![]() ![]() After learning the first four Bamboo Spirit Flow Drills, we start to do some free play incorporating only those four flow drills. He has an intuitive grasp of going with the flow. The kid is laser-focused during our sessions. He possesses a ton of talent, learns quickly, and has a competitive streak. What caused me to teach Caiden this phrase? Some background on this kid. Myself and Caiden after I promoted him in December. For the duration of the lesson, he repeated that phrase, laughing at the same time. navy in the 1960s, it's based on the idea that most systems work best if they're kept simple.During a lesson with Caiden, I was pontificating on the importance of “K.I.S.S.” I explained to him that was shorthand for “ Keep it simple stupid!” The kid laughed, thinking that was the greatest quote he ever heard. The term 'Keep It Simple, Stupid' was coined by Kelly Johnson, an engineer in the U.S. Make your copy more convincing with the appliance of science.If you found these tips useful you might enjoy some of my other blogs: If no one tried new things we'd still be writing like Harriet Beecher Stowe – and that would make my life very challenging! Language is constantly changing and evolving. But you can express yourself and your business through your words too, so don't be afraid to develop your own rules. Be the funky ones, the interesting ones, the ones people remember, not the dull as dishwater just like everybody else ones.Ĭopywriting is about getting your meaning across and creating an unfulfilled desire in your reader to call you, buy something, or wait for you in the car park. If you want to stand out in a competitive market, reflect the difference between you and other organisations on your website and in your copy. Whenever you write for or about your business – you might be explaining something to your readers, entertaining or amusing them – you're expressing your company's character and brand through your choice of language (or, as we like to call it, through your 'tone of voice'). My personal style-guide means I never use 'whom' (always 'who'), 'whilst' is not in my vocabulary (while 'while' is), and no one could pay me enough to insert a semi-colon into my writing! 5. I think that online content should be conversational and fairly informal (unless you're writing your terms and conditions or other official documents). When people read, they hear the words too and industry-speak just sounds weird. ![]() You might say you help people find new and exciting opportunities, or you help them work out the best way to grow their businesses, or you work in lots of different ways to suit your clients. Do you talk about facilitating opportunities, being solutions-focussed, or offering a multitude of diverse services? QUICK TIP: Listen to the words you use when you're out networking or meeting a client. It's not dumbing down or being condescending to your audience, it's writing naturally rather than sounding like a sixth former who's swallowed a dictionary and is trying to bring it back up. Replace long words with short onesĪlways use a short word instead of a long one if you can. And you can use tricks – like starting sentences with 'and' – to keep it flowing. Your readers will stay with you and get your meaning. Having lots of clauses in a sentence can start to get really complicated as readers have to keep lots of information in their heads, so by the time they've got to the end they can't remember what they read at the beginning, they might need to go back to the start and re-read the whole sentence to get the gist, which is a pain, or they might give up altogether, decide it's not worth the effort and see what's on the telly instead. Take out all the unnecessary words and you get: We can help you set up your business. What's really important here? What are they trying to say? Working from our headquarters, we can help you set up a business in your sector and provide services to your clients by assisting you through the process of forming a company, and all that entails. Here's an example of a company explaining what they do: Here's a quick guide to help you clarify, clean-up and declutter your copy, step away from those sesquipedalian words, and write short, punchy copy instead. Stowe might be one of the greatest writers of all time but that sentence from 1852 is a good example of how not to write content in 2017. So wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', one of the most influential and important books of the last 200 years, in her beautiful prose.īut let's be honest, it's quite convoluted isn't it?! Mrs Bird, looking the very picture of delight, was superintending the arrangements of the table, ever and anon mingling admonitory remarks to a number of frolicsome juveniles, who were effervescing in all those modes of untold gambol and mischief that have astonished mothers ever since the flood.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |