I’m a sucker for an alliterative list.

When a client asked me to write a piece on the 28 languages now available on her company’s technology, I wrote this lead:

“Whether you speak Chinese or Czech, Korean or Catalan, Finnish or French, Tetra radios speak your language.”

Got a list? Why not alliterate a little?

“A spoonful of alliteration helps the medicine go down,” write Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

It helps the listings go down, too.

Siddhartha Mukherjee uses this approach to communicate a list of side effects in The Emperor of All Maladies:

“The acute, short-term effects of nitrogen mustard — the respiratory complications, the burnt skin, the blisters, the blindness — were so amply monstrous that its long-term effects were overlooked.”

Help readers remember. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink writes that there are three reasons we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age:

“Abundance, Asia, Automation”

Alliterating a short list like this serves as a mnemonic: It makes the list easier to remember, especially for listeners at TED conferences, where Pink is a frequent speaker.

“Alliterative words … give listeners’ and readers’ minds an auditory hook on which to hang a memory,” writes Sam Horn, president of Action Seminars/Consulting, “Alliterating the key words tickles our intellect and makes ideas easier to grasp and remember.”

Communicate range. Alliteration works for a range as well as a list.

In Innocent, Scott Turow writes:

“But even by the standards of somebody whose emotional temperature usually ranges from blah to blue, I’ve been in a bad way awaiting today.”

I alliterate both a range and a list in my bio:

“Ann’s workshops take her from Hollywood to Helsinki, helping communicators in organizations like NASA, Nike and Nokia polish their skills and find new inspiration for their work.”

Alliterate a list today. Have a long, random list to alliterate? Use The Alphabetizer to quickly sort your list into alphabetical order.

How can you use alliteration to make your language more lyrical?

Play with your words

Want to master the art of making your copy more creative and engaging through wordplay?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to write creative copy for your organization.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to polish your creative writing skills with one-on-one writing coaching. And find out about Ann’s next creative writing webinar.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of tipsheets on playing with your words at RevUpReadership.com.
• Learn more: Get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.

You could just say that in Cleopatra’s time, women had few legal rights. Or you could illustrate that point with an example, as Stacy Schiff does in Cleopatra: A Life:

“[I]n a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills.”

SHOW ME Illustrate your point with an example, story, analogy or other concrete detail

They may be the two most beautiful words in the English language: for example. Concrete examples like Darth Vader toothbrushes and Pepto-Bismol-slathered schnauzers change the pictures in people’s heads and move readers to act.

One way to write concretely is to lead by example. Present an illustration — a “for instance” — to prove your point.

Play it SAFE.

Examples are just one kind of concrete material you can use to prove your assertions. Diane West and Jennifer Dreyer of Tamayo Consulting offer the mnemonic SAFEST as a way to remember to add other concrete elements to your copy:

• Statistics
• Analogies
• Facts
• Examples
• Stories
• Testimonials

How can you add examples, statistics, analogies and other concrete details to make your message more vivid?

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

A good sound bite can help support your points, give your story a human voice, change the pace of the piece and add creativity and color to your copy. Unfortunately, quotations in business communications often sound as if they were manufactured by a computer, not spoken by a human being.

Want to learn to write better sound bites? If so, please join me for PRSA’s Nov. 10 webinar, “Craft Snappy Sound Bites.” In this session, you will learn how to transform your quotations from blah to brilliant.

You’ll learn how to:

• Make quotes crisp, clear and concise, and how to avoid over-quoting, hiccup quotes and an irritating “bumpety-bump” formula that lulls your readers to sleep.
• Peel back your quotes to make them tighter and more interesting.
• Write a colorful, quotable quote and watch it get picked up by the media.
• Write attribution like a pro, and use some simple tricks and rules of thumb that will give your writing polish and authority.
• Find and craft testimonials.

Hope to “see” you there!

Lear about my other webinars.

The other day, I was brainstorming with clients for ways to make this abstract lead more concrete:

“As the weather warms up and the end of the school year looms, a familiar dread emerges among parents of preteens, middle schoolers and high school students: What will keep their children busy this summer?”

WRITER'S BEST FRIEND Turn abstract ideas into concrete images like this schnauzer. Photo by Happy Batatinha

To make an abstract idea concrete, you might:

• Come up with a creative technique to illustrate your story angle.
• Run down a list of types of concrete details until you find one that fits your story.
• Ask questions that drill down from the abstract— “What will keep kids busy this summer?” — to the concrete.

We tried the third approach.

“What have your kids done that’s kept them engaged over the summer?” we asked. “What have they done when they were bored?”

And from the back of the room, Greg Smith, learning design specialist for Thrivent Financial, shouted out:

“Paint the schnauzer.”

“Paint the schnauzer” is my new mantra for finding examples that prove the point. That’s important. Because everything we know about how people respond to information tells us that they’re more likely to pay attention to, understand, remember and act on concrete messages than abstract ones.

Name names, number numbers.

One way to make your copy more concrete is to cite specific details. So name names and number numbers.

William H. Broad names names to make this passage about the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge more concrete:

“The span, at the time the world’s third-longest suspension bridge, crossed a strait of Puget Sound near Tacoma, Wash. A few months after its opening, high winds caused the bridge to fail in a roar of twisted metal and shattered concrete. No one died. The only fatality was a black cocker spaniel named Tubby.”

Poor Tubby. But notice how “black cocker spaniel” is way more effective than “dog” and how “Tubby” is way more effective than “black cocker spaniel” alone. As The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark counsels, “Get the name of the dog.”

Smith’s schnauzer’s name? Frisky.

But I’m still not seeing poor painted Frisky. We need to step down a rung on the ladder of abstraction to make him more vivid. So we asked, what color did the kids paint him?

“They used Pepto-Bismol,” Smith said.

Now I see.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a “Make Your Copy More Creative” workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next “Art of the Storyteller” webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

‘Applewood-smoked bacon’ just tastes better

Turns out a Southwestern Tex-Mex salad by any other name would not taste as good.

Vivid menu descriptions — “applewood-smoked bacon,” “Maytag blue cheese” and “buttery plump pasta,” for instance — can increase restaurant sales up to 27 percent, according to research by Brian Wansink.

Furthermore, diners feel more satisfied after eating a Southwestern Tex-Mex Salad than after eating the same salad with a blander name.

So why do these adjectives sell while other adjectives just get in the way?

Deliver real meaning.

Adjectives work when they deliver real meaning and not “the illusion of meaning without its substance.”

Roger Dooley, blogger at Neuromarketing, suggests using adjectives that are:

• Vivid. “Freshly cracked,” “light-and-fluffy,” “handcrafted,” “triple-basted” and “slow-cooked” paint pictures in the readers’ minds. Those pictures are more compelling than, say, a plain, old omelet.
• Sensory. I, for one, want my bacon applewood smoked. Descriptions like this engage the readers’ senses.
• Emotional or nostalgic. “‘Aged Vermont cheddar,’” he writes, “evokes images of crusty New England dairymen rather than Kraft mega-plants.” “Boodie’s Chicken Liver Masala” and “Grandma’s zucchini cookies” also evoke emotion and nostalgia.
• Specific. “Wild Alaskan” salmon conjures up “visions of vigorous, healthy fish swimming in pristine, unpolluted streams,” he writes.
• Branded. I strongly prefer Maytag, Stilton and Roquefort to plain old blue cheese … even though I’m not that clear on the difference.

Bottom line: Sprinkle in a few adjectives when they’ll change the picture in the reader’s head or otherwise engage the senses. But don’t use modifiers — gorgeous, great, groundbreaking — that just take up space.

Cut Through the Clutter

Want to make every piece you write easier to read and understand?

•  Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team in to handle a special writing or editing project.
•  Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Cut Through the Clutter workshop.
•  Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to cut the clutter in your own copy in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Cut Through the Clutter webinar.
•  Learn more: Read Ann’s Cut Through the Clutter manual. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.

About Ann Wylie

Ann Wylie is president of Wylie Communications Inc., a training, writing and consulting firm. She works with communicators who want to reach more readers and with organizations that want to get the word out. Wylie is the author of RevUpReadership.com, a toolbox for writers, and Wylie’s Writing Tips, a free e-zine. She has earned more than 60 awards, including two IABC Gold Quills, for her work.

Copyright © 2011 Ann Wylie. All rights reserved.

Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of Cut Through the Clutter tipsheets on RevUpReadership.com.

Can you measure how interesting your copy is? Readability expert Rudolph Flesch believed that you can.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL To make your copy more interesting, populate it with people.

Flesch is famous for developing the Flesch Reading Ease, one of the most popular and widely used readability tests. It uses word length and sentence length to measure how easy your copy is to read.

Less famously, Flesch also created a formula for measuring “human interest” in your copy. It uses references to people and conversational language to measure how interesting your copy is to read. And interesting copy, Flesch said, is more readable.

“The structural shortcoming of the [Flesch Reading Ease] formula is the fact that it does not always show the high readability of direct, conversational writing,” Flesch wrote in “A New Readability Yardstick.”

