What are your pet pedant peeves?

What grammar Nazi laws annoy you the most? Please comment. Mine’s the one that forbids me to start a sentence with a conjunction. But that’s a whole nother story… ;-)

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I wouldn’t say it happens all the time, but enough to make me wonder. After pointing to something in my copywriting portfolio and saying, “Write it in that style”, Joe Client proceeds to rip out many of the bits that probably drew him to the piece in the first place (albeit subconsciously). I suspect if you’re a blogger with a boss who reviews your posts before publishing, it’s happened to you too.

Why all the fuss? I’d always considered most of these devices kinda formal. I actually avoid them in more casual copy. I know “What’s more” contains a contraction, but c’mon! That alone surely doesn’t make it casual.

So I asked around on Twitter, and some of my copywriter buddies were of much the same opinion as me: it’s an affront to what some clients consider professional. (Here’s @angie1234p’s answer, @Skigod’s answer and @angusgmelb’s answer.)

But that still doesn’t tell me why! The real why. Why do some people think these devices are an affront to professionalism?

Determined to get to the bottom of it, I had a good think about it on my run yesterday. And I came to a conclusion. Here it is…

Some people are so used to formal copy being hard to read, that they think anything easy to read must be informal.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But I reckon I’m onto something, and I have a justification for the theory. Unfortunately, if you wanna hear it, you’ll have to sit through a bit of grammar. But I promise I’ll make it as pain-free as possible!

“What’s more” from a copywriting perspective

“What’s more” and co. are great for linking sentences to each other. They make for a bump-free read, and, in Joseph Sugarman’s words, grease the slippery slide leading to conversion. I talked more about this in a previous post: A quick tip for keeping your readers on your copywriting slippery slide.

“What’s more” from a grammar perspective

“What’s more” and its greasy companions are all examples of transitional devices (or ‘linkers’ or ‘transition words’). They connect ideas to provide coherence.

“Unless readers can move easily from one thought to another, they will surely find something else to read or turn on the television.” (Capital Community College Foundation’s Guide to Grammar & Writing)

Extra Reading: Some great descriptions and examples at:

• Wikipedia
• Capital Community College Foundation’s Guide to Grammar & Writing
• ESLProf.com

Transitional devices can be formal or informal

The above readings list a couple of hundred other examples of transitional devices. If you take a look, you’ll notice they vary in formality. Some are really formal, like “moreover” and “notwithstanding”, while some are just your plain old garden variety conjunctions, like “and” and “but”.

This got me thinking. If some reviewers question both the formal and the informal transitional devices (I don’t need to remind you about the “Never start a sentence with a conjunction” reviewer), perhaps formality’s not the real issue. Perhaps it’s the use of the transitional device itself. ANY transitional device.

Formal writing often doesn’t use transitional devices

Check out any copyright notice or privacy policy. Or any boring old prospectus. Or virtually any government document. You’ll notice few – if any – transitional devices. (Don’t ask me why!)

I did a quick search. These are (honestly) the first documents I found. And whatdyaknow?! A real shortage of transitional devices.

• Copyright notice
• Privacy policy
• Prospectus (PDF)
• Government document

Now remember, these are the documents that most copywriting clients and blog reviewers think when they think formal.

Some reviewers just don’t like anything that greases the slippery slide

So I’ve come to the conclusion that some reviewers consider transitional devices informal, simply because they’re not used in stereotypical formal writing. Regardless of whether the device itself is actually informal. Put another way, some reviewers find anything that greases the copywriting slope kinda confronting.

Strange eh?

What do you think?

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Facebook Note Removes British Juror from Trial

WHO removed her?! Unless Facebook has really extended its reach recently, I’m pretty sure IT didn’t remove the juror. I think it’s far more likely a judge did that!

The problem with this headline is that it’s written in the active voice but has no ‘Actor’. The Actor is the person or thing that actually does something. Clearly that’s the judge, here, not the Facebook note.

So how does a copywriter make such a fundamental error? Probably because of a conflict between a grammar rule and a usability rule. The rules?

1. Grammar rule: Headlines should be active
2. Usability rule: Make the first two words count

So why the conflict?

