Copywriting Tip: Sometimes the worst grammar is the right grammar
you don't speak perfectly
but you write like a scholar
I am sure I'm opening up a can of worms here. And I know that we'll get at least one complaint over this, but some times--at certain times--the worst grammar you can use is the very grammar your teachers always told you to observe: the correct grammar.
This is a bit of a breach from our normal business email oriented copywriting tips, but lately I've read a few stories of complaints over informal grammar and language use and I have come to the realization that a lot of people think that all writing should have perfect grammar.
That simply is not the case.
A professor of creative writing once told me that the worst thing you can ever do to your writing is get a PHD. He said that the institutionalization of grammar drives away the flavour of language, and that the key to real authorship is knowing grammar, but also knowing when to break it.
The truth is, the voice of the author depends on how they break the rules. Take the following passage:
"In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake"
Can you count the grammatical errors? Go ahead and count them, then stop, put the grammar out of your mind and read it. It's a wonderfully written passageand is filled with the natural voice of the narrator (indeed McCarthy is considered one of the great American authors) .
Now as a business you don't want this, right? You want perfect natural prose that speaks of the "professionalness" of your company. You want perfect grammar that shows the detail oriented nature of your staff. And if you work for a business that markets to other businesses you might want that, but only because its businessmen who think like that.
But casual readers don't read based on rules. The only rules most people observe is the length they pause when hitting a comma, or period, the focus when reaching an emphasized word or a dash.
The truth is, voice is established not by how it follows rules, but how it breaks them. Casual grammar (particularly not caring about a lot of the advice that we give) defines a lot of what makes a voice casual and a casual voices, quite frankly, is more enjoyable to read. This isn't to say that bad grammar is necessarily easier to read--anything is further from the case. However, smart use of casual grammar can give text a flavour simply unattainable without it, keeping the readers attention and coaxing them along. Take MarketingSherpa's case study on lead nurturing (sorry, registration required). Amidst other changes, they found that making the tone more casual increased the conversion rate of their emails.
Thus, take our copywriting tips with a grain of salt. These aren't rules to obey, they are rules to understand, and then--sometimes--to break.
If you like this post then please consider subscribing to our RSS feed.
The key is "judiciously". If you're just breaking rules because you don't know better, it's going to be obvious to some readers. And you'll look dumb. Definitely not an impression you want to leave with your readers!
Wood: "The danger is not just melodrama but imprecision and, occasionally, something close to nonsense. “All the Pretty Horses” opens with a now celebrated description of a train: “It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes.” It is dawn, hence the train’s headlamp is seen as a satellite of the coming sun, and I suppose the wormlike train is vaguely phallic, hence “ribald.” But surely “ribald” is a meaning too far. Does a train ever seem “ribald”?" Yes, Oh Learned Wood, a train can indeed seem ribald as demonstrated in the quoted passage in the context of "All the Pretty Horses". As if to underscore his educated blindness, Wood goes on to disparage McCarthy's depcition of a "small-town policeman" as a man
possessed of dignity and principle. It is possible for such traits to exist outside of Ivory Towers and High-Hat, toney publications. Of course, McCarthy's passage is descriptive of the quality of the small-town
policeman and not a fancied up depiction of his speech. But Wood is thrown off-stride by the authoritatively jarring yet sublime use of language by McCarthy. See, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/07/25/050725...
I know how difficult it is to track these things, so thought I'd point it out.
-Billy
And that review is pretty pathetic. I haven't read All The Pretty Horses yet (I'm saving The Border Trilogy), but the image of a train is fantastic.
What struck me about the review, however, was how the quoted passages, far from supporting the criticism, refuted it. There's no accounting for
taste, and I suppose there's a certain thrill in trying to deflate the high-flown McCarthy.
In terms of the context of the original post, while McCarthy is certainly an apt example of how the rules should be broken, its a dangerous one, because its a
butcher's tool in less skilled hands.
To focus on grammar is to miss the point. The absolute top priority in business writing is readability. That is, making sure that the person reading your words understands what you meant by them.
Other considerations exist - professionalism, the right 'voice' - but they are always subordinate to readability.
Where correct grammar increases readability, then it is the right choice. Where it decreases it, it is not.