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Adjectives and adverbs: Objective versus subjective

Mark Twain: “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them — then the rest will be valuable.”

Here are the Merriam-Webster definitions of an adjective and an adverb. They’re long, but here’s a summary: an adjective’s role is to describe a noun while an adverb’s role is to modify a verb or adjective.

Here are a few examples:

Steve drove a red car. — “Red” is the adjective.

Ben ran very quickly. — “Very” is the adverb. So is “quickly.”

Think of your idea as a face and adjectives and adverbs as make-up. A little touch here and there accentuates your beauty and brings out your best qualities. But too much hides the natural brilliance and makes you look like a clown.

If you were describing Steve’s red car, you could modify red with “cherry” or “deep.” These are objective adjectives that paint a specific picture in the reader’s mind.

On the flipside, adjectives like “luscious” or “brilliant” don’t do anything for your reader because they’re subjective. What “luscious” means to you can mean something completely different to your reader. So you’re not helping them. In fact, you’re just confusing them.

You can always tell a novice writer by the way they overuse subjective adjectives and adverbs. You can almost picture them consulting a thesaurus for the perfect word they think makes the piece feel smarter.

It’s only when a writer becomes more confident in their ideas that they realize they don’t have to hide behind subjective adjectives and adverbs.

Steve drove a cherry red car. — Your reader knows what cherry red looks like. They can picture the hue of Steve’s car and you can get on with your story.

Steve drove a luscious and majestic cherry red car. — Your reader has no idea what you mean by luscious and majestic. So now they’re trying to read your mind, which is brain power they’re not putting towards the story you’re telling.

3 writing tips for avoidingsubjective adjectives and adverbs

As an inexperienced writer, you’ll find yourself using subjective adjectives and adverbs without knowing it. It’s one of the more common mistakes. So as you’re writing, consider the following:

Play with sentence structure

If you think you need to further describe Steve’s cherry red car, think about adding a second sentence after the initial description. “Steve drove a cherry red car. Its lusciousness was undeniable, as evidenced by how much attention it attracted.” You’ve now taken the subjective “luscious” and made it an objective fact, which you’ve then supported with proof. Your reader now understands what you mean by luscious, and they can picture people stopping to look at the car.

Consider metaphors and similes

Metaphors and similes are comparisons for the purpose of establishing context. The difference between the two is that similes use the words “like” or “as” to draw a comparison while metaphors don’t.

Simile: Steve’s car was red like a bowl of ripe cherries.

Metaphor: Steve’s car was a cherry on wheels.

Default to brevity.

If Steve’s car was cherry red, just describe it that way and move on.

As for adverbs, the one you should ALWAYS avoid is “very.” If Steve’s car is red, saying it was very red doesn’t make it any more red.

7 effective political slogans, and one ineffective but ballsy one.

At the end of the day, all politicians have are their words. Well-designed political slogans can push a so-so candidate over the top if it’s mobilizing, motivating and simple enough to get behind.

Let’s look at some of the best political slogans from the past 120 years and what made them so effective.

It’s Morning Again in America (Ronald Reagan, 1984)

By the time 1984 came around, the United States had gone through 20 years of hell, starting with Vietnam and the counter culture, ending with AIDS and 21% interest rates, and highlighted by Martin Luther King, Watergate, disco music, the Cold War and everything else Billy Joel sang about in We Didn’t Start the Fire. Americans needed calm. They needed to turn the page. And what better way to signal the coming of a new day then to actually signal the coming of a new day?  

Yes We Can (Barack Obama, 2008)

In 2008, America was lost. It knew it was the greatest country on earth but it didn’t think it was behaving that way. It was hunting a man it couldn’t find. It had written cheques it couldn’t cash. And the US dollar was worth less than the Canadian dollar. The “American Way” of picking yourself up and dusting yourself off wasn’t going to work this time. So instead of a kick in the ass, Barack Obama extended a hand. And his political slogans invited everyone to join him.

 The Last Best West (Clifford Sifton, Canadian Minister of the Interior 1896)

The CanCon portion of this list comes from the Laurier government. In the late 19th century, the race to populate the West was in full force. The Americans had been pushing hard for upwards of 60 years, and all signs were pointing north. Laurier knew he had to extend Canada (then just a 29-year-old country and still part of the British Empire) or America was going to grow around them. To do that, he needed immigrants. He could’ve played the “chase your fortune” card. But he went more basic than that. With gorgeous pictures of the plains, prairies and mountains, he sold the vista and the space, which resonated with Europeans who’d been living on top of each other for 400 years.

