Are “blah” words damaging your response?
Here is an imperative that undoubtedly goes back to Biblical times: “Match your rhetoric to your target individual.”
So genuine wordsmithy isn’t the writer’s ego-driven conclusion, “This is what I have to say.” It’s “This is what my best prospect wants to read.”
Everybody reading this is a professional. These opinions may not be what you want to read, but my excuse is that I’m not selling something…other than the oh-so-worthy concept of wordsmithy.
Will tweaking one word result in one more order? Maybe. (Notice, please: I wrote maybe, not perhaps. That’s because maybe, a more conversational ploy, has fractionally greater emotional impact than perhaps. We deal in such fractions.) Yes, tweaking one word can, will, and regularly does result in one more order…or six more orders…or a batch of orders that wouldn’t have come in had the weaker word-choice survived unchallenged.
Case in point: The high-fashion catalog whose description of a woman’s cotton jacket begins, “You’ll love the way you look in this” isn’t maximizing impact. Oh, the whole concept is a weather-beaten cliché, but we’re playing with individual words. For that catalog, “You’ll adore the way you look in this” is a better match for the specific readership.
Now, let’s move down a notch. Suppose it’s a discount sale catalog. Might “You’ll look great in this” be more congruent with the catalog’s projected image? Beats me. The only hard answer would come from word testing in alternate catalogs, and I don’t know any catalog that wants to make such an investment. We take our best shot. That’s what professionals do.
Admiring the Little Word “The”
Arrogance does have some position in wordsmithy. Here is another catalog that smartly uses one of the three most common words in our lexicon — the.
What role can the play in establishing salesworthiness? The answer to that question is as easy as analyzing the obvious difference between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the. This catalog has as a typical product heading, “The Gardener’s Hat.” Simple enough, isn’t it?
If you don’t agree it’s simple, consider four alternatives for the heading:
- Gardener’s Hat.
- A Gardener’s Hat.
- The Gardener’s Hat.
- Our Gardener’s Hat.
By using the definite article, the heading positions the hat. It isn’t just a gardener’s hat; it’s the gardener’s hat. Our Gardener’s Hat positions it even more, and that may be too potent a positioning because it suggests competition, while The denies competition. Complicated? Not at all, if you’re a word-use analyst.
The catalog in which the hat appears is loaded with “The” headings — “The Large-Capacity Locking Mailbox”…“The Dirt-Capturing Doormat”…“The Impervious Tableware”…“The Sleep Sound Generator.” Each of these, by starting with “The,” says to the reader: “Don’t waste your time looking for anything similar. This is the whatever.”
I had said arrogance has some position in wordsmithy, and these “The” openings are proof. For example, that Sleep Sound Generator is one of a number of similar products with the generic name “sleep machines.” So this isn’t the Sleep Sound Generator; it’s actually a Sleep Sound Generator. But we have to admire the wordsmithy, don’t we, because a flat “Sleep Sound Generator” wouldn’t be as demanding. That’s what professionals get paid for.
Ah, but professionalism extends beyond flat rules that have no exceptions. When we move inside a description, eliminating “the” can add power when the next word has superior evocative strength: “The superb details of the fluted columns are just the first image…” has less selling clout than “Superb details of the fluted columns are just the first image…” because identification has been pre-established, and superiority — the major selling weapon — leaps into high gear.
What we’re exploring is the tricky jungle of information optimizing, the height of the art in word use. If a dinky little word such as “the” can be massaged this way, how much potency might we add — or lose — by turning loose the dogs on more colorful words?
A quick thought that occurs to me only because the previous sentence employs both “lose” and “loose”: If a candidate for a copywriting job misuses those two words, don’t hire him or her (or, because either education or mentality is troglodytic, it). Disaster lies ahead.
I may be preaching to the choir, but I have to add “its” and “it’s,” “impostor” and “imposter,” “burgundy” and “burgandy,” and their ilk. (“Your and “You’re” coming up shortly.) A professional writer whose command of grammar has so little depth is parallel to a doctor who can’t read his own blood pressure gadget. Both have to depend on nurses.
