Three easy ways to make your writing more persuasive

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First, a disclaimer. 

One of the main points I make over and over again is that the specific words you use are much less important than the benefits you choose to highlight, your overall value proposition and your positioning.

In other words, if you're using the right words to write about the wrong things, you're not going to persuade anybody to do anything. 

But, having said that, you can make your copy a lot more persuasive by making just a few small changes before you press send. These quick wins only take a few minutes to deal to, but they can make a huge difference to your results. 

Let's take a look: 
 

1: Prune your adjectives

Adjectives are great. They describe your product or service. But when you're in the flow of things, it's easy to end up using multiple adjectives that essentially say the same thing. 

This is less great. If you say something like "this car is fast, speedy and quick," you're causing two problems. The first is that you are wasting the reader's time. They get the point after the first adjective; there's no reason to make them read two more. 

The second is much more important - the opportunity cost of those adjectives. When you write the same thing three different ways, you miss an opportunity to highlight three different aspects of your product, rather than just one. Or, you miss an opportunity to use that space to really dial in on just one killer feature or benefit. 

So prune your adjectives. Get rid of the redundant ones - it makes the remaining ones much stronger and more persuasive. 

(I wrote about this on Linkedin last week. Drop a comment if you can be bothered. It helps get my content in front of more people.)
 

2: Kill "really"

This is closely related to my first point - and it's also something I'm constantly guilty of myself. 

The word "really" seldom adds any value to your writing. For example, imagine if you wrote "this is really good." That "really" isn't adding much to the word "good" - so go ahead and delete it.

And if your product actually is "really good," then just change "good" to "great"! Most adjectives have a superlative form (like "great," "huge," or "tiny" for "good," "big," and "small). If the situation calls for it, use that superlative, rather than trying to modify a base-level adjective. You'll use fewer words, and make a bigger impact by using a stronger word. 
 

3: Watch your writing tics

These are different for everybody, but everybody has them. For me, it's compulsively starting new sentences with the words "and," "so," and "but." Or, I'll fill my copy with em dashes (this: --), when I would be better off starting new sentences. 

Your tics will be different, but I guarantee that you have them. The good news is that they're really easy to find. All you need to do is make sure you read through your copy before you send, post or publish it. There will be common denominators that show up in every few sentences. These are your tics - get rid of them! 

 

That's it

Just a short one today. Give these three tips a go next time you write something. Could be an email, a powerpoint presentation, a report. Anything really. They're universal tips, and they apply to all writing, not just copywriting. 

See you in a couple weeks.

Sam

PS: Earlier this year, I put together a cheat sheet with four more tips to help you write more persuasively. These tips are in a handy PDF, which you can download here. 

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Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash