First up, let’s consider what I mean by ‘improve your writing’.
It’s my opinion that if you’re taking the time to write something, it’s because you want it to be read. Whether it’s an email, a letter, a piece of marketing literature, a report, or anything else you can think of, you aren’t writing it just for the sake of it. You’re writing it because you have something to say and you want to persuade, inform, discuss, or explain something to your readers.
So if your words aren’t getting the response you want — or aren’t getting a response at all — it’s time to take action.
As a copywriter, it’s my job to write things that persuade people to buy whatever it is my client is selling, if not now then at some point in the future. And a critical element of this is writing things that people want to read. Because the longer I can keep people reading, the more opportunity I have to put my client’s message across.
The things I’ve learned as a copywriter are useful for anyone who writes anything. And here’s what they are.
Plan what you want to say
Before you sit down to write anything, take some time to plan its structure. (If you’re writing a quick email to a colleague, this need only takes seconds and can be done in your head. If you’re writing your company’s annual report, it’s going to take considerably longer and it’s advisable to commit your thoughts to paper.)
Think about the points you need to cover and arrange them in a logical order. Note that a logical order for one type of writing might be different for another.
In a press release, for example, you want to start with the most important information first. So the first paragraph might be about how your work has just helped your client increase turnover by £200,000 a year.
But if you’re writing a case study, you want to start with the problems your client was facing before you got involved. So you might start by saying that your client knew their outdated manufacturing processes were stopping them from growing because this is a problem that will resonate with your potential clients.
You can go into as much detail or as little when you put together your plan.
However, my advice, learned from bitter experience, is that the more thinking you put in at this stage, the less time you spend writing — and the less frustration you feel as you delete yet another paragraph that wasn’t right.
When you plan out your writing, you’ll get to the point more quickly and you’ll cut out unnecessary information so you won’t waste readers’ time — and they’ll like you all the more for it. This leads me to my next point.
Think about your reader
At the same time as planning the structure of your writing, you need to think about your reader.
If you’re writing an email to your colleague, this is easy — you just think about them.
If you’re writing a piece of marketing literature, it’s harder, but not impossible. You think about a typical customer. In marketing terms, this is known as your customer avatar. If you haven’t already created your customer avatar(s), there are plenty of tutorials online. I’d recommend taking the time to do the work properly, but there’s plenty to be said for just taking a moment to think about what your customers are like.
When you’re planning your writing, ask yourself what your reader will want from your writing. And what do you want them to feel after they’ve read it? Note here that I’ve said ‘reader’ not ‘readers’. Because while thousands of people might read your writing, every individual reader engages with your writing one-on-one. This is important to remember — I’ll explain why in a minute.
If you need to email a junior member of staff to point out a mistake that needs to be corrected, but you don’t want to make a big deal of it, you might want to start and end by highlighting something about their work you were impressed by and put the negative point in the middle.
If you’re writing a piece of marketing literature, you’ll have to be brutally honest with yourself. You might be very proud of the technology that sits behind your product. But the chances are that your reader doesn’t need to know about it in detail — they just need to know that your product does something that no one else’s product can. So this is all you have to tell them — along with just enough information to back up your claim.
When you’re writing, keep this one reader in mind. It will take away ‘stage fright’ — you’re writing something for one person rather than potentially thousands, which makes everything feel a lot easier and less stressful. It will also make your writing much more conversational because you’re ‘talking’ to one person rather than ‘broadcasting’ to thousands.
Use short sentences
It’s a fact that the shorter a sentence is, the easier it is to read.
The American Press Institute found that:
- When the average sentence length is less than eight words, readers understood 100% of the story
- At 14 words, comprehension is more than 90%
- At 43 words, comprehension is less than 10%.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that one in seven adults has literacy levels at or below that of a 9–11-year-old.
Use short paragraphs
As well as using short sentences, use short paragraphs too. And break up text with headings so people can skim to the section they want to read. It’s a simple visual trick but it works. If your reader can see lots of white space around your words, it looks less intimidating and tiring to read — so they’re more likely to read it.
Write in the same way as you’d speak
When you commit words to paper, it’s very easy to think you have to be much more formal than you would if you were speaking. You might want to use longer words or more words. You might use ‘interesting’ sentence structures. Try not to do these things. As copywriter Bob Bly once said: “In my nearly 30 years of writing business-to-business copy aimed at engineers, scientists, programmers, and other techies, I have never once heard a prospect complain, ‘This brochure is too easy to read.’”
I should perhaps add an extra bit to this tip. ‘Write in the same way as you’d speak if you were speaking to the person you’re writing to.’ The way you’d talk to a colleague is different from the way you’d talk to your bank manager or boss. If you’re writing a marketing piece to be read by CEOs and you aren’t a CEO yourself, you want to be respectful but you don’t want to make a fool of yourself by using ‘fancy’ language, instead, you want to get to the point quickly but confidently.
Focus on the benefits, not the features
This is a classic piece of copywriting advice and it’s invaluable when you are writing marketing literature. It’s an extension of the point above about your reader not necessarily needing to know the ins and outs of your software, just that it works. The feature is, well, the feature. The benefit is the thing that makes it useful or interesting to your reader.
To check whether you’re using benefits, not features, use the ‘so what?’ test. Read the point you’ve made, then ask yourself, would my reader be justified in saying ‘so what?’ to that statement. If they could, you’ve used the feature not the benefit.
For example, you might write: ‘We invest in state-of-the-art technology.’ To which the answer might be: ‘So what?’ But if you write: ‘We invest in state-of-the-art technology so we always deliver the highest quality products,’ there’s more understanding. You could take it further too. ‘We invest in state-of-the-art technology so we always deliver the highest quality products. For example, last year we invested £250,000 in a new ZX72 coating machine that means the coating on our fence paneling is ten times stronger than it was before.’
But this advice isn’t just useful for marketing copy. It’s also useful whenever you want anyone to do something for you. Here, you can use the ‘What’s in it for me?’ test.
Let’s take an example. Let’s say your office cleaners have complained about dirty cups and dishes being left in the kitchen sink because they don’t have time to do the washing up in the time they’ve got.
You could just issue a notice to staff — ‘Please wash and dry your crockery after you’ve used it.’ But you might get better buy-in if you said instead: ‘Please wash and dry your crockery after you’ve used it. It means our cleaners have more time to spend on cleaning the rest of the office so we have a nicer, more hygienic environment to work in.’
Provide a call to action
Finally, if you want your readers to do something after they’ve finished reading, make it crystal clear. If you’re writing a piece of marketing literature, say call now, email now, download this, read this, ask about this, or whatever it is you want them to do.
It’s also true when you want your colleagues to do something. Let’s say you’re coordinating the Christmas meal and you want people to confirm their menu choices by a certain date. Rather than saying ‘Here’s the menu for our Christmas lunch. I need to let the restaurant know what we want by 1 December, so please make your choices before then’ say ‘Here’s the menu for our Christmas lunch for you to choose from. Please could you let me know your choices by 30 November?’
Writing to be read
Ultimately, if you’re going to take the time to write something, it’s preferable to write something that people will want to read. That way your hard work will have been worth it.
And if I had to summarise all these points into one overarching piece of advice, it would be simply this. Keep your reader in mind. When you put them and their needs first, you make your writing readable.
