrong again. Those words have been used in direct response marketing for a hundred years plus. And they show no sign of wearing out.

In fact, words like amazing and secret are used so often, and with so much power, that I put them in a list of 20 such magic words.

It’s part of round 14 of Copy Riddles. That’s my program about bullets and copywriting. The promise is that in just 8 weeks, Copy Riddles gets A-list copywriting skills into your head, through a combination of exercises and demonstration.

The deadline to join this run of Copy Riddles is this Sunday at 12 midnight PST. 2 days from now. Coming up soon.

So if you want skills that pay the bills… or complete command of copywriting… this might be worth a look:

https://copyriddles.com/

How to sound smarter

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There’s a well-known guy in the copywriting space who loves to use million-dollar words. He does it a lot in writing. He does it even more when giving a speech.

I’ve always wondered at this. It seems out of place in the quick-cheap-easy world of direct response. Like some kind of insecurity. Like he’s trying to prove he’s educated and smart.

If so, then bad move, at least if you go by a study I just read.

Back in 2005, a scientist at Princeton University jiggered a bunch of texts. He put in longer words into some. He put in shorter words into others. And then he put these texts in front of Stanford undergrads, to see what they would say.

I’m sure you can guess one part of what the students said. The texts with the longer words were harder to read. No surprise there.

But get this:

Students also said that longer words made the author sound less smart. And vice versa. Shorter words made the author sound more smart.

Of course, if you like, there are holes you can poke in this study:

It was only done on Stanford students, an unusual bunch. And it’s only about written texts, and not about speech.

But to my lazy mind, the conclusion is clear:

Use short words. Make your writing and speaking simple. Not because you want to sell more. That’s a nice side effect. But the real benefit is that short and simple will make you sound smarter.

And now the punchline:

Are you impressed by my 1- and 2- syllable words? Then you will love, I say love, my email news-letter. It’s full of short words. You can sign up for it here.

My unflattering email critique to my earlier self

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[I gave myself a harsh email critique recently. It’s for an email I wrote exactly two years ago, which gets a “C” at best. If you want to see why, here’s the original email in bold, along with my comments in brackets:]

SUBJECT: The email that broke the camel’s back

[I’ve found that “play on a popular phrase” rarely works as a subject line, at least to my personal newsletter list. So I would say, force yourself to come up with 10 new subject lines, and use the best of those. But if you insist on the subject line above, then make it more specific and intriguing. Something like, “The sticky sweet email that broke this camel’s back.”]

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

[Only people who really love you will read past this opening. Everybody else will leave. As James Altucher says, you have to bleed in the first line. Options:

– “How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter.” Lead off with this and then explain what it’s all about.

– “And that’s when I unsubscribed.” Lead off with the end of the story (below) and then work your way back to explain how it all went wrong.

– Make it into a metaphor. “I only dated the Farnam Street newsletter for a few weeks. In that short time, we had several nasty fights…”]

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

[Ideally, make this section more concrete. Give examples of specific emails, and make each example funny or stupid. If you can’t do that for any reason… then make this section shorter. Your copy should never be both abstract and long, which is what’s happening here.]

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

[This is a missed opportunity to be a bit funny. You can make fun of the Icelanders and their nerdy tradition… of Shane Parrish and his virtue signalling… or of yourself and your cold Grinch heart, two sizes too small.]

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

[This point is worthwhile. But it could be developed further. An easy way to do this would be with another, positive example. “I was on Ben Settle’s list in two separate bursts, for 3 years in total, before I subscribed to his paid newsletter. The last email I read before I subscribed had the subject, “The Myth of Security”… but you can be sure it wasn’t that email alone that made me subscribe. It was those 3 years of cumulative reading.”]

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

[A couple of points to wrap this up for you and for myself both:

1. Even though this email is weak from a copywriting standpoint, that’s ok. Sometimes these daily emails come out a little undercooked, other times they are dry and flavorless. But the more you write, the more of them turn out fine.

But even if not, so what? A weak daily email still has value. It strengthens your relationship with your list… it cements the central idea in your mind… and it can form fodder for your future emails, two years down the line. So keep writing, or if you haven’t started yet, then start.

2. When you tease something at the end of your email, make sure you write down what you had in mind for the payoff. I’d like to know now what info I was teasing back then… but two years later, I have no idea any more. Time to head over to Farnam Street and see what advice Shane has about improving my failing memory.]

Look at your copy… it should make you cringe

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“‘Bild’ car tester Peter Glodschey compared the new Panda to a ‘shoe box.’ But shoe boxes look nicer.”

