Forum Moderators: not2easy
Veteran direct marketer Herschell Gordon Lewis has written about a technique he calls "Word Expansion [directmag.com]" that goes the other way - once you've trimmed all the fat, then you start puffing things back up! A solid article from Direct Magazine.
Word expansion doesn't affect either veracity or fact. That's both the beauty of it and the power of it.Notice the extra word in the previous sentence? Without “both,” a fragment of power vanishes.
I saw Gordon Herschell Lewis in a Hong Kong conference 15 years ago. I read many of his books after as he seems to be able to avoid the Amercianist Direct marketing spin and just gave solid advice on copywriting. I beleive copywriting for the Web is now (not so much for the early Web era) getting closer and closer (thx to google for the most part) to traditional principles of good copy.
I would recommend that Web copywriters give the old man a good read. To me it makes much more sense than 99% of the Web-specific SEO/copy writing "gurus" of late.
If a human gets rid of every ounce of fat in his or her body, that person will become very ill and possibly die. So it is with writing for the web: you want to get rid of stuff which weighs down your text with irrelevant nonsense, making it hard to find the actual content -- but you don't want to cut out so much that the result is dry, thin and lifeless. It's a skill, and unfortunately for many, it's an instinctive skill that is next to impossible to teach.
Coincindentally, I'm involved in creating a sort of tutorial site which covers this kind of thing amongst many other subjects. Lesson 12 is a page and a half of irrelevant rubbish entitled "Too much text". Lesson 13 is entitled "Too little text", and consists of just one sentence: "Too little text is also bad."
The best advice I received was from an old-school prof, he said, "Spend as much time reading as you spend writing. Make sure to read the trash as well as the classics and when you can determine which classics are trash, you've won through half the battle. Remember that William Strunk only wrote one book that anyone remembers and aspire to greater things".
If you want to see an alternative to Strunk and White, pick up a copy of Adios, Strunk & White, by Gary and Glynis Hoffman. Writing style, like language is dynamic. Elements of style, while still useful, is dated.
The other half of the battle? Write better trash than most classics contain. :)
DG
I also really like "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It's so well written it's actually fun to read! :)
(Don't worry, the book wasn't the catalyst that caused the friendship to decline ...) :)
Tedster thank you for your advise about Herschell Gordon Lewis an inspirational book.
Good Copy that sells is something is so easy to overlook in these “more and more content” driven days. Higher conversion of visitors is what it is about, Traffic without sales is worth zip.
A recent tidbit for me from his "On the Art of Writing Copy":
The Second Great Law:
Cleverness for the sake of cleverness may well be a liability.
The cleverness bug is nearly epidemic in ALL current US advertising. Visual cleverness. Playing with words, metaphors, comparisons and slogans until any important message is lost - and in the worst cases, the product itself is almost totally obscured.
Lewis states his "Umbrella Rule" ---Your copy must succeeed if it has these three ingredients:
1. clarity
2. benefit
3. credibility
Strunk and White is a fast read and probably a big help to the novice. I would recommend it to those who I thought needed to begin somewhere, anywhere - just read a book on writing mostest better gooder.
:-)
I learned two things about writing.
1. Write what you mean and mean what you write and
2. Murder your darlings.
The first one is pretty straightforward. In the world of writing for the web use quality words and use them wisely. Don't sprinkle them around just for the sake of having more of them on the page.
The second requires a good inner ear. When you write, you sometimes create a perfect phrase or paragraph, or even a page. Lovely and delicious. But when you see it in context along with the rest of what you've written, it appears as a bolder in the middle of a river - stubborn, unmoving, and so resistent to the flow. Murder it. Dig it up. Save it if you must but have the guts to realize it doesn't belong and toss it.
-I don't remember who said this but I like it.
If I only had more time I could say it with fewer words.
"If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter."
-Mark Twain
Funny. I just realized that I have a "swipe" file right here with articles from HGL and great pages ripped out of print catalogs but I have nothing similar for great web copy.
Two words worth millions to anyone that can profit from improved copywriting....
Swipe File
Every professional copywriter has an enormous one.
I know one phenomenally successful online and offline direct marketing master that has an entire room filled with diligently cross-indexed files of outstanding copy for virtually every market and product imaginable.
