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Nailing Down Your Ideas - How to Fix Fuzzy Ideas In Your Copy

Lesson 12 from: From Structure to Style: Master Your Copywriting

Shani Raja

Nailing Down Your Ideas - How to Fix Fuzzy Ideas In Your Copy

Lesson 12 from: From Structure to Style: Master Your Copywriting

Shani Raja

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Lesson Info

12. Nailing Down Your Ideas - How to Fix Fuzzy Ideas In Your Copy

Lessons

Class Trailer

Chapter 1: Copywriting Fundamentals

1

Class Introduction - Overview of the Course Content

03:50
2

The Five Aspirations of a Superior Copywriter

05:28
3

The Importance of Defining Your Intention & Audience

06:02
4

The “Secret Sauce” of Good Copywriting

04:29
5

Quiz - Chapter 1

Chapter 2: Simplicity

6

Introduction - The Power of Simplicity

02:06

Lesson Info

Nailing Down Your Ideas - How to Fix Fuzzy Ideas In Your Copy

in this lesson, you're going to learn how to sharpen your writing by pinning down or nailing down your meaning really well, by the end you'll know how to avoid leaving readers confused by sentences that may be too fuzzy to immediately click. Let's start by looking at an example of a really unclear sentence from a made up blog post. World renewed author, Jake Bliss said Today Nine Days is a new book that was mostly written in the basement during a book signing, although with the rest of the chapters that would have been written in a nearby park. Now, this has just got so much wrong with it in terms of clarity. Right? Pause the video and see if you can spot. First of all, how many things in terms of clarity are wrong with it. Okay, well, first off, there's an actual mistaken word there. It should be world renowned, not world renewed. Right? So that gets us off to a bad start. Second, there's a lack of clarity about whether it is in fact Jake talking about his own book or perhaps Jake tal...

king about someone else's book, I assume it's his own book. Thirdly, there is some doubt as to what the actual book title is, right As the writer hasn't used any clear indicators such as bold or italics or even appropriate capital letters. It's impossible to know where the book title begins and where it ends. It could be today. nine days or it might simply be nine days where the word today refers to when Jake Bliss actually said this. Now look at where during a book signing is placed within the sentence. It makes the sentence really fuzzy, doesn't it? Because it's hard to pin it down properly to the rest of the sentence. The tensors are also all messed up, various different tenses are used, such as was would have been and is making the sentence really hard to navigate for a reader and finally the phrase would have been written in a nearby park, makes it difficult to determine whether those chapters had been written in a nearby park or whether they may have been written in a nearby park, but actually we're not. Now you may have noticed even more problems, but let me ask you now to try to rewrite the sentence after thinking about what the writer might have been trying to say here. Note that some guess work may be required and maybe try also making use of some of the simplicity tactics that I shared with you earlier to help make the writing as tight as possible to Okay, well, how about if we rewrote it like this at a book signing today, world renowned author Jake Bliss said most chapters in his new book, Nine Days were written in his basement and the rest in a nearby park. Now there are other, possibly even better ways of doing it, but I just wanted to show you how to make a really foggy sentence much clearer for your readers. Now, here's another type of out of focus sentence that I often see. A Microsoft press release said it plans to open several new high street stores. What's wrong with that? Well, it sounds as if the press release rather than the company itself is planning to open the stores, doesn't it, the way it's written. So how would you fix it to nail down the meaning more precisely? Well, here's one way Microsoft said in a press release that it plans to open several new high street stores, and that gives us just that much more clarity and focus, doesn't it? So just make sure you're never being half asked with your writing or editing always aimed to make sure that every point is abundantly and unambiguously clear to as many of your readers as possible. Now, next, we're going to look at how writing can lose clarity to when we don't take enough care with where we place words within a sentence.

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