In 1999, Italian designer Giorgetto Giugiaro was named “Car Designer of the Century.” Giugiaro designed such icons as the 1961 Aston Martin DB4… the 1966 Maserati Ghibli… and the 1981 DeLorean, which would time-travel once it reached speeds of 88 miles an hour.

But Giugiaro also designed some ugly ducklings. There was the 1988 Yugo Florida… the 1985 Hyundai Excel… and the initial Fiat Panda.

Back in 1980, when the Panda came out, Giugiaro called it the “most enchanting work in my life.” But reviewers weren’t buying it. German magazine Der Spiegel likened the Panda to a “tin gnome,” while Bild called it a “shoe box” (quote above).

You can’t win ’em all, right? But you can learn from your flops, and see how you can improve.

I don’t know if Giorgetto Giugiaro ever did this. But I decided it was a good idea for myself. Because I remember hearing somewhere that if you look at your copy from a few years earlier, it should make you cringe. That means you’re improving.

So I just went through an email I wrote exactly two years ago. My face didn’t lock up from cringing… but the email could definitely be better. So I wrote up a cold and nasty critique to myself, about what needs to be changed, cut, or made sexy instead of grandmotherly.

It was a good exercise. And if you’re interested, I’ll share my results with you tomorrow. Maybe these insights, which come after 2+ years of non-stop daily emails, can help shorten your own learning curve. Maybe they can help you get from “shoe box” to “enchanting work” a bit more quickly.

Weapons-grade copy that carries a wallop

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Most rocks on earth contain 2 to 4 ppm of uranium. The worst that a uranium-bearing rock can do is split your head open.

But take many tons of rock, and cook it down to nothing. What you get is “weapons grade” uranium-235. Less than a kilogram of that stuff was enough to wipe out Hiroshima and about 80,000 people.

I bring up this gruesome fact to show you the power of distillation.

​​I started this email with a draft of 200 words. I’ve managed to cut it down to about 100. Because as John Caples said:

“Overwriting is the key. If you need a thousand words, write two thousand. Trim vigorously. Fact-packed messages carry a wallop.”

If you want to subscribe to my fact-packed email newsletter, click here.

 

On writing badly

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“Don’t fight such a current if it feels right. Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become a prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”

I’m re-reading William Zinsser’s book On Writing Well. I don’t like this book. I have several reasons why, but one is that I don’t like the style.

The passage above is one example. It comes from a chapter on “unity.” That’s what Zinsser calls being consistent with your pronouns, your tense, and your mood. But…

It seems no one told William Zinsser about being consistent with your imagery. So in the passage above, the reader is first floating on a body of water (current). Then he’s on hard land (terrain) or perhaps a volcano (vibrations). Suddenly, he seems to be in trouble with the law (a prisoner) and finally he’s building a house (blueprints).

My point is that a lot of the “rules” of writing well, even by supposed authorities like Zinsser, don’t mean much. A good writer can break these rules. So can a mediocre writer.

My advice, in case you want it, is to not worry about the rules of “good” writing. Instead, spend your energy on looking for something new or unique to say. And if you don’t know where to find such stuff, then start with what’s already been written by others — “On Writing Well” — and turn it on its head.

At least that’s what I do. Each day, I write a few hundred words like this. My goal is to say something new or unique about writing, persuasion, and marketing.

I’ve got an email newsletter where I publish these daily essays. In case the vibrations are good and you want to reach the destination of being subscribed to this newsletter, then click here and float down the current it leads you to.

The trouble with “writing how you talk”

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“Pitbulls are like a gun you can pet.”
— Bill Burr

I read a question on a copywriter message board recently:

“Should you write copy the way you speak?”

It’s certainly common advice to do so. And it can help people who fear writing to get over their phobia.

​​But I don’t agree that you can speak your way to good writing, or even to good copy.

Fact is, copy should use simple words and paint word pictures.

But except for a few talented communicators, most people don’t talk like that.

Sure, when it’s all done and done, somebody reading your copy should be able to convince themselves they might say this when speaking. But they never really would, any more than your random schmuck off the street would deliver a Bill Burr-level rant while jiving with his friends at the bar.

A top comedian like Burr will put in dozens or hundreds of hours of work to polish and perfect a joke that lasts only a few minutes.

​​And if you want similar success with your copy, you too will have to work harder on your copy than just “writing how you talk.”

Or you can just write daily emails. The rules for those are often different than for traditional sales letters. And if you want to see what I have in mind, you might like to sign up for my daily email newsletter. You can do so by clicking here.