Let me explain. The conventional grammarian wisdom says that headlines should be in the form:

Actor does X to Object

Now in the Facebook story, the Actor is clearly the judge and the Object is clearly the juror. Facebook didn’t DO nothin’! (Kinda ironic, huh?)

But if we followed this rule, we’d end up with:

“Judge Removes British Juror from Trial for Posting Facebook Note”
or
“Judge Removes Juror from Trial Because of Facebook Note.”

Too long, right?

What’s more, what would online visitors see if they were just scanning with the typical F-pattern? Probably just:

“Judge Removes”
or
“Judge Removes British”
or
“Judge Removes Juror”

In a legal publication that’d be fine, but in ‘Marketing Pilgrim’, the key subject is Facebook. And in the Active voice construction above, Facebook is shunted right to the end.

As you can see, the copywriter (or copy-editor) is in a bit of a bind.

Their solution? Simply bung Facebook in at the start of the sentence, in place of the Actor, and hope everyone understands what you mean! In order to avoid breaking a usability rule, they’ve broken a grammar rule, making their headline a muddy mess.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that grammar’s more important than usability. To the contrary. I believe the only solution WAS to break a grammar rule. Just not the one they broke.

I think the headline should have read something like this.

“Facebook Juror Removed from Trial”

Yes, I know it’s passive (Object has X done to it), and worse yet, there’s no Actor, but at least it gets the eye-candy up front, and it’s direct and easy to understand.

The reality is that sometimes, passive headlines just work better. Especially online. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe leading web usability specialist, Jakob Nielsen:

“Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations.” (Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings)

Wrap up

The truth is, most readers probably COULD understand the Facebook headline in its current form… if they tried hard enough. But headlines are like ads; if they make the audience work, they usually fail.

The moral to this story? If you’re going to break a rule, break the right one. The one that’ll simply offend a few prescriptive grammarians, not the one that’ll stop readers from clicking through.

Happy copywriting!

PS. What do you think the headline SHOULD have been? Please comment your suggestions.

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Specifically, she examined the effect of linking to the Home page using keyword rich anchor text. These results are very instructive (thanks Ann!), and they make a lot of sense. Google is right to penalize sites with over-optimized internal links. Here’s why…

When a visitor first arrives at your site, one of the first things they’re gonna try and do is find the Home page. (Jakob Nielsen: Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability) And when they do, they’ll look for a link, menu or button that says “Home” (or they look for a logo at the top left of the page). They won’t look for a link that says, “Computer Spare Parts Home” or “SEO Copywriter Home” or “Red Tennis Shoes Home.”

So by optimizing links to your Home page, you’re certainly not improving usability. Your optimization is purely an SEO tactic with no visitor benefit. (Indeed, if you replace all straight “Home” links with optimized links, you’d be actively undermining usability.)

Why should this affect your ranking? Simple. Google wants quality, helpful sites in its SERPs. If you make your site less usable, that’s not gonna reflect well on Google, so it makes perfect sense that your ranking will drop as a result.

I hate to say it (well… err… no, actually, I don’t ;-)), but Ann’s results reinforce what good SEO copywriters have been saying for years: “never sacrifice readability for searchability.” It’s also what Google’s been saying all along.

And, although Ann’s results relate to Home page links only, the usability message (and maybe even the penalty) applies to all links. Don’t over-optimize them. Here’s just a few reasons why:

1. 79% of users scan; only 16% read word-by-word. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
2. People look for links when scanning a page. (Nielsen: How Users Read on the Web)
3. Concise copy is 58% more usable, and scannable copy is 47% more usable. (Nielsen: Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web). Over-optimizing links makes them both less concise and less scannable.
4. Low-literacy visitors don’t scan effectively. They tend to read word-for-word. And if the text gets to dense, they look for the next link, often skipping important info in the process. If that link is also dense, they’re more likely to skip it too, resulting in more info skipped. (Nielsen: Lower-Literacy Users)
5. The first two words of scannable items, like links, are vital, because they’re often all the visitor sees. They should be words that carry the most information. (Nielson: Passive Voice Is Redeemed For Web Headings, Writing Style for Print vs. Web and Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005) And that generally won’t be your keywords. In most cases, the visitor is already on a page related to your keywords. Starting a link with those same keywords really only tells visitors that the destination page is related to the current page. It doesn’t tell them anything notable about the destination page, so they can decide whether they want to read it. Knowing that it’s related to the current page isn’t enough.
6. People love clicking on links; it’s the Internet’s most used feature. (Harald Weinreich, Hartmut Obendorf, Eelco Herder, and Matthias Mayer: Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use) So you want to make it easy for them to do what they like, and to find what they’re looking for when they do it.

