3 child’s-play writing rules for winning customer trust
5-minute read • 690 words
Today’s the birthday of legendary Sheffield musician Jarvis Cocker, and I’ve got an opinion to share:
The songs Jarvis made with his band Pulp, like ‘Common People’ and ‘Disco 2000’, are amazing, but they aren’t his best work.
Nope, in my view the greatest thing Mr Cocker’s ever written isn’t even a song. It’s a poem.
In 2005, Jarvis published ‘Getting Trashed on Cider’ for the Steel City’s annual ‘Off The Shelf’ literary festival. Here it is:
Within these walls
the future may
be being forged
Or maybe Jez is getting trashed
on cider
But when you melt
you become the shape
of your surroundings:
Your horizons
Become wider.
Don’t they teach
you no brains
at that school?
– Jarvis Cocker
What do you reckon? I like how the poem combines dramatic phrases with the sort of slang Jarvis probably heard growing up in the Intake area. But one part in particular really got me thinking…
I loved school, or “that school”, as Mr Cocker calls it. In fact, I went to the same school as Jarvis, although the 23-year age gap between us meant we didn’t share any classes. But there’s one thing about school I hate:
The way you’re taught to write in school is wrong.
Loads of the lessons you learn in English class are out of date. Even worse, you’re often told not to do things that are actually perfectly fine. And there are two key reasons why this is important for small business owners:
If your writing is clear, it’ll be easier to understand, which means you’ll get more people interested in what you’re saying about your business. And when you write the way your customers talk, you win their trust quicker and easier.
You can’t afford to miss any opportunity to reach more customers faster, but if you follow every writing instruction you were given in school, you might. So use these simple copywriting rules instead, and you’ll get better results nearly every time.
3 child’s-play writing rules for winning customer trust
You are allowed to start sentences with ‘And’, ‘But’, and ‘So’.
If you visit any news website or pick up any magazine, you’ll notice the articles are easy to read. And you probably can’t figure out why. But there’s a simple explanation.
Did you find anything wrong with the paragraph above? A teacher might have, but I bet you didn’t, and that’s what counts. Magazines and newspapers often start sentences with coordinators such as ‘But’ and ‘And’, like in the previous paragraph, so you can use them too.
Onwards.
You should only put one space after a full stop, not two.
Look at this paragraph. Something seems a little weird about it. You probably can’t quite put your finger on why. It’s like it belongs in an old book. How come?
People used to write with typewriters, which added equal-sized gaps around each letter. That meant words looked stretched out, so we needed two spaces after a full stop to make the beginning of a new sentence clearer. Today, computers squish thin letters like ‘i’ and ‘j’ closer to other ones, so a single space after a full stop is plenty.
One more to go…
You can often remove ‘that’ without changing the meaning of a sentence.
Read these two bullet points out loud:
Let her know that you love her and that she means the world to you.
Let her know you love her and she means the world to you.
(Source: Writer’s Digest)
They’re both correct, although in school you’d be told otherwise. But the second one feels more like something people today would actually say, and that’s the clincher. Read your writing out loud, and if it sounds like you could take ‘that’ out of a sentence, do it.
No doubt when Jarvis Cocker was a pupil at The City School, he was given the same outdated writing advice many other schoolkids have had. But Jarvis found success when he stopped following those rules and did something else instead:
Write the way people speak.
Even if the products and services you’re writing about aren’t pop songs or poems, that’s one lesson worth remembering. Class dismissed.
Until next time,
Adam