Keep Calm And Carry On (British Ministry of Information, 1939)

The line’s obviously experienced a bit of a renaissance lately, but when it was coined in the lead up to war with Hitler, it was the confidence that Brits needed to throw down. As political slogans go, it’s one of the best ever. It was like “Relax, we got this. You go on about your day and we’ll rid the world of its most dangerous person. We’re the British Empire. This is what we do.” Of course, they had to keep reminding themselves of this during the Blitzkrieg, but it all worked out in the end.

It’s Time (Australian Labour Party, 1972)

The conservatives had been in power for 23 years. The Labour Party had no real directional alternative and no experience leading anything bigger than a marching band. But they had Gough Whitlam at the helm, a gifted orator in contrast to the piece-of-cardboard Prime Minister William McMahon. So they let Whitlam do what he did best, and supported him with a super-simple message: 23 years is too long. The Australians bought in and elected the Labour Party. As it turns out, they got what they paid for. Three years later, in what’s still the greatest political and constitutional crisis in Australian History, Whitlam’s government was dismissed by the Governor General. There’s even a miniseries about it.

Labour’s Not Working (British Conservative Party, 1979)

We featured this line in a previous blog, and it’s worth revisiting because it’s that good. The late 70s in Britain were marred by industrial strikes, closing factories and way too many unemployed people. So when Margaret Thatcher, new leader of the Conservatives, tapped ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi to give them a takedown line, they came back with “Labour Isn’t Working.” Ugh…it’s so good.

Make America Great Again (Donald Trump, 2016)

Say what you want about The Donald, but you can’t deny that he’s a skilled marketer. In four words, he captured what much of the country was feeling. It was simple. It was motivating and it got the job done. Not to be understated, it also works perfectly as an easily repeated acronym: You can say “maga” and not trip over it. In the hashtag-dominated world of today, considering this is critical.

Special Mention: Roosevelt for Ex-President (US Presidential Candidate Wendell Willkie, 1940)

Chutzpah of the highest order.

Don’t trust an AI copywriter

Last month, Chinese mega-publisher Alibaba unveiled their own virtual copywriter. It’s a computer program that they claim can generate 20,000 words of copy per second. Their promise to advertisers is that having an AI copywriter in their back pocket will save them time and, more importantly, save them a ton of money because they won’t have to pay a real person to write their sales copy for them.

We call hogwash, and here’s why:

An AI copywriter won’t take its time.
Alibaba’s proof point for their creation’s efficacy is that consumers couldn’t tell the difference between a human-written piece of text and the AI copywriter’s writing. We’d challenge Alibaba to put their robot’s copy against a skilled copywriter’s work. Because as we’ve said a million times before on this blog, half of writing is knowing when to put the proverbial pencil down. Just because you can write 20,000 words in a second doesn’t mean you should. It’s about finding the right words to drive action. The fact that Alibaba’s AI can generate 20,000 words an hour is like a cook who says they can pump out 200 grilled chicken and veggie plates an hour. Do you really think the meat in any of those mass-produced meals is going to be grilled to perfection? Will you get that quintessential carrot crunch?

Most importantly, if you owned a restaurant and you knew a Zagat critic was coming in that night, would you want to give them one of the 200, or would you take your time and cook something up that was just perfect? Right.
So yes, you’ll save time and money in the creation. But you’ll lose money every time a consumer doesn’t choose your product or service because your copy is blah.

An AI copywriter can’t account for audience
Sure an AI copywriter can write all day about the product it’s given. But as any good copywriter knows, the product is secondary to the customer benefit. “What it is and what it does” pales in comparison to “why should I want this and what will it do for me on an emotional level?” You can’t just program this kind of understanding into a bot — it comes from years of experience resonating with people and moving needles, knowing what works and what doesn’t. And it comes from understanding what people respond to today as opposed to what they may have responded to last year. If you were running a campaign to middle America, you’d probably speak very differently today than you may have at this time two years ago.

Again, you’ll save time and money on the front end, but it’ll cost you dearly on the back end.

An AI copywriter won’t understand your feedback
Copywriting is an iterative process. It’s a partnership between the client and the copywriter to get the message and the tone right.
As we explain to our clients, they know their business better than we do and we rely on them to steer us in the right direction. We listen to their voices and the passion they have for specific things over other things. And as a client, you’d expect to have direct access to your copywriter. You won’t get that with a robot. And you certainly won’t get the level of attention from a robot that you’d get from a real person.

Save time? Sure. Save money? Maybe. Save hassle. Not on your life.

