Copywriting: How to Improve Your Writing Skills

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Read Carefully

A great writer is, first and foremost, a great reader.

By reading, you constantly come into contact with writing styles that might otherwise take you years to discover on your own.

You see how another author introduces a concept without boring the reader, and you notice how they manage to explain something difficult without sounding like a professor.

Over time, some of these techniques become part of the way you write and help you develop a greater sensitivity to language.

I recommend reading not only essays and articles, but plenty of fiction as well.

Pick up a successful novel in a genre you enjoy and start reading it through the eyes of a writer.

It may sound strange if your goal is to write about business, but fiction can teach you how to hold someone's attention better than almost any other source.

This doesn't mean a business text has to become a novel, but if you need to tell the story of how your company was founded, for example, understanding storytelling is extremely useful if you want to keep your reader from dying of boredom.

What does it mean to read through the eyes of a writer?

When you come across a passage that strikes you, ask yourself what it made you feel, then try to understand how the author created that effect.

One very simple technique is to mentally modify the passage: imagine replacing one word with a more generic one.

If the sentence loses its power, you've discovered that the original word was doing important work.

Then try breaking up a long sentence.

If the passage loses its rhythm, its length was serving a purpose.

You can also do the opposite with two short sentences.

For example, take "The door opened. Nobody moved." and turn it into "The door opened, but nobody moved.": if the original feels more tense, you've discovered what those two short sentences were accomplishing.

Record everything in your swipe file.

To learn more about this topic, read the free lesson "How to Create a Swipe File" - COMING SOON.

Write Regularly

Even if it's only fifteen minutes a day, write every day.

If you want to improve your business writing, meaning content for your company, you need to practice primarily with the kinds of texts you actually want to become good at writing.

For example, take a concept you know well and try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it.

The next day, tell the story of something that actually happened at work and try to make it interesting even to someone who wasn't there.

Another time, take a piece of business news and try to explain why it matters without using the language of the original article.

You can also make something up, which is a very useful method when you want to practice the way you tell stories.

You might imagine an entrepreneur who has to make a difficult decision and describe that moment in a few hundred words.

It doesn't matter whether the story is true, because in that case you're training yourself to turn an idea into a situation.

Write Simply in Your First Draft

When you start writing, focus first on clearly saying what you want to say instead of immediately searching for the perfect sentence.

If you have an idea in your head, write it down as naturally as possible, imagining that you're explaining it to someone sitting in front of you.

You'll have time later to make the text more elegant.

This is a very useful approach because trying to find the idea and its perfect expression at the same time can stop you in your tracks and force you to spend ten minutes on a sentence you might end up deleting during revision anyway.

The first draft is mainly about getting your thoughts onto the page, while the revision that follows is about turning those thoughts into something worth reading.

Rewrite

Rewriting is probably one of the most important exercises you can do.

A text is never perfect on the first attempt, probably not even one written by Stephen King.

A useful exercise is to try cutting a text by 20 or 30 percent while communicating exactly the same information in less space.

If you've written a thousand words, try bringing it down to around seven or eight hundred.

If you've written five hundred, try cutting it to roughly three hundred and fifty or four hundred.

You shouldn't become obsessed with the percentage, though, because it's simply a target that forces you to look at your writing more critically.

The best way to avoid losing information is to ask yourself what each paragraph is actually saying before you start cutting.

If you remove a sentence and the message remains intact, that sentence wasn't essential, but if removing it eliminates a step the reader needs in order to follow your reasoning, you've cut too much.

Very often, you'll discover that the problem isn't the information itself but the way you've expressed it.

You may have explained the same idea twice using different words, or you may have spent an entire sentence setting up a concept you could have stated directly.

Revision exists precisely to uncover this gap between what you wanted to say and all the words you used to say it.

Alternate Between Short and Long Sentences

Writing short sentences isn't a mistake, but it's usually better to write longer ones because if you constantly follow the advice of the "great copywriting experts" and write sentences that are five or six words long, your text will obviously sound like it was written by AI.

Look at this example:

Our bakery makes fresh bread. We open every morning. We use good ingredients. Our bread tastes great. Customers come back every day. Visit us today.

Now read this:

Every morning, before most of the neighborhood is awake, we start baking fresh bread with carefully selected ingredients so that when you walk through our door, you're greeted by the smell of loaves that have just come out of the oven. It's a simple method, but it's also the reason so many of our customers come back every day."

I don't need to tell you which version is more pleasant to read.

Longer sentences allow you to develop an idea more effectively when its different parts genuinely depend on one another.

Short sentences are fine every now and then, I use them too.

After a more elaborate sentence, for example, a short one can work very well.

Then the thought needs to expand again.

That's much closer to the natural way a person develops an idea.

Don't Write in a Complicated Way Just to Feed Your Ego

Don't look for difficult words just to make your writing sound more sophisticated, because this is one of the most common mistakes professionals make.

Look at this text:

The CPU's superscalar microarchitecture leverages speculative execution, out-of-order instruction scheduling and multi-level cache hierarchies to maximize instruction-level parallelism while mitigating pipeline stalls and memory-access latency.

I bet you gave up after the third word and immediately moved forward.

Now read this instead:

The CPU is like the manager of a small restaurant. When an order comes in, the manager reads it, decides what needs to be done, and tells the right people what to do. Some workers handle one job while others handle something different, and the manager keeps the things they need most close by so they don't have to walk to the storage room every few seconds. A CPU works in a similar way: it receives instructions, figures out what to do with them, and coordinates the other parts of the computer.

If one of these two texts has a chance of generating a lead, which one do you think will succeed?

An overly sophisticated word or terminology that's too specific to a particular field can make a sentence impossible to understand because it forces the reader to make a cognitive effort that nobody wants to make when reading something online or, more generally, reading marketing copy.

When you write something for your company, your goal shouldn't be to prove how many words you know, but to explain the concept without forcing the reader to strain their brain so they can take the action you want them to take.

Read What You've Written Out Loud

Reading out loud is useful because it prevents you from skimming over your sentences too quickly.

When you know a text well, your brain tends to read it the way you thought you wrote it, whereas actually saying the words out loud forces you to deal with what you really put on the page.

Pay attention to the points where you have to go back because you've lost the meaning of the sentence, because that's an important warning sign: if you wrote the text and you're having trouble following it, the reader will have even more trouble.

Also notice where you naturally run out of breath, because that may mean you're missing a comma or that it would be better to separate a few sentences.

Another important sign appears when you spontaneously change a word while reading.

Maybe you wrote "perform an evaluation" on the page but automatically say "evaluate" out loud: your brain is telling you that the first version is awkward while the second sounds more natural, so replace it.

Learn to Be Concise

Learning to be concise teaches you to recognize which words are actually doing their job and which ones are simply taking up space.

You can practice with this exercise:

Write a text of about 300 words without editing it immediately.
Wait at least a few hours, or even better, until the next day.
Now try to say the same thing in about 200 words (don't remove information, remove words).
Wait the same amount of time again, then repeat the exercise and try to bring it down to 100 words.

The 100-word version will probably be too short to publish, but that doesn't matter, because the purpose of the exercise isn't to produce the final text, it's to train yourself to distinguish what's essential from everything you added while trying to get to the point.

This skill is particularly important today because a reader can abandon a text at any moment, so you constantly have to give them a reason to keep reading.

A three-thousand-word article that keeps adding useful information can be far more enjoyable than a five-hundred-word article that keeps repeating the same idea.