Has the quality of writing gotten worse over the past century or so? How about over the past 5 years or so with the popularity of texting and tweeting?

Linguistic studies at various years in the 20th century and today reveal some surprising facts about the way college students have used English in previous decades. As college graduates enter the work force, employers quickly discover the level of their writing abilities – or lack thereof.

A look at these studies reveals the top mistakes writers have made over various eras of the past 100 years or so. Some statistics suggest that while the nature of the errors shifted slightly, the frequency of errors remained about the same.

For businesses that rely on written communication–the vast majority of them–quality writing is critical to maintaining credibility and professionalism. Understanding which writing mistakes occur most frequently is a good starting point for avoiding them in the future.

Top 10 Writing Mistakes Part 1: the 20th Century
Top 10 Writing Mistakes Part 2: Today

To make your best impression for any form of media, you have to target the needs of consumers of that media. In other words, if you want to recycle your print copy to act as website content, don’t do it.

At least not without making the necessary adjustments so your copy can be consumed easily by a web audience.

The key to writing online copy that’s as powerful as print copy lies in knowing the difference. Here’s a look at the basics of how your online copy should differ from print copy – and why.

It’s Not the Same! How Online Copy Should Differ from Print

Think less copy on your home page seems like a good idea? We do, too – usually. But having less copy isn’t as simple as it might sound. Light copy might seem ideal, but it can backfire unless it’s done right. When it comes to home page copy, balancing lightness with effectiveness is tricky.

What you should know:

1. Copy that’s light—is harder to write. Mark Twain said, “I don’t have time to write you a short letter, so I’m writing you a long one instead.” Crafting a short, powerful message takes time. When fewer words need to say more, it’s often a case of refining, editing and reassessing. Most good writers can fill a page with words. Great writers can fill half a page—and say the same thing.
2. Less space = Less time to communicate. If you only have “room” for 25 words, you could be limiting yourself. Yes, people are tired of reading long marketing copy, but they also need to be informed and to feel welcome. Are too-tight layouts limiting your ability to communicate?
3. Give ‘em a clue. Some companies don’t want any copy on their home page, assuming visitors will click in to get the real story. In reality, they usually click away. Your home page must tell prospects who you are and what you do. Share—or at least hint at—your story to compel visitors and make your sales easier. Remember, you know how exciting your business is, but your prospects don’t—yet.
4. What’s your message? Think of your goals. What main idea you want to communicate? Do you need visitors to sign up for something? Figuring out your goals should be your first priority. Once you have goals, you can decide how to achieve them. Here’s where you think about length. Your home page is often your one shot to capture prospects’ attention. Don’t blow it.
5. Look at why you want less content. Do you want less copy because people are busy? Or because you don’t want to pay for content? (Less content can cost more!) Don’t let the wrong reasons drive your content length. Otherwise, you’re doing your goals, and your audience, a disservice.

Let your business strategy—not your web design—drive your copy length. No matter what the length is, in website content, every word needs to count.

While we write for a living, we’re also huge fans of concise copy. Please share your favorite examples of websites that are light on copy, heavy on impact.

And if you need help keeping your own copy short and sweet, yet packing a powerful punch, just say the word.

Many of us have writing projects we’re struggling to find time for, whether it’s a blog or the Great American Novel.

Unfortunately, a lot of us have bought into the myth of writing as this almost-mystical experience that demands huge swaths of uninterrupted time, during which we call forth our muse for divine inspiration.

Too bad it doesn’t work that way.

Something invariably gets in the way of those grand writing plans. Maybe it’s an impromptu meeting or a telephone call. Or some last-minute deadline crops up.

The only way writing happens is this: you decide you’re going to write, come hell or high water. And you do it.

Making writing time

If you want to get those writing projects done, you’ll have to do one of two things:

• Schedule time for writing.
• Cobble together writing moments.

Sorry. No arcane secrets to share here.

Either you’re going to schedule the time to write, and you’ll keep that date with yourself. Or you’re not, in which case you move on to Plan B.

The disciplined approach

For many people, writing does require a certain mindset, some time to get the brain into a creative flow. The only way you’ll have the luxury of writing under these ideal conditions is by seizing the opportunity.

Try these suggestions:

• Set your alarm an hour earlier (or stay up an hour later). Either way, you get the idea. Make your day longer, and commit to using this time for your writing. Start the day by writing a blog entry. You might be surprised how this kick-starts your productivity.
• Take a writing break in the afternoon. Squeeze in some time during your lunch hour, or write during the afternoon when your energy might be lagging. Grab a cup of coffee to make the experience something you look forward to.
• Become a weekend writer. If your workweek is packed, set aside time each weekend for your writing goals. Write two or three blog entries, one article or a single chapter. Your steady progress might inspire you to find more writing time.

