How To Clean Up Copy

This is a little lesson my father taught me about how to clean up copy so it flows better. The lesson has been improved greatly by adding a few more steps to the procedure.

The first rule of cleaning up any copy is to…

Read It Out Loud!

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you will spot where the writing doesn’t flow, by simply rereading it. It just isn’t the same as reading aloud. When we reread our own words, we skip over hiccups in the flow and keep on reading. If you read the same piece of copy aloud, it becomes impossible not to find the places where the copy no longer flows well.

Copy flow is super important because…

People Value

Their Reading Time

Too Much

If you ask someone to take five minutes to watch a video, you can often get them to agree and start watching it right then and there.

When you ask someone to take a few minutes to read something, they often put it off and say things like I’ll read it over later while I am at lunch.

Reading causes eye fatigue and takes a modicum of focus. Whereas people will volunteer to waste a half hour checking out almost any video.

And, it is getting worse. Whole generations of people are giving up reading novels for entertainment, like people gave up reading papers for news.

Since people have such a natural aversion to reading anything lengthy, a hiccup in the flow of the copy, may make them decide to come back to it later, which means they gave up.

If embarrassment stops you from reading aloud, do it while you are alone or tell the people you wish to read it to, it's an exercise taught to you by the marketing legend Gary C. Halbert.

To really hammer the point home, it is better if I clean up some copy which is written by someone else and someone good at writing.

The following was published on the website www.ezinearticles.com and to keep everything on topic we will use a sample from the marketing section.

To be clear, this article was chosen as a writing sample because it could easily be made to flow better and it was written and edited by a professional. I am not critiquing it, or in any way disparaging his work.

Here is the beginning of the article:

As you can see….after reading this aloud just once, I identified seven spots where the flow was not very smooth. Again, these hiccups in the flow are not easy to spot unless you read the copy out loud.

We will discuss how to fix those hiccups throughout the rest of this lesson.

The next step in cleaning up your copy is to…

Perform A “THAT” Hunt

Basically, we all use the word “that” too often in writing. We use it as a crutch to stitch together clauses. In almost every instance, the writing will flow better, read more professionally and have more impact, when we remove what my father called, superfluous “that”s.

After you have been doing this a while, you naturally begin to avoid using the word that while writing but don’t try to avoid using it in your first drafts.

Never do a “that” hunt before you finish writing the first draft. When writing your first draft, you want the ideas and the words to flow out of you uninterrupted. Don’t waste precious creative juices worrying about instances where you used the word that. This step should always come after all your words are on the paper/screen.

Since I have been doing a 'that' hunt for decades, it'll be easier (and more clear) if I show you how to do it using the sample article from above.

Here is the beginning of the article again with all of the “that”s highlighted:

Instead of:

In today's highly competitive marketplace, you are faced with the daily challenges that threats to steal your customers and squeeze your profits.

We will simply change the word from “that” to “which.”

Here are the next few instances:

While there are a number of critical marketing strategies that every successful business owner can use to insure success, there are ten that are the most important.

This time we will remove those pesky “that”s altogether and this will mean we have to make a few small changes.

It now reads:

There are a number of critical marketing strategies every successful business owner can use to insure success. Ten of them are the most important.

Lastly, we will change:

1) Who you are and what it is that makes your business special and unique.

Let’s do a removal on this one too. Now it reads:

1)Who you are and what makes your business special and unique.

The next step is to hunt down pronouns like I, it, him, them etc.

Let us start with the most important pronoun to hunt down which is “I” This pronoun is the most important to hunt down because readers hate hearing about the author unless it is negative news.

People love to read things like “I was beat up in jail and worried about survival” but they never want to read “I was cruising down the street in my Ferrari.”

It is too easy to sound self absorbed and put people off by talking about yourself.

You can and should use “I” when you are weaving your story like so, “I was like you, I was broke, living out of my car.” This is when you are relating to your reader in a way he can identify with.

As your tale of woe turns into a tale of triumph you slowly shift to using “you” instead of “I.”

An example would be “I was shaking in fear with stage fright, but then I remembered a little trick you or anyone else could use to never feel nervous again.

The writer is often relating his own experiences and or talking to the reader so it is very natural to say things like “first I want to”

Many times you can just remove the entire clause and the copy will be better.

In our example one paragraph reads:

Some are very serious and must be corrected immediately or will cause dangerous consequences for your business. I want to share three of them with you right now. By eliminating these errors from your business, you can literally leapfrog your competitors and dramatically impact your sales and profits.

After removing the highlighted portion it is shorter which is good and it reads better

Some are very serious and must be corrected immediately or will cause dangerous consequences for your business. By eliminating these errors from your business, you can literally leapfrog your competitors and dramatically impact your sales and profits.

Notice we did not remove the instance where he mentioned he was a consultant. One of the points of writing this article is to show the world he is a professional.

Sometimes you have to speak about yourself to explain or to prove your credibility to the reader.

Just Don’t Do It
When You Don’t Have To

When appropriate, change the word “I” to “We” or remove them altogether as WE have done in this article.