The original readability formula, Flesch wrote, “consistently rates the popular Reader’s Digest more readable than the sophisticated New Yorker magazine, although many educated readers consider the Reader’s Digest dull and the sprightly New Yorker ten times as readable.”

So how interesting is your copy?

Run the human-interest test on your copy.

Flesch’s human interest score hinges on two measures:

1. Personal words. They include:

• Nouns with natural gender, such as mother, father, Frank and Opal
• Pronouns except for neuter pronouns — he and she, for instance, but not it
• The words people (used with the plural verb) and folks

2. Personal sentences. These test how interesting and conversational the copy is. Count:

• Quotations, whether marked by quotation marks or not
• Imperative sentences, or those addressed to the reader, including questions, commands and requests
• Exclamations
• Grammatically incomplete sentences whose meaning the reader must infer from the context

The higher the percentage of personal words and personal sentences, the higher the human interest score.

Which is more interesting?

In one application of his formula, Flesch analyzed articles from Life and The New Yorker that covered the same topic.

I find The New Yorker passage much more interesting than the Life passage. But exactly how much more interesting is it, and why? According to Flesch’s human interest test, the New Yorker piece is 757 times more interesting:

• With 0 personal words and 11 personal sentences per 290 words, the Life article scores a 7, or “dull.”
• With 11 personal words and 41 personal sentences, the New Yorker piece gets a score of 53, or “highly interesting.”

Is your copy dull — or highly interesting?

To make it more engaging, increase your human interest score.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Read more: Get the full text of Rudolf Flesch’s “A New Readability Yardstick” (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 32. No. 3, June 1948) in William H. DuBay’s Unlocking Language: The Classic Readability Studies (PDF).
• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to make your copy more creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the full story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

BEING THERE Go to the scene and observe, then recreate that experience for your reader through description.

For his latest book, Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee:

• Rode from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a 65-foot, 18-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats
• Attended ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in 20-foot scale models
• Traveled by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways that Henry David Thoreau navigated in a homemade skiff in 1839

To get their stories, other writers have journeyed with a teenage boy from the Honduras to North Carolina to find his mother, eaten nothing but Big Macs for a month and traveled cross-country with Einstein’s brain.

When it comes to description, there’s nothing like being there. And there’s nothing like taking your reader to the scene through observational stories.

For an observational story, you go on an adventure, then recreate that experience in a collection of scenes for your reader.

Make mine short.

Most of us don’t have the rest of our lives to research a story. But you don’t have to drive Einstein’s brain around America to pull this story form off.

You can research an observational story in:

• One day. As an editorial assistant for Folio: magazine, Steve Wilson once spent 14 hours hanging out at a Manhattan bookstore to write an observational story about how people looked at magazines.
• Half a day. Wilson’s previous job was tougher: He tested rain gear for another magazine by going through a car wash on foot nine times. (Even I have never asked an writer to get pressure-washed and sprayed with hot wax more than eight times.)
• A few hours. I once turned a profile of a personal nutritionist into an observational story by having her give my pantry a makeover (she discovered a Chef Boyardee pizza mix from 1989), then going grocery shopping with her.
• Two hours or less. A friend who works for H&R Block tries out the company’s tax software before writing an observational pitch about it.

Road trip

For a profile of a Farmland Industries CEO, I once spent a day with Harry Cleberg touring the Kansas City Farmland facilities. Rather than a traditional profile, I used vignettes from the road to reveal Cleberg’s character in little glimpses, as it had been revealed to me. Here’s the lead:

“His desk sits in the corner office of Farmland Industries’ headquarters building in North Kansas City, but Harry Cleberg’s heart is here: among the 50-pound bags of fertilizer, soybean seed and milk replacer for calves at the Central Cooperative Inc. in Adrian, Mo.

“He gossips and teases, chatting with owner Ben Griffith and manager Owen Highly about the height of corn in Colby, Kan., and how much milo got planted before this early-June rain turned the fields into muck.

“’How many people work at a local co-op?’ he asks the staff at large, scooping a fistful of dried molasses out of a bag and offering me a taste of the feed sweetener.

“’About half!’ he answers with a squeal, his eyebrows jutting like exclamation points from his wire-rimmed glasses. And Owen and Roger and Chuck, gathered around to shoot the breeze on this grizzly morning with Harry — Harry, just plain Harry, none of this ‘Mr.’ stuff for him — bust out laughing, too.”

Granted, I’m no McPhee. But I did wind up with a much livelier story because of the time I spent in the field.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of tipsheets on creative copywriting at RevUpReadership.com.

There are two kinds of details: realistic and telling.