Patchwork-quilt approach

Can’t commit to a full hour for writing? No worries. You can train yourself to write on demand. Just give yourself every opportunity to write whenever inspiration strikes.

• Keep pen and paper handy. If you’re waiting for a meeting to start or stuck in line at a grocery store, jot down some headlines or story ideas. Write the first paragraph of your newsletter article. Keep a pad in your gym bag or next to the shower.
• Take baby steps. Start by committing to five or ten minutes each day. Promise yourself a five-minute writing break after you check your morning email or finish an important task. Develop your writing muscles, and see how much more easily the words flow.
• Stockpile your writing. If you find yourself stuck on a train or plane, take advantage of the opportunity to write your daily quota—and to get ahead. Write an extra article or blog entry, and you’ll have a free pass for those days when your muse goes on strike.

If all else fails, consider reaching out to your friendly neighborhood copywriting agency. You can still get credit for your brilliant ideas—and have time to tackle more enjoyable or profitable tasks.

What’s your favorite tip for finding writing time? Please share. And let us know if you’d like to appear as a guest blogger.

“What is the writer’s first job?”

Award-winning mystery novelist Reed Farrel Coleman asked the question at a recent workshop sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America.

A few attendees ventured educated guesses like “develop plot” or “sit down and write.”

Some enlightened soul soon voiced the answer Coleman was seeking: “To entertain.”

Exactly. He expanded this concept by restating it as “to engage the reader.”

The goal of the first sentence is to grab readers by the throat and convince them to read the second sentence, which is designed to propel readers toward the next sentence… and the next… and the next.

While Coleman was educating a room full of mystery writers on the editing process, his advice also applies to marketing copy.

• In creating a direct mail package, for instance, the job of the envelope is to get the recipient to open it.
• The role of the headline is to encourage the recipient to read the lead paragraph.
• The goal of the lead paragraph? To invite the recipient to read the next paragraph.

And so it goes until, hopefully, the prospect has reached the end of our brilliantly crafted pitch and found himself powerless to resist the compelling call to action.

If only it were that easy… Still, if you lose the reader before that point, your chances of a sale or donation go into the trash, along with your package.

Taking the Mystery out of Better Sales Copy

Follow these tips from the fiction pros to improve your response rates:

• Hit the ground running. People are too busy to wade through the marketing equivalent of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Find that emotional hook that will snatch the reader’s shirt collar and hold his attention. To gauge your success, copywriting great John Forde recommends covering your lead with a sheet of blank paper. If the second paragraph works just fine without the intro, start the message here. Repeat this process, cutting all unnecessary paragraphs.
• Read your work aloud. According to Coleman, we write with our eyes, but we edit with our ears. If the language sounds awkward and stilted when read aloud, it needs work. Make no mistake: readers “hear” your voice in their heads. Either this voice rings true, or they move on.
• View the writing with fresh eyes. Once you’ve finished the draft, set it aside at least overnight—ideally, for a few days or more. Then, go back and read the work out loud. Again. This distance from the writing process often uncovers new problems you might have overlooked.

At the end of the day, good writing is good writing. Whether you’re a mystery writer spinning a tale of whodunit or a marketer promoting a service or product, you must respect the reader’s time by making every word count.

Try these tips and let us know what you think. Did they work for you? Do you have other suggestions to help marketers—or mystery writers—cut out the parts that people skip? Please share.

In an age super-saturated with marketing messages, your prospects have developed such an aversion to being sold anything that you have to overcome resistance at every step.

They pick up your direct mail package, see what it is… and toss it in the garbage. So you add some intriguing copy or graphics to the envelope, just enough to make them open it.

They open up your envelope, see what you’re selling… and toss it in the garbage. So you include some headlines that snag their attention, capture their imagination, and keep them reading.

They read some of your headlines, recognize it as just another ho-hum sales pitch… and toss it in the garbage. So you write copy that they simply cannot put down, filled with dramatic benefits, showing them how much better their lives will be if they listen to your message.

They finally reach your call to action, see the cost… and toss it in the garbage because they don’t want to spend any money, even if you’ve managed to get them this far. So now your job is to help them rationalize what their emotions want.

These barriers of resistance are enormous, difficult to overcome no matter how breathtaking your benefits. So how do we, as marketers, get around this?

When defenses are that strong, it is senseless to confront them directly. To borrow the words of Sun Tzu, “Supreme excellence is achieved in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” Our prospect is not the enemy, but his resistance is. Marketers dare not use force to overcome defenses; we’re stuck with persuasion and seduction. So we go around the defenses with approaches that the prospect does not expect. We take the argument in an unexpected direction, evoke emotions that she is not expecting, inspire her imagination, and help her rationalize her action.