Maybe Google is already taking all of these usability issues into account, maybe it’s not. One thing’s certain though: your visitors sure are!

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Now, one of the copywriting tactics that Sugarman discusses for ‘greasing’ the slippery slide, is what he calls ‘seeds of curiosity’. He often ends his paragraphs with things like, “But there’s more” or “So read on” or “Let me explain.” These are explicit meaning-based cues that encourage the reader down the slide. But they’re not the only way to create momentum.

In fact, when you’re dealing with sophisticated audiences, explicit cues aren’t always the best approach. Sophisticated audiences can be quite sensitive to explicit greasing techniques. And they don’t always like being greased; it can make them feel like someone’s trying to sell them steak knives!

So sometimes style-based cues – not meaning-based cues – are what’s required. What do I mean by style-based cues? Well, I’ve used three of them already, in just four paragraphs. “Now” links para two back to para one, “In fact” links para three back to para two, and “So” links para four back to para three.

I could TRY to explain why these two elements work, or how they work, but I’d probably fail. I’m a copywriter, not a grammarian! An easier – and much more effective – way is for you to read the first four paragraphs WITHOUT “Now”, “In fact” and “So”. Read them out aloud. I guarantee you’ll find it a bumpier ride.

Of course, there are plenty more where they came from. Try a few of these on for size:

• “What’s more”
• “Nevertheless”
• “Of course”
• “Needless to say”
• “And”
• “But”
• “Still”
• “Importantly”
• “Just as importantly”
• “Additionally”
• “Furthermore”
• “No matter which”

These are all tactics that successful copywriters use daily. And they’re just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Should be enough to see you through all but the longest pieces of copy!

In coming posts, I’ll be discussing additional ways to keep readers on your copywriting slippery slide. So stay tuned. In fact, why not subscribe?!

Please comment.

Happy copywriting!

PS. All of this applies to blog copywriting too!

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I’ve lost count of the number of freelancers who’ve sent me samples chock-full of things like “we will” and “you are” and “we are”. Even fairly conservative audiences like to read the way they speak (within limits). There’s nothing wrong with a bit of “we’ll” or “you’re” or “we’re”.

In fact, when editing freelancer work, I’ve found that introducing more contractions is all that’s required to transform something jerky-sounding into something smooth and easy-to-read.

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As you’ve probably already guessed from my headline, Divine Write has launched a copywriting forum. It’ll interest copywriters, business owners, marketing managers and webmasters most, but ‘regular’ writers will also find it useful (I hope). Current forums include:

• General copywriting
• SEO copywriting
• Web copywriting (non SEO)
• Direct Marketing (DM) copywriting
• Advertising copywriting
• TV, print & radio copywriting.
• Grammar, punctuation, etc.
• Copyright of copywriting
• Copywriting as a career
• Critique my Copy

You can register by clicking the ‘Register’ link at the top of the main page. Hope to see you there!

Anyway, that’s it for today.

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The easiest way to do it is to be specific. (In fact, in most cases, this is the only rule you’ll need to follow.) As you write every sentence, ask yourself, “Could I be more specific?”  For example, don’t just say “our computers” or “our products”; ask yourself if you can get away with saying “our cheap second hand computers” (assuming, of course, that that’s your keyword phrase). Similarly, don’t say things like “with our help”; instead, say “with the help of our cheap second hand computers”. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find there are more than enough opportunities to replace a generic term with your keyword phrase.

Obviously, there’s a bit of an art to it. Sometimes it ends up just sounding like you’re repeating your keyword phrase over and over again. If this happens, you may just need to restructure the sentence or paragraph.

The most important thing to remember is, your site reflects the quality of your product or service. If your site is hard to read, people will infer a lot about your offering… Readability is all-important to visitors. And after all, it’s the visitors who buy your product or service, not the search engines.

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