The Stuff In Between Our Words
Copy writing is all about the words. Or is it?
What about all the little bits pushed in between? Punctuation usage can tell us a lot about writing style. Which copy looks easier to read? You don’t need to see any of the words to pick the one on the left. If you picked the one on the right you might be a masochist. Or maybe you’re president of the Faulkner book club as that’s his work.
I will wager every dollar I don’t have that if your fundraising copy punctuation looks like Faulkner’s it won’t get read. Not even a little bit. Way too dense and stuffed with parentheticals. You know what parentheticals often signify? Somebody who is trying to prove how much they know by cramming all that knowledge into a sentence. Punctuation can reveal a lot. Are the sentences long and complicated with lots of commas or dashes? Or what about a string of dollar signs or percentages? The former is all the asking, the latter citing numbing stats and factoids.
We’ve been analyzing punctuation and comparing it with our Copy Optimizer tool that analyzes parts of speech to produce a Story and Readability score. We know that higher Copy Optimizer scores = higher response rates. We’re starting to see a pattern with punctuation and these scores.
We strongly recommend starting all copy with a story. This is the opening paragraphs of two different appeals with nearly identical word count. One does very well on storytelling, the other is poor. Look at the punctuation usage? More involved and complicated on the right.
Words matter. Parts of speech matter. The bits jammed in between seem to matter too.
Kevin
2 responses to “The Stuff In Between Our Words”
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Brilliant.
When all else fails … [dot, dot, dot]
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