In the chain of resistance, you will note that at every stage, the prospect puts up resistance when she recognizes part of the marketing process. “Oh, this is where the sales pitch starts. I don’t feel like hearing a sales pitch right now.” This method of circumventing resistance predicts when that resistance will begin–and shifts gears before it can. As in wooing and warfare, do the unexpected, and you’ll more often experience dramatic results.

At what other stages of the selling process does resistance appear? How do you overcome it? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Evoking response is the primary duty of any marketing campaign. Generating more sales and revenue than the campaign cost to produce is the bottom line. Any good marketer knows that the first step is understanding the benefits of the product or service. Why should the customer care about what you’re saying? How can your widget make their lives better?

Advertising legend David Ogilvy realized that the best ads focused on one major benefit and included the others in subordinate roles. Stressing the strongest benefits creates the strongest possible response. But you can’t just say what the benefits are. You have to make them dramatic, so that they fling themselves at your prospect’s mind and stick there. You want to make them keep reading, call, click, whip out their credit cards.

A powerful way to do that is to turn your benefit into a promise.

“How to Make $1M in Two Years—Tax Free”

Makes a pretty strong headline, doesn’t it?  Why? Because it promises a benefit—making $1M within two years, tax free—and promises that if you keep reading, you will know how to do this. This headline conveys authority and success. It sounds like a wild claim; so your copy has to deliver on the promise, and so does your product.

What if the headline read:

“Our Company Can Make You $1M in Two Years”

This headline is inherently weaker, because it sounds like empty boasting. The benefit is there, but the previous example presupposes that it will be done, not that it can be done.

Making benefits immediate, concrete and dramatic increases their power and effectiveness. Whether you’re writing the copy, or approving the particulars of an advertising campaign, keep this in mind: Seize the audience‘s attention with big promises and powerful benefits. If you can do that, your widgets and services will practically sell themselves.

But let’s take it up a notch. What if you could paint a picture of the prospect’s success in their own imagination? How’s this one?

“They Laughed When I Said I Could Make $1M Tax-Free Within Two Years, but When I Bought that Ferrari…”

This headline paints a powerful picture. You can see interactions between people and feel the speaker’s final triumph when he stood victorious over the naysayers. This picture and the feelings it evokes capture the essence of the drama you want to create in the reader’s mind.

What kind of headlines/taglines/slogans have you found particularly effective? Can you put your finger on why?

The Myers-Briggs Temperament Test is an increasingly popular way to identify what makes a person tick. The Myers-Briggs Test, originally developed in the 1950s, is now used worldwide to identify patterns of behavior and attitude. The expansion of the test’s popularity has been spurred in large part by Dr. David Keirsey, who refined and expanded the Myers-Briggs types in his books, Please Understand Me and Please Understand Me II.

Human temperament theory states the following: all individuals can be categorized as one of four basic personality types. These personality types can each be broken down into four sub-types based on introversion/extroversion and the person’s preferred role as leader/follower, but those sub-types are irrelevant to the core values of the main types. Each holds a specific core value–the thing that drives people of that type.

Artisan (Sensing Perceiving – SP). There are many Artisans, perhaps 35-40% of the population. Artisans want to be excited, stimulated, to make an impact on the world.  They trust their impulses and aspire to virtuosity in their chosen field.

Guardian (Sensing Judging – SJ). Guardians are the most common, making up roughly 40-45% of the population. They are concerned about their lives, families, communities, responsibilities. They trust authority and seek security and belonging.

Idealist (Intuitive Feeling – NF). Idealists are rare, making up no more than 8-10% of the population. They are enthusiastic and romantic, seeking self-discovery and recognition of their efforts. They help others, and in so doing walk the path to enlightenment.

Rational (Intuitive Thinking – NT). Rationals are even more scarce, comprising as little as 5-7% of the population. They are calm, collected, trusting their reason and intellectual capacity. They live their lives in search of knowledge, fascinated by the systems that drive the universe.

With this basic knowledge, a good copywriter can craft a message to appeal to  all these types, or even more specifically to those types most likely to be interested in the message. One can develop marketing messages to maximize impact on certain personality types, or include hooks to appeal broadly to all four. Most of the hooks that will work on a Guardian will not likely work on an Idealist, because each type is driven by different internal forces.

One general difference between the types is that Artisans and Guardians operate most comfortably, and respond most favorably, to concrete things, such as tools, results, real-world things. Idealists and Rationals, on the other hand, are more likely to respond to abstract things, such as holistic concepts or systems.

Your job as a marketer is to craft a compelling message, and human temperament theory can be an absolutely priceless tool in your inventory.

How do you visualize your target audience when crafting copy? Are you a Myers-Briggs fan? Do you use a different approach? Please share what works for you.

Source: Keirsey, David. Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence. Del Mar: Prometheus Nemesis. 1998.

