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5 WAY S T O W R I T E A Damn Good 
Sentence
Average copywriters 
write average sentences.
You, I’m guessing, don’t 
want to be average.
You want to be great. 
You want to be 
! 
remarkable.
That means you need to write 
damn good sentences … 
! 
without even thinking about it … 
! 
day in and day out.
Do that and you’ll become 
an unstoppable writing 
machine. 
! 
You’ll become a 
killer copywriter.
See, everything you write 
begins and ends with a 
sentence.
We have a number of 
research studies to thank 
for this discovery.
The first one is primacy. 
! 
It refers to our tendency 
to remember items at the 
beginning of a list.
Other studies suggest you’ll always remember: 
! 
more 
words 
from 
the 
end 
of 
a 
list 
! 
than from the beginning simply because those 
are the last words you read.
This is called recency.
Together, primacy and 
recency make up the serial 
position effect, 
! 
! 
a term coined by German psychologist 
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909).
T H I S C A N B E S E E N I N T H E 
S E R I A L P O S I T I O N C U RV E : 
!
In 1946, Solomon E. Asch upped the 
ante with studies that evaluated the 
impact the position of words had on 
people. 
! 
The study we care about involves 
how we position adjectives to 
describe a person.
Read the following two sentences. 
! 
! 
“Steve is smart, diligent, critical, 
impulsive, and jealous.” 
! 
“Steve is jealous, impulsive, 
critical, diligent, and smart.”
These two sentences 
contain the 
same information.
However, when a group of 
participants were given the first 
sentence ... 
! 
! 
they reported “Steve” in 
a positive light.
And the group given the second 
sentence? 
! 
Yep. 
! 
They reported “Steve” in 
a negative light.
Thirty years later, 
William Crano 
decided to sharpen 
the distinction 
the impact 
order 
has on meaning.
His studies uncovered 
additional effects, particularly 
with the use of adjectives.
Change of meaning hypothesis 
Early adjectives establish an 
expectation, which the reader 
then filters all the subsequent 
adjectives through.
Inconsistency discounting 
Options presented later that 
don’t match earlier 
expectations are downgraded.
Attention decrement hypothesis 
Early adjectives wield 
considerable influence than 
later ones (we saw this in the 
Steve sentences).
All these conclusions are 
important when it comes to 
persuasive writing for several 
reasons.
Take this long-winded 
sentence from Lisa Miller’s 
2012 article “Listening to 
Xanax” ...
“Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew 
off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate 
Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses 
with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel 
to confess in print that she entertained fantasies 
of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive 
talent who died too soon, ‘young and sad, a 
corpse with her head in the oven.’”
That Miller ends this sentence 
with “young and sad, a corpse 
with her head in the oven” 
is NOT an accident.
Decisions had to be made 
when crafting that sentence. 
! 
! 
Guaranteed it did not flow from 
Miller’s mind in the published form.
It was a piecemeal affair. 
An experimentation with 
effect.
And this is the craft of writing 
a damn good sentence.
Bone up on your 
sentence-writing skills 
! 
and those pieces of content 
will only get better 
! 
and be more 
widely shared.
Want to learn how? 
Follow me.
Insert Facts 
1
This is nothing more than basic subject and 
verb agreement: 
! 
! 
“Moses ate a muffaletta.” 
! 
! 
Logical and consistent. 
The building blocks of a story.
You insert facts by thinking through the 5 Ws: 
! 
Who 
What 
When 
Where 
Why 
! 
Think specific and concrete.
Compare these two sentences. 
! 
! 
“On the first day of winter, Moses fed his 
muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.” 
! 
“On the last day of winter, Moses fed his 
muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.”
The significance is heightened 
in the first sentence, 
minimized in the second. 
! 
All by one word. 
(Can you find that word?)
And notice how your sympathies 
change when I write: 
! 
! 
“On the first day of winter, Moses fed his 
muffuletta to the three-day old woolly 
mammoth.”
Those new facts heighten 
the emotional appeal of 
that simple story.
Create Images 
2
It’s not a coincidence 
that the root of imagination 
is image.
Imagination is the capacity for 
people to see the world you 
are trying to paint.
Intelligent people like to use 
their imagination. 
! 
! 
So, don’t insult their intelligence by 
over-explaining … but also don’t abuse 
their intelligence by starving it.
Use active verbs and concrete nouns 
and you will naturally create images. 
! 
! 
“The buzzard bled.”
Introduce one (or all) of the five senses 
and you’ll enhance those images: 
! 
! 
“The screaming buzzard bled.”
