5 WAY S T O
W R I T E A Damn Good Sentence

Average copywriters
write average sentences.

You, I’m guessing, don’t want
to be average.

You want to be great.
You want to be ! remarkable.

That means you need to
write damn good sentences … ! without even thinking about it … ! day in and day out.

Do that and you’ll become
an unstoppable writing machine. ! You’ll become a killer copywriter.

See, everything you write begins
and ends with a sentence.

We have a number of
research studies to thank for this discovery.

The first one is primacy.
! It refers to our tendency to remember items at the beginning of a list.

Other studies suggest you’ll always
remember: ! more words from the end of a list ! than from the beginning simply because those are the last words you read.

This is called recency.

Together, primacy and recency make
up the serial position effect, ! ! a term coined by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909).

T H I S C
A N B E S E E N I N T H E S E R I A L P O S I T I O N C U RV E : !

In 1946, Solomon E. Asch
upped the ante with studies that evaluated the impact the position of words had on people. ! The study we care about involves how we position adjectives to describe a person.

Read the following two sentences.
! ! “Steve is smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous.” ! “Steve is jealous, impulsive, critical, diligent, and smart.”

These two sentences contain the
same information.

However, when a group of
participants were given the first sentence ... ! ! they reported “Steve” in a positive light.

And the group given the
second sentence? ! Yep. ! They reported “Steve” in a negative light.

Thirty years later, William Crano
decided to sharpen the distinction the impact order has on meaning.

His studies uncovered additional effects,
particularly with the use of adjectives.

Change of meaning hypothesis Early
adjectives establish an expectation, which the reader then filters all the subsequent adjectives through.

Inconsistency discounting Options presented later
that don’t match earlier expectations are downgraded.

Attention decrement hypothesis Early adjectives
wield considerable influence than later ones (we saw this in the Steve sentences).

All these conclusions are important
when it comes to persuasive writing for several reasons.

Take this long-winded sentence from
Lisa Miller’s 2012 article “Listening to Xanax” ...

“Twenty years ago, just before
Kurt Cobain blew off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel to confess in print that she entertained fantasies of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive talent who died too soon, ‘young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.’”

That Miller ends this sentence
with “young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven” is NOT an accident.

Decisions had to be made
when crafting that sentence. ! ! Guaranteed it did not flow from Miller’s mind in the published form.

It was a piecemeal affair.
An experimentation with effect.

And this is the craft
of writing a damn good sentence.

Bone up on your sentence-writing
skills ! and those pieces of content will only get better ! and be more widely shared.

Want to learn how? Follow
me.

Insert Facts
1

This is nothing more than
basic subject and verb agreement: ! ! “Moses ate a muffaletta.” ! ! Logical and consistent. The building blocks of a story.

You insert facts by thinking
through the 5 Ws: ! Who What When Where Why ! Think specific and concrete.

Compare these two sentences. !
! “On the first day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.” ! “On the last day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.”

The significance is heightened in
the first sentence, minimized in the second. ! All by one word. (Can you find that word?)

And notice how your sympathies
change when I write: ! ! “On the first day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the three-day old woolly mammoth.”

Those new facts heighten the
emotional appeal of that simple story.

Create Images
2

It’s not a coincidence that
the root of imagination is image.

Imagination is the capacity for
people to see the world you are trying to paint.

Intelligent people like to use
their imagination. ! ! So, don’t insult their intelligence by over-explaining … but also don’t abuse their intelligence by starving it.

Use active verbs and concrete
nouns and you will naturally create images. ! ! “The buzzard bled.”

Introduce one (or all) of
the five senses and you’ll enhance those images: ! ! “The screaming buzzard bled.”

Use phrases like “imagine this”
or “picture this” to signal to your reader you are about to paint a picture.

“Imagine a fifty-something man in
a blue long-sleeve shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned, his knuckles thick and coarse. He’s on the side of the road, quibbling over a stack of used cinder blocks with a merchant.” ! from 10 Productivity Tips from a Blue-Collar Genius

In those two sentences, you
learn the color of the shirt, the state of the cuffs, and the condition of his knuckles.