Professionals of all backgrounds need to unlock the doors of creativity at one time or another. Copywriters, marketers, executives, anyone who needs to find new solutions to intractable problems. Sometimes those solutions do not come. The brain feels blocked. How do you free your imagination?

Writers, for instance, are in the business of capturing emotions. Copywriters capture those emotions and invite their audiences to act on those emotions.  Any time you want to create the impulse in your readers to do something–e.g., click-through, call, make a purchase–you need to put them into a peak emotional state. You need to make them feel. To do that, the writer must be able to capture and lead the readers’ imagination, and thus, their emotions.

Can you do that without feeling those emotions yourself? Most great writers will say, “No.” To lead someone there, you have to go there first.

Great results in marketing come more often from positive emotions than negative ones. Unlocking your own imagination and creativity is the key to helping your audience do it, and this applies whether your job is the writer, or the executive, or the manager. Finding solutions occurs when you free your imagination.

But how do you do that? You do it by putting yourself into a peak emotional state.

How do you get yourself into a positive emotional state–a feat often hampered by life’s onerous challenges–and do your best work?

1. Rest. Get a good night’s sleep. Whose mind works well when it is fatigued?
2. Exercise. A brisk walk, a bike ride, a bit of yoga. Exercise makes the body fully alert and produces the internal chemicals that create a positive mental state.
3. Eat light. Don’t eat a big, heavy meal that will make you drowsy and lethargic.
4. Unplug. Turn off your phone and email. Distractions–also known as procrastination tools–can interrupt your creative process and shatter your positive state.
5. Celebrate the positive. Relationships, the knowledge that you’re good at what you do, with all the skills and experience you need, the certainty that you are the only person in the world who can knock this project out of the park. Negative thoughts will torpedo you.
6. Visualize success. Imagine how great it will feel afterward to have completed your project and to know that you did it well.
7. Affirm yourself. As you sit down to work, type or write this three times:  “I, (name here), am going to (solve this problem, write an amazing sales letter, craft an amazing proposal, etc.).” Making this positive affirmation will help bring your goal into being.

The positive attitude generated by this simple process will spark your imagination. You might even find that if results do not come immediately, they will come at unexpected times, seemingly out of nowhere, such when you are driving, exercising, or making dinner. This is your subconscious creativity kicking into gear, so be ready for it when it happens.

So what are you waiting for? Plant gluteus maximus in chair, apply fingers to keyboard, take a deep breath, smile with head high, and get to it.  Nobody can do it better than you.

What do you think of these tips? Do you have a favorite technique for unleashing your creativity? Please share them with us.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain

I’ve just finished reading The Power of Less by Leo Babauta, yet another book that promises greater productivity with less effort. His principles are sound, and reading the book takes very little time.

Putting those principles into practice and creating those life-changing habits… Yes, you still have months and years of hard work ahead of you, but Babauta packs this slim volume with oodles of tips to keep you motivated during that tedious reprogramming phase, as we train ourselves to focus on the things that really matter to us.

Reprogramming in action

For me, the timing was especially interesting because I’m living through the slow, frustrating process of creating a new habit. Specifically, I’m teaching myself to touch type with the Dvorak layout after two decades of Qwerty. (Why? Because of yet another productivity book, Bit Literacy by Mark Hurst.)

After several weeks of Dvorak practice, while typing in Qwerty for work because I couldn’t afford the drop in productivity, a switch in my brain flipped. Now, my fingers instinctively move to the Dvorak positions, although not with their former speed and accuracy. Switching to Qwerty no longer gives me a huge boost in speed because my fingers are caught betwixt and between the two layouts.

Unexpected benefits (to me and to others)

Two weeks ago, I made the full-time switch to Dvorak. Emails and edits that previously took minutes have become laborious typing drills.

My writing has become tighter and more focused as a result.

No longer able to tap out lengthy paragraphs at 95 words per minute, I carefully consider each word that goes into a message or document. Recent correspondence has become short and to the point, almost to an extreme.

No one has complained. (In fact, I suspect at least a few contacts are grateful since brief emails take up less of their time.)

Set limits… and write better

As Babauta explains in his first chapter, we need to start by setting limits. Working within these limits forces us to make stronger choices.

Here are a few ways you might limit your writing to punch up the impact:

• Write a headline of 15 words or less
• Write a blog post of 500 words or less
• Limit your home page copy to 200 words
• Set a 5-line limit for emails

The original limits we set may not be the right ones, but they provide a starting point for refinement.

Think it can’t be done?

According to literary legend, Ernest Hemingway once won a bet (or some other challenge) by writing a six-word short story: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.”

What are your thoughts on the “less is more” approach to writing? Please share, as well as any defenses of long copy promotions.