Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

Writers! Have you ever received feedback like these from fellow writers, colleagues, bosses, or clients?:

“That does not sound right to me.”

“Not on brand.”

“I don’t like it.”

I have. Mostly from my time working in digital agencies. The most memorable was this quip from a designer colleague: “The intern writes better than you.”

Well.

Feedback like these suffer from what Andy Maslen called “the sin of subjectivity“. It’s about me and my opinion (or my brand and what my brand is all about). That’s not helpful if the purpose of the copy is to market or sell something. When it comes to copywriting, the tastes of your fellow writers, colleagues, bosses, clients, and heck — YOU, too — should not be the main consideration.

What truly matters, then? It’s how often your audience does what you want them to do. So, according to Maslen, the one question you should ask when evaluating copy is:

Will it work?

Test to find out. In marketing, one of the most common tests is A/B tests or split tests. These involve sending out two or more variants of copy to segments of your audience, and then seeing which variant performs best. Some examples:

1. Which email headline leads to better open rates?
2. Does a landing page with a video embedded get more sign ups than one without a video?
3. Which call-to-action button copy entices more clicks?

You can also make informed decisions about a copy’s effectiveness by referring to your data and analytics. I used to run my previous company’s Facebook page. According to our Facebook analytics, posts with pictures and stories about the team enjoying themselves at work were ALWAYS more well-received than posts about industry news. So I made sure I included more of such happy posts when planning the Facebook post calendar.

If you run a blog, check out your site analytics and find out:

1. Which are the most popular posts?
2. What do they have in common? E.g. topic, incorporation of images/videos, length of stories
3. Can you create more of such posts since they are more well-received?

Finally, Colin Theriot recommended an iterative approach to fine-tuning copy. He said:

Real copy is: try your best at pitching whatever it is, publish that, then tweak and refine through testing.

It’s not: create a perfect offer as a final, highest converting draft through just trying really hard and knowing exactly what to see on your first try.

So many writers stress trying to create a big winner out of the gate. And I can relate – writing for launches, you have to. But most situations, it’s about getting the offer out there and seeing how the audience takes it. Adjust accordingly based on DATA and not OPINION.

Remember: don’t get too caught up with aesthetics. If your want to market or sell, then you can’t ignore the data or results you get from your audience. Or, as Maslen put it pithily:

Anyone who believes 50% of their job is something to do with art is no help to a client with a quarterly profits target to meet.

Find out what works best. Then iterate, iterate, iterate.

Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

If you’re a writer or an editor, you might have heard of the phrase “kill your darlings”, which is commonly attributed to William Faulkner. The idea is to not get too attached to your writing and have no qualms about axing bits that you like but are unnecessary.

Easier said than done!

It’s hard to put a distance between our work and us. Especially if we toiled over it for so long, or we are passionate about the subject matter! But remember: we write for our readers and not ourselves. When our writing is clear and smooth, it will have more impact.

Here are five tips and tricks I use to reduce self-editing angst and make the process more effective:

1. Take A Break

I always chill before plunging into the edits. A break does wonders in clearing a head full of writing. During my break, I’d freshen up by eating, drinking, or splashing water on my face. Then I can go back to my work and review it with a more critical eye.

I find returning to work the next day most effective, but if pressed for time, an hour could work.

2. Trick the Brain

Self-editing is hard because we develop personal attachments to our work as we write.

My solution: trick myself into thinking that I am editing someone else’s work! I just make the document look different, like so:

• Change the font size, colour, and type
• Print it out, so that I review the work on a different medium than the screen

Tricking the brain is handy especially when I am unable to break long enough to put sufficient mental distance between my work and I.

3. Read it Aloud

This is great for people with a propensity for verbosity. Like me!

I’ll know when something needs correcting if it sounds unwieldy and rambly when read aloud. If it sounds cumbersome when spoken, it probably reads cumbersome too.

4. What’s the Focus?

Every time I am reluctant to axe something I wrote, I ask questions like

• How does this relate to the key focus?
• If I took this out, will it make a difference?

Always have a clear and solid idea of The Point of writing, and refer back to it.

5. Use an App

In the absence of an editor colleague, I rely on Hemingway. Not the great writer himself (I wish!), but the Hemingway App.

The app aims to “(make) your writing bold and clear”. I just copy my writing, paste it into the text box, and then the app will highlight all the bits that need improving. My writing will also get an overall readability rating.

P.S No need to follow every suggestion made by the app of course! Sometimes we break the rules in order to bring across a point more powerfully (case in point: the last paragraph of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road). The Hemingway app is best used to improve overall readability.