ATTENTION TO DETAIL Use telling details to reveal character, illustrate larger values and support the meaning of the story.

“If someone is bald, that’s realistic detail,” writes narrative nonfiction author Lauren Kessler. “If someone chooses to deal with baldness by getting $3,000 hair implants, that’s a status detail. It is a particular that offers insight into character.”

We want more of the latter and less of the former. Your details should, as Donald M. Murray writes in Writing to Deadline,“support the action and meaning of the story.”

Outer details reveal inner character.

For Full Court Press, Kessler’s book about women’s college sports, she noted the head coach’s hands:

“Her nails were perfectly shaped and always — even when she was dressed in sweats and her size 11 Nikes — professionally manicured. That’s status detail. It reflects a choice she made and offers insight into the care she took to preserve her femininity in the masculine world of sports. It is a small detail that illuminates larger values.”

In An Object of Beauty, Steve Martin reveals inner character through outward appearance:

“His skin was mottled red, sanded to a shine by one too many chemical peels.”

And a Harper’s Magazine profile turns mobster John Gotti’s hair into a psychiatric evaluation:

“Each bluish-gray streak was brushed back and up to make the entire head of hair perfect, arranged, untouchable — a head of stone, suggestive of control and power. He could butt your face with it. … The hair shows it all. Gotti is making myth of himself. He presents himself to jury and press as a human become statue, looming in stature, a temple god south of Rome somewhere.”

How can you find the details that will illuminate your subject?

Find meaningful specifics.

Here are three ways to find telling details:

1. Be there. Hang up the phone, back away from the keyboard and go to the scene to observe. You won’t come up with good description if you never leave your desk.

“I learn by going where I have to go,” wrote American poet Theodore Roethke.

So:

• Interview subject matter experts in their natural habitat.
• Take a field trip.
• Go on more tours and demonstrations.

“Place can provoke new information, funny stories, and great dialogue,” suggests Jeff Klinkenberg, author of Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators and other narrative nonfiction books about Florida. “The way people talk, and what they talk about, is influenced by their surroundings. They may whisper in church, shout on the basketball court, talk nonsense after a couple of tall boys. Or they may chat about something remarkable they’ve just seen, something important.

“When you interview somebody at home, ask for a tour. Every picture, every book, every piece of furniture, can tell a story.”

2. Tune into your five senses. “The question is not what you look at, but what you see,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in an 1851 journal.

And don’t just see, counsels Kevin McGrath, assistant metro editor/nights at The Wichita Eagle: Capture “not just sights but sounds, smells, actions, reactions, interactions, bits of conversation, facial expressions, posture, clothing and the state it’s in (crisply pressed, badly wrinkled, sweaty, dirty, raggedy, shirttails hanging out etc.), how things look in relation to their surroundings, etc.”

As you observe, look for all kinds of color.

“Does a clock on the wall of a high-powered executive tick-tock relentlessly, like a metronome for his pressure-packed career?” prompts David A. Fryxell, former editor of Writer’s Digest. “Do the floors of the manufacturing magnate’s office tremble with the distant pulse of the factory floor? Does the home smell of freshly baked bread, the production plant of ozone, the farm of recently spread manure?”

3. Take more notes than you use. You can always toss out whatever doesn’t make it into your piece. Pulitzer Prize-winning narrative nonfiction journalist John McPhee, for instance, might take 10,000 pages of notes for a single book.

And don’t just write down what your subject says, Fryxell suggests. Note his looks and mannerisms too.

“Do his eyebrows twitch like frenzied caterpillars when he talks?” he prompts. “What’s he wearing? Anything sticking out of his shirt pocket?”

These details will help you reveal character, illustrate larger values and support the meaning of the story.

Make Your Copy More Creative.

Want to use creative copy to communicate better?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next Art of the Storyteller webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. Find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

___

Sources: David A. Fryxell, “The Observation Occupation,” Writer’s Digest, October 1997

Lauren Kessler, “The Search for Meaning,” Writer’s Digest, April 1998

Jeff Klinkenberg, “Writing About Place: The Boundaries of a Story,” St. Petersburg Times, January 1995

Kevin McGrath, “Scene-setting moments,” WriterL

Creative copy can attract or distract

Creative copy is powerful. It attracts attention, helps people learn and remember — even makes them more creative, according to the research.

But the power to attract may also distract readers from your main idea. If your “seductive details” don’t illustrate your key points, they can:

• Draw attention away from more important ideas (Luftig & Greeson, 1983)
• Disrupt text processing (Garner, Gillingham & White, 1989)
• Cause readers to forget the important information while remembering the interesting stuff (Baird & Hidi, 1984)

“Interesting but unimportant information frequently disrupts the learning of more important ideas,” writes Suzanne Hidi, associate member, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Centre for Applied Cognitive Science.

