Seven Secrets to Supercharged Writing

July 21, 2011 - PRLog -- Here’s a simple demonstration of just how easy it can be to make everything you write more pleasing, potent and persuasive. It’s a five minute flipchart exercise. And on the flipchart we have the headline: A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in writing designed to persuade. So here’s tip one: make your writing active and personal. By saying things like ‘your writing’, for example. Write as one individual talking to another individual. So we make a change to the headline on the flipchart. It now reads: A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade. Second tip: use ‘hardwired words’. There are words that just seem to grab people’s attention, almost as if they’re hardwired in our brains. One example is the word ‘guaranteed’. Another is ‘secrets’. Which means the headline now becomes: A few secrets to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade – guaranteed. Third tip: be specific not generic. People like precision, facts, numbers, statistics. And the more tangible those are, the better. So instead of ‘Save up to 40%’, it’s more effective to say ‘Save as much as £65’. The headline gets another tweak: Seven secrets to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade – guaranteed. Fourth tip: talk about solutions, not problems. People buy solutions, they don’t like hearing about problems. In an anti-dandruff shampoo ad where they have one big picture, for instance, it’ll never be a picture of the problem. It’ll be a picture of someone with dazzling, flake-free hair. The headline gets another couple of tweaks: Seven secrets which can make your writing irresistible – guaranteed. Fifth tip: features tell, benefits sell. So, when you get a credit card, ‘Fraud protection’ is a feature, ‘You can feel safe when you shop online’ is the benefit. The changes we’ve made to our headline have already made it more benefit driven, but we can enhance it further. Firstly, by putting the definite article at the beginning. And secondly by being bolder and saying the benefits ‘will’ rather than ‘can’. We’ll also add an important, new benefit: that these secrets are ‘easy’. So now we have: The seven easy secrets which will make your writing irresistible – guaranteed. Sixth and penultimate tip: make your writing lyrical and lively. Use slightly unusual language, a little alliteration, a metaphor, onomatopoeia or a play on words to make it stand out. We can make the headline more alliterative by changing ‘easy’ to ‘simple’. And we can make it more distinctive by adding a punchy adjective: The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed. Seventh, final tip: ooze credibility. There are lots of ways of sounding more credible – such as quoting someone. Interestingly, it works even if your audience doesn’t know the person you’re quoting. In fact, it works even your quote doesn’t say who it’s from, but just looks like a quote. So, let’s add speech marks: ”The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed.” And there it is. From A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in writing designed to persuade to ”The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed” with a few advertising parlour tricks. These seven simple examples are taken from ‘25 Quick Wins’, a chapter in the book Copy. Righter. by Ian Atkinson. The book is a modern take on how to write great copy across print and digital media, and covers topics such as how to develop exciting concepts, how to work with a brand’s tone of voice and a fascinating section on how to use the psychology of persuasion in your writing, to get your reader to do whatever it is you want them to do. Copy. Righter. is published by LID Publishing and is available to order now from Amazon.

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