 

Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

“The first draft of anything is shit” ~ Ernest Hemingway

So don’t feel too bad about your first drafts if they turn out unsatisfactory. They are meant to be raw and rough. Take it from a world-famous writer like Hemingway!

Accepting the unpolished nature of first drafts was one of the biggest challenges I faced as a writer. It’s still a challenge, actually. Just that I don’t find it as difficult as I did in the past. Even as I type this post, I can hear my inner editor trying to correct my writing. Oh, that description is inaccurate. That paragraph does not segue nicely with the preceding one. That sentence is too long and cumbersome.

Then I worked with an editor who told me that the point of first drafts is to just get the words out. Coalesce all those thoughts, ideas, and plans into a written whole. It doesn’t matter if that written whole is too unwieldy, too incoherent, too unfit to see the light of day. The polishing, shortening, and nip-tucking WILL be done. But only after I get those words out.

Understanding this was a critical step forward for me as a writer, because I found myself working faster after I cut down on agonizing over the best way to express myself as I write. I just keep reminding my inner editor to shut up until I am ready to edit. It’s not easy I tell you!

I also find it helpful to have a clear purpose for writing before I begin my first draft. You know that feeling of getting lost in your own words? That feeling of “what was I going to write about anyway, I don’t know where I am going with this?!” That sucky feeling causes my inner editor to go on red alert. I end up correcting and re-correcting myself every little step of the way. Having a clear purpose from the start helps the words flow out of my brain faster, even if they come out rubbish-y in raw form. Rubbish writing is still better than no writing at all; at least rubbish is something that I can work with.

Any other tips for first-drafting? My editor once told me about this writing app that works by automatically deleting everything you write if you hesitate a little too long. Whoa! Now that’s an extreme way of forcing those words out. Maybe I will try it someday …

Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

There’s this group that I follow on social media, called Brilliant Ads. These guys are dedicated to featuring “The most creative, unique, controversial, remarkable and powerful ads, signs and marketing related things from around the world”. Wonderful source of inspiration!

A few days ago, they featured this gem from Speedos:

“Armed and dangerless” – that’s a cute spoof of the popular expression “armed and dangerous”! But imagine removing the accompanying picture of the baby with inflatable armbands. “Armed and dangerless” would fall flat, wouldn’t it? The ad’s humour only works because its two main elements, the copy and the visual, were so right for each other.

There’s a lesson for content writers and copywriters here. Too often, we get caught up with hitting all the right notes in our writing. Have we highlighted the product benefits? What’s the call-to-action? Are we concise enough? We focus so much on the words we write, because, well, writing is our job.

But in the digital world, words don’t exist on their own on a blank white web page. There are many other elements as well, like visuals, audio, and information architecture. All of them must be congruous with each other and contribute to creating certain vibes or emotions in users. Yep, I’m talking about the wider user experience.

User experience is important because, when done right, users will be inspired to take the action we want them to. Speedo was going for lighthearted humour that might illicit some chuckles and perhaps sharing. An activist group might want to evoke outrage so as to rally people into action. A government might want to foster a sense of national pride in order to bring diverse communities together. Ultimately, the most successful brands don’t just sell products or services. They sell intangibles like aspirations, comfort, identity, and sense of community, for people to experience and buy into.

That’s the big picture that all of us digital creatives work towards.

Back to the task of writing. Don’t just think of the words in isolation; consider how it fits with its surrounding elements. It’s your responsibility to ask questions like:

• What are the accompanying images, if any?
• If your copy goes into a landing page, microsite, eNewsletter, etc. is there a mockup you can refer to?
• Who are the users, and what do we want them to feel and do?

Even if you’re writing long-form content like articles or blog posts, where the words rule, think of how you can write and structure it with the reader in mind.

• Are there walls of text that might be hard to read on a mobile phone?
• Can some of those words be presented in bullet points or lists?
• Do you even need to use so many words, might some parts be better packaged in infographic form?

You don’t just write. You’re helping to create experiences that people love and want to belong to. Isn’t that something to be proud of?

Image source: Brilliant Ads

Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

As a content marketer who’s worked on many marketing campaigns, I’ve been exposed to a huge variety of topics. If I’m lucky, I get to write about topics that are fun and interesting. More often than not, I am tasked to write about stuff that is niche, complex, or just … meh. These include:

• Enterprise Resource Planning
• Decorative laminates
• Satellite communication technology
• Enterprise storage solutions
• Application performance management solutions

However I feel about these, it’s still my job to deliver good copy on time. Here’s how I’d tackle them:

First, set judgments and labels aside. What’s “difficult” or “boring” to me, may be valuable or  downright fascinating to others. It’s not about me the writer anyway; it’s about my target audience and how what I am writing about could help them. That’s one of the golden rules of marketing.

