In the last post, Back to school brings me back to basics, I discussed the importance of putting aside some time to re-read and re-learn past teachings in our particular areas of expertise. And since my area is copywriting and marketing, I tend to focus on the core fundamentals of writing to sell.
The interesting thing about the fundamentals of writing to sell is that they sometimes conflict with the standard fundamentals of writing (the grammar and punctuation rules) that we have all learned throughout the years.
When writing to sell, it is often ok to break some of the grammar rules we have all come to know and love. I am not talking about typos or jarring mistakes or anything that confuses the message as these are always no-nos.
Some examples of this acceptable rule-bending I am referring to are:
- Opting for a sentence fragment vs. a full sentence, maybe in the form of a question in a headline or a subhead. This is a big one – I use a lot of fragments and Microsoft Word will almsot always flag these. Be bold and know you are generally fine doing this.
- Opting to use slang or industry jargon when it makes more sense than a formal explanation. Along with this goes the “write like you would talk” advice that almost always trumps the “write like you are spekaing formal English” advice.
- Going with different punctuations like the ….(ellipsis) or ending sentences with prepositions.
I always find it is more important to be consistent in style than to always be by-the-book right.
Tags: copywriting, marketing, writing, writing to sell
