There’s a red pen in here somewhere…
Hopefully after last week’s post, you’ve had a look through your writing and taken a big, red pen to any superfluous words.
This time, I’m not highlighting errors as such, but easy ways to simplify the language you use in your marketing copy.
Many of us have a tendency to make everything more long winded than it needs to be – I confess I’ve fallen into that trap myself many times in the past!
We think it makes us sound more intelligent, or our writing more impressive. It doesn’t. If anything, it can make us sound pretentious and it lessens the impact of the message we’re trying to convey. And that’s when our readers (or rather, our customers) switch off.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.
‘Investigators arrived at the conclusion…’ instead of ‘Investigators concluded…’
Option 1 adds to your word count and makes you sound more wordy, more intelligent, right?
Wrong.
Your high school English teacher didn’t fall for that tactic and your customers won’t either.
Here are a few examples of how to keep things simple for greater impact.
‘at the present time’ replace with ‘now’
‘a large percentage of‘ replace with ‘many‘
‘by virtue of the fact that‘ replace with ‘because’
‘in spite of the fact that’ replace with ‘despite’
‘owing to the fact that’ replace with ‘because’
‘in the event that’ replace with ‘if’
‘prior to’ replace with ‘before’
You get the idea.
Always remember, if the word doesn’t add anything to the meaning of your sentence, give it the chop.
And if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, or you just don’t know where to start, give me a shout. I live for this stuff!