Avoid ‘Visual Vampires.’

Call these interesting but unimportant elements “Visual Vampires.” That’s PreTesting’s term for images that attract audience members in television ads but that don’t draw them to the product.

PreTesting is a Tenafly, N.J., company that gauges consumers’ reactions to ads by measuring their “saccadic” eye movements, or how fast their eyes vibrate.

Ads featuring men with wacky, red, pigtail wigs (Wendy’s), dogs wearing dentures (Citi) and an exotic woman stretching (Hormel) all grabbed attention. But they failed to keep it long enough to for viewers to read the copy or hear about the products.

Build an argument.

So take a tip from Hemingway. Ask, are your creative elements architecture, helping you build your argument? Or are they interior design, just putting wallpaper over your message?

If they’re interior design, they could be distracting readers from your key ideas. Instead, support your abstract, important ideas with concrete, interesting material.

Remember: It’s not enough to make your copy interesting. Our job is to, in the words of James Fallows, author of Breaking the News, “make the important interesting.”

___

Sources: Suzanne Hidi, “Interest and Its Contribution as a Mental Resource for Learning,” Review of Educational Research, Winter 1990, Vol. 60, No. 4, pp. 549-571

Kenneth Hein, “Beware of Visual Vampires, Warns Measurement Firm,” Brandweek, Nov. 26, 2007

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a “Make Your Copy More Creative” workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to Make Your Copy More Creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next “Art of the Storyteller” webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership.Find dozens of creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.

Did you ever take your mom’s toaster apart to figure out how it worked?

BEG, BORROW OR STEAL Imitation is the sincerest form of professional development

You can do the same thing with writing.

It’s called modeling the masters: studying the best writing out there for technique, form and process, then incorporating what you’ve learned into your own copy. It’s the best way I know to polish your skills.

To get started, choose a piece of writing you love. Then take it apart and put it back together until you understand why you like it and what the writer did to make it that way.

In my clip file, for instance, I have a short piece about Las Vegas from Time magazine. I collected it for a single sentence:

“Lounge music may be to the symphony
what Velveeta is to cheese — but hey! —
it’s all part of what make Las Vegas great.”

Take it apart.

Here’s what I love about that passage:

• The analogy format (blank is to blank what blank is to blank)
• The word “Velveeta” (cheesy brand names are always fun)
• The full sentence with an exclamation point between the dashes

Identify the template.

So now you know what to do: Write a sentence with two comparisons compared to each other, a cheesy brand name and a full sentence with an explanation point between dashes in the middle. The template looks like this:

“Blank may be to blank what (funny brand name) is to blank — hypershort sentence! — something.”

Put it back together.

When I asked participants in a workshop to model that passage, they came up with:

“Youth hostels may be to the Hyatt what love beads are to diamonds — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes your Adventures Ltd. vacation great.”

“Facilities Management may be to corporate America what ‘Baywatch’ is to ‘Masterpiece Theater’ — but hey! — facilities don’t manage themselves.”

I’m not really sure that second one works. But I do know this: You’ll see me write “something may be to something what ‘Baywatch’ is to ‘Masterpiece Theater’” before the year is out.

Try it yourself.

Now I’ve got one for you to model — this passage from Loren D. Estleman’s The Midnight Man:

“It was one of those gummy mornings we get all through July and August, when the warm wet towel on your face is the air you’re breathing, and the headache you wake up with is the same one you took to bed the night before. Milk turns in the refrigerator. Doors swell. Flies clog the screens gasping for oxygen. Everything you touch sticks, including the receiver you pick up just to stop the bell from jangling loose your tender brain.”

Take it apart. Find the template. Then use the template to write your own passage using Estlemen’s techniques.

Email me the best Estleman by April 21, and I’ll send you a little surprise.

Make Your Copy More Creative

Want to communicate better with creative copy?

• Get it off your desk: Invite Ann’s team to handle a creative writing or editing project.
• Polish staff skills: Bring Ann to your organization for a “Make Your Copy More Creative” workshop.
• Boost your own abilities: Work with Ann to make your copy more creative in one-on-one writing coaching. Or find out about Ann’s next “Art of the Storyteller” webinar.
• Learn more: Read Ann’s learning tools on storytelling, metaphor and human interest. And get free writing tips every month when you subscribe to our e-zine.
• Join the club: Get the whole story in the latest issue of Rev Up Readership. And find creative copywriting tipsheets at RevUpReadership.com.