Do This to Become an Instantly Better Writer

I am working right now on putting together a masterclass on copywriting. It is. I’m trying to lay out every single thing that I have learned over the years about putting words to pages that then translate into influencing somebody’s behavior, because that’s really, at the end of the day, what copywriting is the ability to use your words in a way that impacts another person’s behavior. A lot of times, we’re using words on a page to get somebody to buy our thing. That’s the more traditional understanding of copywriting that a lot of people think of. But I think of copywriting even more holistically. It’s just influential or persuasive communication. And that doesn’t even have to be through the written word.

It could be through the spoken word. The spoken word, when you are trying to influence somebody else’s behavior, is a form of copywriting. At least that’s how I think about it. We can nitpick that and say, no, that’s actually a different category of thing. But that’s how I think about copywriting. It’s not just about words on a page. Anyway. I’m putting together this masterclass on copywriting because I think this is when I think back on, like, what’s the most lucrative skill within the world of entrepreneurship and business? Regardless of your service, your product doesn’t really matter what kind of business that you have.

I believe the ability to speak influentially, to communicate your ideas with impact, that drives another person’s behavior. I think that is the most lucrative skill, because once you have it, you can literally put words on a page, imprint, money. It’s like, it’s incredible how valuable this skill is. So I’m putting together this class. I’m wildly excited about this. There’s very few topics that I get wildly excited about, but this one is because it allows me to talk about a whole slew of topics, including psychology. Because to be a good copywriter, to be able to influence somebody else’s behavior, you have to have a deep understanding of human psychology. So there’s a section in here to talking very deeply about psychology.
There’s another about storytelling, just another about the act, the physical act of writing itself. And I love writing, and I don’t love writing. I love having written. But the reason is because writing is difficult. Writing is very, very difficult. But I wanted to share with you guys today in this episode, one of the most powerful tools or tricks or ideas to becoming a more impactful writer. And it’s a very simple, very, very simple thing, which is to pretty much have. That’s a really weird word.
Have the words that you use. Let me try to rephrase that, because that is poorly. That’s a poorly constructed sentence. When you are trying to communicate something, when you’re trying to write something out, take the words that initially come out, that’s your first draft, and then try to cut it in half and use exactly half as many words to communicate the same idea. Sometimes you won’t be able to do this. Sometimes you just simply need all the words to explain the situation. Whatever. But more often than not, the difference between my first draft and my final draft is the final draft is my first draft, minus around 20%.
So if I write, say, 10,000 words, then my final draft will likely be around 8500, maybe 8000 words. That’s a lot of cutting, that’s a lot of editing. And just as a general rule, the more clear and, like, the more concise you can be in your word usage, the more clear your message is going to be. And you don’t. A lot of times we use adverbs, we know we shouldn’t use those. Like, those are really, really, really bad. Right. We know to get rid of those filler words, but they still have a way of creeping in there because we think we need to add more context than we do, we think we need to be more grammatically correct than we do.
And just as a good writing exercise is to take whatever you’re trying to communicate and then cut it in half, treat every word as though you had a budget, tell yourself, I only have $1,000 to write this piece of writing, and each word is going to cost me dollar ten, right? Or maybe it’s a $100 whatever. Like, set your set the challenge that it’s a difficult. And just by going through this and thinking, how can I make this more sustainable, more concise? That is a very powerful, clarifying exercise. And this is one of the reasons I’m such a big fan of writing for Twitter. Now, Twitter these days allows you to do kind of like a medium to long form blog. And so it’s changed versus its old days when you could only have, what, 100 8200 ish characters. So I, what I like to do, I write long form on Twitter. But I also try to write a couple of shorter things every day to work on being very clear and concise and trying to be almost pithy.

Pithy is such a fun word. But yeah, anyhow, I got. I went down a rabbit hole in my brain about the word pithy. And how if you had a lisp and it’d be like, are you saying pithy or pithy? I don’t know any who. You can see an inner glimpse of how my ADHD brain works there. Anyway, great writing is clear, it is concise, it is not necessarily overly clever, but the best way that I have found to, like, just enhance, easily enhance the quality of your writing is just to use fewer words. So I’m going to leave it there. Whatever you’re doing today, whatever you’re writing, look at it.