You learn where he is
and what he is doing in concrete language.

The writer uses very precise
language to tell you what he was doing. ! For example, the character in the story wasn’t talking, he was “quibbling.” ! ! Something entirely different than chatting.

Evoke Emotion
3

You can naturally get mood
into your sentences if you follow the two previous steps. ! ! But as a copywriter you don’t want emotion to be an afterthought.

You must carefully plan and
manufacture emotion.

This starts by asking: !
What is the dominant mood of your reader or customer? What problem is he or she trying to solve? Is it fear over losing a job? A spouse? A scholarship? Pride of donating to a good cause? Joy for finally getting muscular definition in his calves?

Here’s an example.

How often are these little
tragedies repeated in your life? ! You write something clever, but everyone ignores it. You hear about a new opportunity, but don’t pursue it because you don’t have the skills or confidence to attempt it. You get overlooked by everybody – including your boss – because the guy in the next cubicle seems to know everything about SEO, email marketing, or copywriting. You hear about all the new clients your peers are picking up … but none are showing up at your door.

In that short opening, I
identified the relevant pain and agitated it so the solution was a no brainer.

But notice those four conditions
are all about rejection. Yet … ! I didn’t use the word “reject,” or a derivative, once. I didn’t tell you the emotion you should feel. I simply showed it to you.

Big difference in the quality
of writing.

Make Promises
4

As a copywriter, you aren’t
merely interested in heightening people’s emotions for the sake of heightening emotions. ! Otherwise, you’d be a novelist or screenwriter.

Entertainment is not a copywriter’s
bread and butter.

Getting action is.

So, you need people to
see hope in your sentences: ! What promises are you making to the reader in this sentence? What advantages will the reader gain? What pain will people avoid if they obey you?

In the opening to The
Dirty Little Secret to Seducing Readers, I wrote … ! “I’m guessing you want to write copy that sells. You want to write copy so irresistible it makes your readers scramble down the page — begging to do whatever it is you want when they’re done reading — whether it’s to make a purchase, send a donation, or join your newsletter.”

The promise is that you
can learn how to write in such a way people can’t resist your words. ! ! And that’s compelling for the right people.

Practice, Practice,
5
Practice.

Writing great sentences
takes work.

At first it may feel
mechanical, wooden. ! That’s okay.

The goal is to get
to a point where you unconsciously blend these elements so they feel natural in the sentence and can’t be pulled apart.

Sort of like when a
golf instructor stops your swing to adjust your mechanics.

That may feel mechanical and
unnatural, but eventually your swing becomes natural and he stops interrupting you.

Here are some exercises to
help you improve your sentence writing.

Exercise #1: Copy great sentences
! ! Hand-write 100 great first sentences. Memorize portions of great sales letters. Dissect killer lines.

Exercise #2: Concentrate on your
opening and closing paragraphs ! It’s arduous to consciously think about each and every sentence you write in a 500-word article. ! Concentrate your powers on the beginning and the ending.

Exercise #3: Labor over headlines
! ! Your headlines won’t be complete sentences, but they offer you an opportunity to focus closely on what you are writing.

Exercise #4: Labor over subject
lines ! ! Unlike headlines, you can use your subject line in an unconventional way.

“Thought of you while I
was at the steam bath.” ! Who’s NOT going to open that email up? ! ! And make sure to measure responses, adjust, and test more ideas.

Exercise #5: Labor over your
tweets ! ! Twitter is the perfect mechanism for perfecting your sentences. ! You are forced to say a lot in 140 characters. And you get feedback.

People either respond — or
they don’t.

Check for retweets, favorites, and
replies. ! And if you don’t get a response, try sharing it again at a different time.

Your Turn

Each sentence in a 500-word
article may not be great … ! ! but the more you practice the fundamentals, the closer you are going to get to perfection.

Don’t give up.

Keep plugging
away.

One sentence
at a time.

Click to learn more at
copyblogger.com