Next, find out where the copy would be more clear if you dropped the pronoun and write out exactly what the pronoun refers to.

For example, earlier we wrote:

Let’s start with the most important one.

This becomes much more clear if we drop the word “one” and spell out what we are talking about.

Now it reads:

Let’s start with the most important pronoun to hunt down.

Another trick to cleaning up copy, is to break up long sentences when possible. Writers tend to feel sentences should be a certain length. However, to the reader, shorter is better.

Sentences May Be Too Long,
But Never Too Short!

We already used this trick with one of the sentences we reworked.

We changed:

While there are a number of critical marketing strategies that every successful business owner can use to insure success, there are ten that are the most important .

The new copy reads:

There are a number of critical marketing strategies every successful business owner can use to insure success. Ten of them are the most important.

The same principle applies to paragraphs.

Keep Paragraphs Under 5 Sentences if the copy is printed on paper and less if it is online. Many of us will click off a page or put a letter down the second we see it looks like a long read.

The readers mind registers the fact the next paragraph is short and if you want to check it out, it won’t take long.

You ALWAYS want the reader to view your copy as something easy and quick to read!

This is especially good for copy online, because the reader can’t see if the copy is 2 pages or 200 pages without scrolling down.

If the reader finds reading the first screen full of copy to be very easy and she thinks the next paragraph doesn’t start their journey into the Encyclopedia Britannica, they will continue to read on.

The books which stick out in our minds as really long all sucked. The better the writing is the less we want it to end.

In my mind, one of the longest books I ever read was “The Old Man In The Sea” by Hemmingway.

But I like many people finished it because I kept figuring this book is so small it couldn’t take me too long before I’d finish it.

WRONG!

It was a great lesson in relativity of time.

To get readers to view your copy as easy to read is simple….

Break Up Your Copy

With Sub Heads

Like This One!

Shoot for two or more per page.

Just find the potent part of a few paragraphs and turn them into mini headlines.

Whenever you under line a word or two, bold something, use bullets, ellipses or dashes you create what my dad calls eye relief.

You want to underline power words and use bold where there should be emphasis.

By the way, do this after the copy is written. Go ahead and underline what you want to emphasize while writing, but you should always go back and add more eye relief when the writing is finished.

This is part of the polishing process.

Also, use a few two-word paragraphs like we have in this report. My dad often used a one word paragraph and I’ll use it now because it is a good place for it.

Onward.

Hunt down qualifiers. Qualified words like "almost", "mostly" and "often" weaken the strength of what you are saying. Marketers often use qualifiers to keep it legal but we do it too much.

Which of the following sentences sounds better?

Overuse of the word “that” often destroys the flow of copy.

Or..

Overuse of the word “that” destroys the flow of copy.

In fact the best of all is:

Overuse of the word “that” always destroys copy flow.

Hunt down the $5 words.

My audience is made up of articulate and very literate people like you. It would never be good to use words like modicum in marketing.

Even if the target audience is very educated, you want to avoid using any words which stand out.

Good Writing Creates

Effortless Reading!

You don’t want your reader to pause because of a word they don’t know or to impress them. You never want your audience to think about your writing style at all.

Engaging in circumlocution and prolixity hones ones acumen for linguistics but is rarely pedantic for the reader and often perceived as disport or worse arrogance.

My father’s SAT scores for vocabulary were off the chart, but just by reading his ads, you would never know it.

Even with novels, the real page turners tell a great story rather than just tell a story well.

My last writing tip is on the use of commas. Use commas whenever the reader needs to take a quick pause to get the meaning straight.

Never worry about the grammatically correct use of commas. Worry about copy flow instead. Use commas wherever and whenever you need them. You will find most of the best places to put them, after reading your copy aloud.

Using semicolons when appropriate is great in school, but they should almost be banned from all forms of marketing, because they interrupt the flow of copy. Rewrite the paragraph and use commas instead

When lawyers DON”T want you to read something like a disclaimer, they place all the copy in a single block of capital letters, with no paragraph breaks or indents.

If you want your copy to be read you need to do the opposite.

We already covered breaking up paragraphs but this also means don’t use all caps ever! It is okay to capitalize one or two words for emphasis, but a whole sentence is made harder to read if you capitalize every letter.

Which of the following is easier to read?:

NOT HAVING A STRATEGIC MARKETING POSITION AND ARTICULATING IT CLEARLY

Not Having A Strategic Marketing Position And Articulating It Clearly

We were even able to increase the font size because of the change.

Find where you were lazy.

Spell out acronyms the first two times you use them in your writing. In our sample SMP was used once without an explanation. It causes the reader (me) to look up and find the connection in the subhead.

Again, it is correct, but it could flow better. Reread the entire piece aloud again and you will see how it now flows much more smoothly after these exercises.

Again, this author is good. He isn’t wishy washy which is great. He never comes off as egotistical or too arrogant by speaking of himself too often.

My own writing needs to be reworked several times to look as good as our sample was before we did anything to improve it.

Here endeth the lesson.

Peace,
Bond

PS In the next letter I will start showing you how ANYONE can write EFFECTIVE ads like a world-class copywriter.