Use phrases like “imagine this” or 
“picture this” to signal to your 
reader you are about to paint a 
picture.
“Imagine a fifty-something man in a blue 
long-sleeve shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned, 
his knuckles thick and coarse. He’s on 
the side of the road, quibbling over a 
stack of used cinder blocks with a 
merchant.” 
! 
from 10 Productivity Tips from a Blue-Collar Genius
In those two sentences, 
you learn the color of the shirt, 
the state of the cuffs, 
and the condition of his knuckles.
You learn where he is and 
what he is doing in concrete 
language.
The writer uses very precise language to 
tell you what he was doing. 
! 
For example, the character in the story 
wasn’t talking, he was “quibbling.” 
! 
! 
Something entirely different 
than chatting.
Evoke Emotion 
3
You can naturally get mood into your 
sentences if you follow the two previous 
steps. 
! 
! 
But as a copywriter you don’t want 
emotion to be an afterthought.
You must carefully plan 
and manufacture emotion.
This starts by asking: 
! 
What is the dominant mood of your reader or customer? 
What problem is he or she trying to solve? 
Is it fear over losing a job? A spouse? A scholarship? 
Pride of donating to a good cause? Joy for finally getting 
muscular definition in his calves?
Here’s an example.
How often are these little tragedies 
repeated in your life? 
! 
You write something clever, but everyone ignores it. 
You hear about a new opportunity, but don’t pursue it 
because you don’t have the skills or confidence to 
attempt it. 
You get overlooked by everybody – including your boss – 
because the guy in the next cubicle seems to know 
everything about SEO, email marketing, or copywriting. 
You hear about all the new clients your peers are picking 
up … but none are showing up at your door.
In that short opening, 
I identified the relevant pain 
and agitated it so the solution 
was a no brainer.
But notice those four conditions are all 
about rejection. Yet … 
! 
I didn’t use the word “reject,” or a 
derivative, once. I didn’t tell you the 
emotion you should feel. I simply 
showed it to you.
Big difference in the 
quality of writing.
Make Promises 
4
As a copywriter, you aren’t merely 
interested in heightening people’s 
emotions for the sake of heightening 
emotions. 
! 
Otherwise, you’d be a 
novelist or screenwriter.
Entertainment is not a 
copywriter’s 
bread and butter.
Getting action is.
So, you need people to see hope in 
your sentences: 
! 
What promises are you making to the reader in this 
sentence? 
What advantages will the reader gain? 
What pain will people avoid if they obey you?
In the opening to The Dirty Little Secret 
to Seducing Readers, I wrote … 
! 
“I’m guessing you want to write copy that 
sells. You want to write copy so irresistible it 
makes your readers scramble down the page 
— begging to do whatever it is you want when 
they’re done reading — whether it’s to make a 
purchase, send a donation, or join your 
newsletter.”
The promise is that you can learn 
how to write in such a way people 
can’t resist your words. 
! 
! 
And that’s compelling 
for the right people.
Practice, Practice, 
5 
Practice.
Writing great sentences 
takes work.
At first it may feel 
mechanical, wooden. 
! 
That’s okay.
The goal is to get to a point where 
you unconsciously blend these 
elements so they feel natural in the 
sentence and can’t be pulled apart.
Sort of like when a golf instructor 
stops your swing to adjust your 
mechanics.
That may feel mechanical and 
unnatural, but eventually your 
swing becomes natural and he 
stops interrupting you.
Here are some exercises to 
help you improve your 
sentence writing.
Exercise #1: Copy great sentences 
! 
! 
Hand-write 100 great first sentences. 
Memorize portions of great sales letters. 
Dissect killer lines.
Exercise #2: Concentrate on your 
opening and closing paragraphs 
! 
It’s arduous to consciously think about each 
and every sentence you write in a 500-word 
article. 
! 
Concentrate your powers on the beginning 
and the ending.
Exercise #3: Labor over headlines 
! 
! 
Your headlines won’t be complete 
sentences, but they offer you an 
opportunity to focus closely on what you 
are writing.
Exercise #4: Labor over subject lines 
! 
! 
Unlike headlines, you can use your subject 
line in an unconventional way.
“Thought of you while I was 
at the steam bath.” 
! 
Who’s NOT going to open 
that email up? 
! 
! 
And make sure to measure responses, 
adjust, and test more ideas.
Exercise #5: Labor over your tweets 
! 
! 
Twitter is the perfect mechanism for perfecting 
your sentences. 
! 
You are forced to say a lot in 140 characters. 
And you get feedback.
People either respond — 
or they don’t.
