The Copywriting Rules We Ignore

The rule I break is never starting a sentence with “And” or “Because”. I know it’s grammatically incorrect. But I don’t care. I start sentences with “And” all the time. And with “Because”, especially when answering a question. Or I expand it to “This is because…” to hammer a point home. It’s how we talk, which I try to stay true to when I write.

Not every client agrees. Just the other week, I got this feedback on a first piece of work for a new client: “Please can we try not to start a sentence with ‘and’, ‘but’ or ‘because’ as I always try not to do this. I hear my mum’s headteacher voice in my head when I read it back.”

Fair enough. She’s the client and I’ll write how she’s comfortable. But I still said my piece: “Of course, although it’s out of date in terms of writing like we speak. Yes, grammatically incorrect in academic terms. But perfectly acceptable for readability in marketing copy.”

No doubt it won’t be the last time I break this rule on purpose and get called out for it. But, lecture-style copy doesn’t sell. Human, relatable copy, on the other hand, does.

Conventional wisdom has it that the About Me page is a misnomer and it should focus entirely on the customer and their challenges. ‘You’ is more important than ‘we’ and we should avoid talking about the company too much!

While I agree no one wants to read a brag list of all your achievements or a blow-by-blow account of your company’s history, customers are still interested in who they do business with (or buy from). It’s the first page I check on a website. If I can’t get a sense of the company because they’re too busy empathising with my challenges, then I leave with a slightly icky feeling and wonder if it’s a scam company pretending to be local while operating from the other side of the world. When anyone can sound slick at the touch of a button, our humanity is only going to get more important.

I recently worked on a website copy project for a solopreneur, and yes, ‘me’ did feature quite heavily in her About page. We left the challenges to the service pages, which was helpful as they were addressing different audiences.

It has been decreed that when writing brand copy, you must start with the “why”. According to Simon Sinek, organisations must answer the question, “Why do you exist?” and the answer cannot be “to make a profit”. Thanks to Sinek’s TED Talk, we seem to have collectively accepted that all organisations need a founding “purpose, cause or belief” if they are to succeed. Be wildly aspirational like Apple, he tells us, have a dream like Martin Luther King.

I’ve sat in workshops where well-meaning brand agencies impose a “why” onto small businesses. The founders of said businesses are people who worked in an industry, spotted a way of doing things a bit better, and did it. When the agency reverse-engineers some lofty purpose for them, they’re a little too embarrassed to admit that their intentions were never that noble, their ambitions never that Apple.

Ultimately, this spurious “why” gets etched into mission/vision statements in the Brand Guidelines, which copywriters feel they have to follow, and they end up producing copy that just doesn’t ring true.

But you can override this rule – if you get in early. In a recent workshop, I probed the “why” that the agency had concocted for the business. The founder then agreed that, actually, they didn’t launch their B2B consultancy with any particular humanitarian goal in mind. That freed us up to explore what’s genuinely distinctive about the brand. With that established, I wrote copy that readers can trust because it’s grounded in reality.

I often choose delight over speed and write for memorability instead of conversion efficiency. For example I’ll retain a joke, rhythm or unusual (even vernacular) phrase, when a simpler version would’ve communicated faster.

Linked to this, I frequently wander off on tangents – because they create texture – and then return. This is a speaker-y thing I do that has influenced my writing. I think I like to spend a bit of time making readers care about the point before I eventually reveal it.

The last time I did it? This morning, in a corporate profile.

Without a doubt, mine is: “Just get a first draft done, you can always edit it later.”

Whenever I’ve tried this, I soon find myself wrestling with a slippery, unwieldy monster. Octopus-like: legs (sentences) and tentacles (words) everywhere, none of which you’re happy with. Editing something that needs a lot of work, for me, makes the process a billion times harder.

Better to let your ideas percolate, take a walk, chant, jot down some thoughts, stare at a blank page and then – BAM – write out a few hundred words of pristine, clean-as-a-bone copy that barely needs any tinkering.