Alibaba, stick to world retail domination
Ali (can we call you Ali?), you wrote the book on eCommerce. You should stick to that. When it comes to writing the copy for that book, leave it to the experts.

The demise of email has been greatly exaggerated

So, about that prediction a while back that email was going to go the way of cassette tape — looks like that was a whole lot of nothing.

Email is STILL the most influential source of outward-bound B2B information. In fact, the only two sources of information that rank higher are co-worker recos and advice from industry-specific thought leaders.

That puts email in pretty impressive company. But some people are still not convinced. They think email is archaic and that platforms like Slack are superior — at least, that’s what these platforms are touting. But they’re not having very much success.

• 86% of workers prefer email for communicating for business.
• 73% of millennials prefer email for business communication.

Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s easy. It’s universally accessible. It’s become part of our behaviour since we all got our first hotmail addresses in the late 1990s. And kudos to all the contrarians out there who had a “coolmail” address.

But here’s the best reason for sticking with email:

A recent study found a $44 return for every $1 spent on email marketing.

Yes, you read that right. A well-thought-out email marketing strategy can deliver a 440% return. So the million-dollar question becomes this: “What’s a well-thought-out email marketing strategy? The way we see it, it’s a 4-step process.

Step 1: Build a robust list

Take every opportunity to add more email addresses to your list. There’s no wrong way to do this. Some of the more common tactics include:

• Offering exclusive content in exchange for email addresses
• Inviting people to enter a contest by giving you their email addresses
• Adding a request for email addressesat the end of a blog post
• Creating social media posts that ask for email addresses
• Collecting email addresses one-to-one at trade shows or events

We came across this blog post that breaks down the value of an email address. It’s an interesting read, but the money shot of it all is this:not only is email the most effective form of marketing, it’s also the most profitable because you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get email addresses. You just have to give people a reason to offer you a place in their inboxes. And from there, the following equation applies:

# of contacts x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value = Revenue

 Now simply plug in your conversion rate and your average order value and you start to see what a quality marketing email campaign can do.

1000 contacts x 2% Conversion Rate x $10/order = $2,000

You didn’t spend any money. You didn’t run an ad. You sent an email.

Step 2: Increase your conversion rate

This is the key to maximizing the equation above: you have to get through people’s natural inclination to delete emails before they read them. And this is where you need a good copywriter.

We approach an email this way:

Subject lines— They’re everything. If they’re not compelling, the email won’t get read.

Headlines— Email readers really don’t have a lot of time. Get. To. The. Point.

Offer— What’s in it for the recipient?

Strong Call to Action— Get good at being direct in a friendly way. Tell people what you want them to do and why they should. Do that and they probably will.

Step 3: Be consistent

It doesn’t matter how often you communicate with the folks on your list. But whatever schedule you choose, stick to it. You win when people start to expect and look forward to your presence in their inboxes.

We send out a monthly email. People like it. And you will too. Sign up for it on the bottom left corner of our home page.

Half of copywriting is knowing when to stop writing

Young scribes new to copywriting have a tendency to overwrite. And they do it for different reasons. Some want to show off their vocabularies. Others want to be super-diligent in their explanations. A few draw their writing inspiration from the verbose masters of English literature like Charles Dickens who, while we love the guy, was most likely allergic to short sentences.

But here’s the thing about copywriting that separates it from every other form of writing out there: no one wants to read it.

That’s not to say they won’t read it. They will, but they have to be convinced. A big part of that convincing process comes down to time: you can’t waste a split-second of it because it’s without a doubt the most valuable commodity you, we and everyone on the planet has.

The reality of brevity

To write a little takes more time than to write a lot.

Axiomatically, that doesn’t make sense. But think about your own writing (like an email to a friend). If you just spew out whatever’s on your mind, you can write it, send it and be done. But if you go back, review what you wrote, take out sentences you think might offend them or be interpreted improperly, shorten your thoughts so you get the response you want and make sure your recipient fully understands what you’re saying, it’s going to take a lot longer.

Now imagine you’re trying to sell something: a product, a service, an idea. You’re competing with everyone else in the world trying to sell products, services and ideas, so you have to do it quickly. You’re competing with modern attention spans (that really shouldn’t be called spans at all because for something to span it should at least be more than two seconds long) so you have do it compellingly. And you’re competing with consumers who demand more than the facts. They want to be entertained. Their entire relationship with social media is about being entertained. They willingly give up their personal privacy to be entertained. So you have to make them laugh, cry or think.

And you have to do all that in a matter of seconds, lest you fade into the background of obscurity.