Check for retweets, favorites, and 
replies. 
! 
And if you don’t get a response, try 
sharing it again at a different time.
Your Turn
Each sentence in a 500-word article may 
not be great … 
! 
! 
but the more you practice the 
fundamentals, the closer you are 
going to get to perfection.
Don’t give up.
Keep plugging 
away.
One sentence 
at a time.
Click to learn more at 
copyblogger.com

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5 Ways to Write a Damn Good Sentence

  • 1. 5 WAY S T O W R I T E A Damn Good Sentence
  • 2. Average copywriters write average sentences.
  • 3. You, I’m guessing, don’t want to be average.
  • 4. You want to be great. You want to be ! remarkable.
  • 5. That means you need to write damn good sentences … ! without even thinking about it … ! day in and day out.
  • 6. Do that and you’ll become an unstoppable writing machine. ! You’ll become a killer copywriter.
  • 7. See, everything you write begins and ends with a sentence.
  • 8. We have a number of research studies to thank for this discovery.
  • 9. The first one is primacy. ! It refers to our tendency to remember items at the beginning of a list.
  • 10. Other studies suggest you’ll always remember: ! more words from the end of a list ! than from the beginning simply because those are the last words you read.
  • 11. This is called recency.
  • 12. Together, primacy and recency make up the serial position effect, ! ! a term coined by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909).
  • 13. T H I S C A N B E S E E N I N T H E S E R I A L P O S I T I O N C U RV E : !
  • 14. In 1946, Solomon E. Asch upped the ante with studies that evaluated the impact the position of words had on people. ! The study we care about involves how we position adjectives to describe a person.
  • 15. Read the following two sentences. ! ! “Steve is smart, diligent, critical, impulsive, and jealous.” ! “Steve is jealous, impulsive, critical, diligent, and smart.”
  • 16. These two sentences contain the same information.
  • 17. However, when a group of participants were given the first sentence ... ! ! they reported “Steve” in a positive light.
  • 18. And the group given the second sentence? ! Yep. ! They reported “Steve” in a negative light.
  • 19. Thirty years later, William Crano decided to sharpen the distinction the impact order has on meaning.
  • 20. His studies uncovered additional effects, particularly with the use of adjectives.
  • 21. Change of meaning hypothesis Early adjectives establish an expectation, which the reader then filters all the subsequent adjectives through.
  • 22. Inconsistency discounting Options presented later that don’t match earlier expectations are downgraded.
  • 23. Attention decrement hypothesis Early adjectives wield considerable influence than later ones (we saw this in the Steve sentences).
  • 24. All these conclusions are important when it comes to persuasive writing for several reasons.
  • 25. Take this long-winded sentence from Lisa Miller’s 2012 article “Listening to Xanax” ...
  • 26. “Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel to confess in print that she entertained fantasies of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive talent who died too soon, ‘young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven.’”
  • 27. That Miller ends this sentence with “young and sad, a corpse with her head in the oven” is NOT an accident.
  • 28. Decisions had to be made when crafting that sentence. ! ! Guaranteed it did not flow from Miller’s mind in the published form.
  • 29. It was a piecemeal affair. An experimentation with effect.
  • 30. And this is the craft of writing a damn good sentence.
  • 31. Bone up on your sentence-writing skills ! and those pieces of content will only get better ! and be more widely shared.
  • 32. Want to learn how? Follow me.
  • 34. This is nothing more than basic subject and verb agreement: ! ! “Moses ate a muffaletta.” ! ! Logical and consistent. The building blocks of a story.
  • 35. You insert facts by thinking through the 5 Ws: ! Who What When Where Why ! Think specific and concrete.
  • 36. Compare these two sentences. ! ! “On the first day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.” ! “On the last day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.”
  • 37. The significance is heightened in the first sentence, minimized in the second. ! All by one word. (Can you find that word?)
  • 38. And notice how your sympathies change when I write: ! ! “On the first day of winter, Moses fed his muffuletta to the three-day old woolly mammoth.”
  • 39. Those new facts heighten the emotional appeal of that simple story.
  • 41. It’s not a coincidence that the root of imagination is image.
  • 42. Imagination is the capacity for people to see the world you are trying to paint.
  • 43. Intelligent people like to use their imagination. ! ! So, don’t insult their intelligence by over-explaining … but also don’t abuse their intelligence by starving it.
  • 44. Use active verbs and concrete nouns and you will naturally create images. ! ! “The buzzard bled.”
  • 45. Introduce one (or all) of the five senses and you’ll enhance those images: ! ! “The screaming buzzard bled.”
