One copywriter on The Crew recently wrote a landing page for a client.
The copywriter used a few literary devices, like rhetorical questions and metaphors.
The client liked it, but responded by asking:
“What are your rules for this copy? What are our rules about whether we should be using metaphors or not? What about whether we should be allowed to use rhetorical questions or not? I don’t see what the underlying structure is here.”
This is an amateur copywriting belief.
Why is this amateur copywriting?
The belief that you need to have an ultra-specific, sentence-level set of rules for your brand’s copy is wrong.
And it’s more common than you may think. Style guides will have rules like “we don’t use contractions” or “we never use m-dashes in our writing.”
What do these rules actually accomplish?
The short answer is, they usually accomplish nothing.
How to write better copy than just rule-based copy?
Instead of working from a set of arbitrary rules, the better approach is to work backwards from your ultimate goal: What you want the reader to take away from the writing.
With that goal in mind, you write the absolute best piece of copy you can.
… And then you tweak things at the sentence level.
Want more?
And if you’re hungry for more counter-narrative copywriting insights like this one, you can always get a Stacked Marketer Pro subscription and take our Copywriting Essentials Course.
It’ll have you producing better copy in about two hours.