Step two, know what the heck I’m writing about. Otherwise, my noob-ness will show in my writing, and that’s not gonna help me gain the trust of my target audience. I just have to understand the topic well enough to be able to write convincingly. Some shortcuts:

• Don’t be afraid to ask. Before writing, clarify anything I don’t understand with the client or the account manager/project manager, even if my questions are stupid questions. Better to look stupid before I do the task, than to write something based on mistaken assumptions and get flak for “missing the mark”.
• Ask the Big “G”. No, not God. Google. I can’t depend solely on the brief or instructions I get. Sometimes, I need to understand the context of the subject, or the people I write for, so I need to research online.
• Know how to speak my target audience’s lingo. If I have to use industry jargon in my copy, I make sure I use them correctly. For example, when I wrote copy for the decorative laminates producer, I read various interior design publications in order to learn how they describe room decor with terms like “accent” and “art deco”. For tech topics, I like Tech Target’s very comprehensive glossary. For finance topics, Investopedia is a great reference.

Lastly, I never skip edits. Figuring out a challenging topic can use up a lot of brain energy, so when I’m done, I take a break and then edit my work. Or I ask my colleagues to give my work a quick sanity check if they are free. When I get too deep into something, I might develop blind spots, so a fresh pair of eyes is helpful.

I admit I still feel nervous every time I get a challenging topic to write about. But y’know what, it can be fun too. Fashion, travel, food, pop culture, etc. are interesting but too many people write about these so it’s hard to get noticed. On the other hand, not many people can write about something as niche as application performance management solutions in an engaging way.

Whatever topic I encounter, there’s always a story to be told, so it’s up to me to dig deep enough to find it, and then help make the story come alive.

Writing Wednesdays is a series on writing tips and tricks that are published on Wednesdays. Not necessarily every Wednesday. But Wednesdays.

I freaked out over writing email copy the other day at work.

The task was to write a punchy email of about 50 words long short that would entice readers into clicking a link to find out more about the client’s product. Oh and the topic wasn’t an easy one; some niche subject in the field of enterprise technology.

It took several rounds of research, writing, rewriting, feedback, and hair-pulling, before I nailed the kind of short+snappy that the client wanted. I was so happy to submit the final copy … but also a little bummed that I did not think of writing it that way earlier.

***

I’ve always had a propensity for verbosity. Long-form writing never daunted me; I like that I have more “room” to talk about the things I know or care about. In university, I specialised in International Relations, and regularly wrote essays of about a few thousand words long throughout my four year degree. My longest ever was my Honours thesis of about 17,000 words long. Every time I got an essay to do, I ALWAYS had to pare down my word count substantially after the first draft.

So, when I started my content marketing career, one of the biggest learning curves I faced was learning how to write in a shorter and more concise way. It’s hard because:

1. You need to be able to understand the subject/idea well enough to distill it to The Point.
2. You need to convey The Point in an attention-grabbing, impactful way. Preferably with less words.

I don’t find it as challenging now that I am more experienced, but there’s still room for improvement. If you have the same tendency to write a lot, try the five tips below for crafting more succinct content. They worked pretty well for me.

1. Never skimp on research: Research the product, competitors, general industry, industry trends, and more — get as much understanding as needed to write convincingly.
2. Read PLENTY of good literature: Learn from pro writers. The International New York Times is a big part of my reading diet. Maybe I should try reading loads of Hemingway too.
3. Practice, feedback, practice, feedback: Good to have someone who can critique your work and point out unnecessary ramble. Or ruthlessly edit in front of you.
4. Develop a rich and wide vocabulary: You can minimise explanation or description if you know the right word to use e.g. instead of describing someone as “feeling very sad and hopeless”, just say “despair”.
5. Use active voice instead of passive voice: Sentences written in active voice tend to be more impactful and shorter.

***

Before I submitted the finalised email to my boss, my colleague who edited my work said “Look, this short little email may appear easy enough for a child to do. Huh! It’s not just about understanding the topic and client well enough. You also need to strike the right tone, pick the most impactful words, present the most relevant data and facts, etc. Never underestimate the research, thought, and care needed to pull off an email that inspires people to find out more.”

I hope to write like her some day.

Thank you, J.

Image source: Lum3n.com @ Pexels