  • 46. Use phrases like “imagine this” or “picture this” to signal to your reader you are about to paint a picture.
  • 47. “Imagine a fifty-something man in a blue long-sleeve shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned, his knuckles thick and coarse. He’s on the side of the road, quibbling over a stack of used cinder blocks with a merchant.” ! from 10 Productivity Tips from a Blue-Collar Genius
  • 48. In those two sentences, you learn the color of the shirt, the state of the cuffs, and the condition of his knuckles.
  • 49. You learn where he is and what he is doing in concrete language.
  • 50. The writer uses very precise language to tell you what he was doing. ! For example, the character in the story wasn’t talking, he was “quibbling.” ! ! Something entirely different than chatting.
  • 52. You can naturally get mood into your sentences if you follow the two previous steps. ! ! But as a copywriter you don’t want emotion to be an afterthought.
  • 53. You must carefully plan and manufacture emotion.
  • 54. This starts by asking: ! What is the dominant mood of your reader or customer? What problem is he or she trying to solve? Is it fear over losing a job? A spouse? A scholarship? Pride of donating to a good cause? Joy for finally getting muscular definition in his calves?
  • 56. How often are these little tragedies repeated in your life? ! You write something clever, but everyone ignores it. You hear about a new opportunity, but don’t pursue it because you don’t have the skills or confidence to attempt it. You get overlooked by everybody – including your boss – because the guy in the next cubicle seems to know everything about SEO, email marketing, or copywriting. You hear about all the new clients your peers are picking up … but none are showing up at your door.
  • 57. In that short opening, I identified the relevant pain and agitated it so the solution was a no brainer.
  • 58. But notice those four conditions are all about rejection. Yet … ! I didn’t use the word “reject,” or a derivative, once. I didn’t tell you the emotion you should feel. I simply showed it to you.
  • 59. Big difference in the quality of writing.
  • 61. As a copywriter, you aren’t merely interested in heightening people’s emotions for the sake of heightening emotions. ! Otherwise, you’d be a novelist or screenwriter.
  • 62. Entertainment is not a copywriter’s bread and butter.
  • 64. So, you need people to see hope in your sentences: ! What promises are you making to the reader in this sentence? What advantages will the reader gain? What pain will people avoid if they obey you?
  • 65. In the opening to The Dirty Little Secret to Seducing Readers, I wrote … ! “I’m guessing you want to write copy that sells. You want to write copy so irresistible it makes your readers scramble down the page — begging to do whatever it is you want when they’re done reading — whether it’s to make a purchase, send a donation, or join your newsletter.”
  • 66. The promise is that you can learn how to write in such a way people can’t resist your words. ! ! And that’s compelling for the right people.
  • 68. Writing great sentences takes work.
  • 69. At first it may feel mechanical, wooden. ! That’s okay.
  • 70. The goal is to get to a point where you unconsciously blend these elements so they feel natural in the sentence and can’t be pulled apart.
  • 71. Sort of like when a golf instructor stops your swing to adjust your mechanics.
  • 72. That may feel mechanical and unnatural, but eventually your swing becomes natural and he stops interrupting you.
  • 73. Here are some exercises to help you improve your sentence writing.
  • 74. Exercise #1: Copy great sentences ! ! Hand-write 100 great first sentences. Memorize portions of great sales letters. Dissect killer lines.
  • 75. Exercise #2: Concentrate on your opening and closing paragraphs ! It’s arduous to consciously think about each and every sentence you write in a 500-word article. ! Concentrate your powers on the beginning and the ending.
  • 76. Exercise #3: Labor over headlines ! ! Your headlines won’t be complete sentences, but they offer you an opportunity to focus closely on what you are writing.
  • 77. Exercise #4: Labor over subject lines ! ! Unlike headlines, you can use your subject line in an unconventional way.
  • 78. “Thought of you while I was at the steam bath.” ! Who’s NOT going to open that email up? ! ! And make sure to measure responses, adjust, and test more ideas.
  • 79. Exercise #5: Labor over your tweets ! ! Twitter is the perfect mechanism for perfecting your sentences. ! You are forced to say a lot in 140 characters. And you get feedback.
  • 80. People either respond — or they don’t.
  • 81. Check for retweets, favorites, and replies. ! And if you don’t get a response, try sharing it again at a different time.
  • 83. Each sentence in a 500-word article may not be great … ! ! but the more you practice the fundamentals, the closer you are going to get to perfection.
  • 86. One sentence at a time.
  • 87. Click to learn more at copyblogger.com