So when we come across a piece of copywriting that says everything it needs to say in a few choice words, we graciously tip our hats because it’s not easy.

The Economist has a rich history of brilliant copywriting. It helps that every ad they put out has the same message: read The Economist and you’ll be smarter. Each one’s better than the last one, but for us, this one sits alone at the top.

This one’s for Canadian Literacy Foundation’s fundraising for dyslexia research campaign. They could’ve spent all day going on about the science of dyslexia, its effect on children, and why it has to be researched and eradicated. But instead, in two words (well, one word and one kinda word) they demonstrated their value to the world. Genius.

We talked earlier in this post about being quick, compelling and entertaining. In three simple words, they nailed all three. You can’t read this headline and not feel your eyebrows and sides of your mouth rise uncontrollably.

Another three-word ad that says it all. Again, they could’ve gone all doom and gloom, showing sick people and dirty lungs or heart-broken widows. But instead, they did quick, compelling and entertaining in three words.

Four ads. Four categories. One copywriting style.

Publishing, charity, politics and health. That’s diversity right there. But the approach to the copywriting was the same: say it straight with a bit of style. In each of these cases, the writer had every opportunity to wax on for paragraphs. And they could’ve.

But they chose something else. It’s why their work is so respected. And why it works so well.

Technical Writing is The Opposite of Writing Technically

When you think of technical writing, do you think of big words and bigger equations, text that could put a person drowning in Red Bull to sleep and a complete lack of anything resembling creativity?

If so, then you’ve been exposed to bad technical writing.

Good technical writing is the opposite of all that. It has to be, or it’s not really doing its job.

What is technical writing and why is it so in demand?

Techwhirl provides a bang-on definition of technical writing: the practice of putting technical information into easily understandable language. It’s in high demand for two polar opposite reasons: too many experts and not enough experts.

Let’s look at both.

Too many experts means not enough understanding

The age of the generalist has gone the way of the dodo. Today, everyone is a specialist, sub-specialist or sub-sub-specialist. They know more about their narrow field of expertise than anyone else, and that knowledge acts as a bottleneck to understanding for everyone else.

Oftentimes, when one of these specialists attempts to explain what they know, it’s wrapped up in far too much jargon and inside information for anyone without their level of learning in the field to have any idea what it means.

And you can hardly fault the expert for that. After all, they understand the material perfectly well, and they probably spend most of their time with people who understand it too. To them, the complexity of the material is what makes it simple; they have no need to simplify further and no practice doing it.

This is where a good technical writer comes in. A technical writer worth his or her weight can read through the text and find the key messages or benefits that would impress a reader who needs to understand what the specialist is saying but doesn’t.

Served up simply, a layperson can understand what the material means, but more importantly, they can understand what it means for them.

Not enough experts means too much misunderstanding

Think about the typical business unit and how many roles are represented: technicians, operators, analysts, communicators, sales reps, account managers and lord knows how many more disciplines. Each of these people have a client they have to answer to, and the only thing more frustrating to a client than having to wait for answers from their suppliers or vendors is getting the wrong answers.

The problems with big multi-role teams is that (a) no one can be an expert in everything, (b) not everyone is available to answer technical questions about their part of the job when a client needs those answers and (c) if an expert is available to answer the question, it might not be satisfactory for the client (see previous section).

For this reason, big companies will invest in technical writing to put everyone on the same page. They’ll deliver what amounts to cheat sheets for everyone on the team that clearly and simply outlines the features and benefits of everyone else’s contributions so anyone can speak to anything confidently and accurately. 

Technical Writing Isn’t Creative? Ha!

Anyone can drop a zinger or throw some sarcastic shade at someone else. But only a highly creative person can pour through reams of information about hot mold injections, Copper Beryllium and Titanium-Zirconium Molybdenum and come back with something that a plant manager who dropped out of high school would understand, while at the same time pleasing the Double-PhD in Physics and Chemistry who created the technology.

And only a truly gifted creative writer can teach a boomer to program an iPhone.

4 qualities to look for in a technical writing vendor

 1. A diverse portfolio

You want a technical writer with demonstrated comfort in a variety of material. This shows you they know how to read and research, and they’re not reliant on their background for knowledge.

2. A universally easy writing style

You want anyone who picks up your material to be able to get it. And you don’t want them to have to work too hard.

3. Attention to detail

Technical writing is about getting the facts right and you want people who respect that. These are people who check, double-check and triple-check their work ¾including their emails to you.

4. Respect for deadlines

Technical writing is often associated with a presentation, launch, pitch or another time-sensitive event. Your technical writer should be consistent in delivering ahead of schedule.