Scare, But Don’t Threaten
A catalog of vitamins and supplements has this heading for a supplement “cocktail” that includes ginseng and bee pollen and other herbs: “Fatigue and Exhaustion.”
This one isn’t even a near miss. How easy it is to add the qualifiers suggesting that this supplement helps prevent or helps eliminate fatigue and exhaustion. (We need the qualifier “helps” because we don’t want the FDA breathing down our necks.) But the genuine wordsmith looks deeper. Is noun-dependent “Fatigue and Exhaustion” as motivational as “Tired and worn out? Here’s help.”?
We agree, I hope, that questions are automatically reader-involving. “Tired and worn out?” is light-years more involving than “Tired and worn out,” because a statement of condition is just as applicable to the marketer as it is to the prospective customer.
My current negative favorite is “Your dead in bed.” Naturally, part of the negativism stems from “Your” instead of “You’re,” because even though the Web is showing us how severely we seem to be losing the battle against illiteracy, we’ll fight to the last syllable. OK, suppose borderline literacy had triumphed and the headline writer had excreted “You’re dead in bed.” I agree, it’s an attention getter. But the negative psychology not only starts an argument with someone who actually may be having boudoir difficulties; it also impedes response, by adding an unnecessary embarrassment factor. This marketer could profit from studying the brilliant way the various pharmaceutical houses have legitimized a once-verboten subject and brought the phrase “erectile dysfunction” into functionality.
Are they kidding? We hope they are, but…
Some copy is…well, it’s funny. Here’s a product heading: “Chinese Rejuvenator.” Hey, guys, I don’t know any Chinese who need rejuvenation. A more puzzling chimera is promotional material for a vendor of gourmet foods and wines: “Who is new in stores?”
Moving away from the mundane world of commerce, one of the most respected not-for-profit organizations has this unfortunate dictum on its envelope: “Multiply Your Gift 6 Times.” The person who handed this to me, unopened, made a telling comment: “They have a lot of nerve.”
I’ll repeat a mantra I’ve preached for years — The Clarity Commandment: When you choose words and phrases for force-communication, clarity is paramount. Don’t let any other component of the communications mix interfere with it.
Our word choices can’t always be stellar. After a rough weekend, we might lapse into doggerel such as “Where you’ll find quality, service, and value,” and then, reading our own words after they’ve appeared in print, hope the person paying us hasn’t read them.
A headline blares: “Exceptional Creations with Extraordinary Results.” Nothing — nothing — in either the illustration (what appears to be a semi-clad acrobat flying out of a red screen) or the text — justifies or defines that headline. And if it did, the result still would be inferior to having had a headline that didn’t warrant cryptographic decoding.
The Plague of Incoherence
We’re blaming e-mail for every other nasty trend in word use, so we might as well add incoherence to the list. And we may have some validity in aiming such an accusation, because e-mail is the nucleus of shortened attention-spans among the literate. (The semi-literates and illiterates are poor targets anyway, and their short attention-spans are either genetic or rearing-based.)
What a ghastly combination of noncreative factors the blend of desperation and a determination to seem clever can be! Yet, even more appalling, our credential-denying universe of advertising and marketing is accepting, wholesale, candidates whose output exhibits that combination.
Here is an ad — full page and bleed, naturally — for pianos. The headline: “Music has no age!” Obviously neither the writer, the creative director, nor the company paying for the ad thought analytically enough to ask, “What the hell does that mean?” The reader coming upon that four-word jumble doesn’t bother to analyze.
The key is to avoid such blah-blah-blah when we do have all our faculties. The wordsmith knows implicitly which words have power and which words sputter and falter. That’s you, isn’t it?
Herschell Gordon Lewis is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He consults with and writes direct response copy for clients worldwide. This is one of an occasional group of articles on word use. Lewis is the author of 27 books, including “On the Art of Writing Copy” (third edition) and “The Complete Advertising and Marketing Handbook.”
Network
