Trim trim trim.
Like they do to those poor sentences at the mercy of extended ears who can’t keep the first sentences intact and subject them to unintended fallacy.
Take this one for instance:
We take immense pride in launching our brand-new book agency. Our agency has been heralded by the greatest decision makers of this century, and we want to congratulate all the avid readers who have made our agency a living legend.
We are looking to implement an idea that will take any book and turn it into a snippet of all the useful wordings that’s meant to be absorbed by the readers who have the faintest of attention spans.
You start reading. ”We take immense pride …. blah blah blah”.
That’s where I stopped.
People like to read short, skimmable headlines about the company. They won’t read, but you’ll have to. Let’s give it to them — but only after a short trim.
Brand-new book agency run by the greatest readers and people of the century.
We take books and turn them into useful snippets for anyone to read.
That was quite a trim!
Here’s how to give it another - without making it bald.
Nugget books for everyone, by our wisest century men.
Now that seems about the right amount of readability.
Let’s try another one:
To understand copywriting, you must first understand the art of advertising and marketing. It needs you to have a small audience to test it on, a big audience to spread the word, and the best audience to know how good it is.
Keep it short, and you’ll get the best of the audience’s hearts.
If you’re thinking, “Oh boy, ‘tis a tough one!” — let me show you how.
In every piece of writing in the first draft, you encounter layers of writing. Compare that to the milk you drink. It has
- the part where it’s all fat
- the part which you drink without choking on the milk fat
Our goal is to keep whatever matters for our copy, and trim the fat.
The words which matter in the first draft are copywriting, advertising, marketing, audience, best, short, heart.
See what we did?
We ignored the words which we could, such as “To understand”, “you must first understand the”, “it needs you to have”.
The best of the world’s ads are short.