5 Ways to Write a Damn Good Sentence

Literary theorist and legal scholar Stanley Fish said, “The skill it takes to produce a sentence, the skill of lining events, actions, and objects in a strict logic — is also the skill of creating a world.”

In other words, sentences are the engines of creativity. But your sentences don’t have to say much. They just have to say the right things.

So, when you are trying to get people to respond to your requests, subscribe to your email newsletter, or donate to your cause … you need to write seductive sentences, and you need to do it naturally.

Here’s how it’s done.

1. HOW TO WRITE A
Damn Good
Sentence

2. Average copywriters 

write average sentences.

3. You, I’m guessing, don’t
want to be average.

4. You want to be great.
You want to be
!
remarkable.

5. That means you need to write
damn good sentences …
!
without even thinking about it …
!
day in and day out.

6. Do that and you’ll become
an unstoppable writing
machine.
!
You’ll become a
killer copywriter.

7. See, everything you write 

begins and ends with a
sentence.

8. We have a number of
research studies to thank
for this discovery.

9. The first one is primacy.
!
It refers to our tendency 

to remember items at the
beginning of a list.

10. Other studies suggest you’ll always remember:
!
more
words
from
the
end
of
a
list
!
than from the beginning simply because those
are the last words you read.

11. This is called recency.

12. Together, primacy and
recency make up the serial
position effect,
!
!
a term coined by German psychologist 

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909).

13. THIS CAN BE SEEN IN THE
SERIAL POSITION CURVE:
!

14. In 1946, Solomon E. Asch upped the
ante with studies that evaluated the
impact the position of words had on
people.
!
The study we care about involves
how we position adjectives to
describe a person.

15. Read the following two sentences.
!
!
“Steve is smart, diligent, critical,
impulsive, and jealous.”
!
“Steve is jealous, impulsive,
critical, diligent, and smart.”

16. These two sentences
contain the 

same information.

17. However, when a group of
participants were given the first
sentence ...
!
!
they reported “Steve” in
a positive light.

18. And the group given the second
sentence?
!
Yep.
!
They reported “Steve” in
a negative light.

19. Thirty years later,
William Crano
decided to sharpen
the distinction
the impact
order
has on meaning.

20. His studies uncovered
additional effects, particularly
with the use of adjectives.

21. Change of meaning hypothesis 

Early adjectives establish an
expectation, which the reader
then filters all the subsequent
adjectives through.

22. Inconsistency discounting 

Options presented later that
don’t match earlier
expectations are downgraded.

23. Attention decrement hypothesis
Early adjectives wield
considerable influence than
later ones (we saw this in the
Steve sentences).

24. All these conclusions are
important when it comes to
persuasive writing for several
reasons.

25. Take this long-winded
sentence from Lisa Miller’s
2012 article “Listening to
Xanax” ...

26. “Twenty years ago, just before Kurt Cobain blew
off his head with a shotgun, it was cool for Kate
Moss to haunt the city from the sides of buses
with a visage like an empty store and for Wurtzel
to confess in print that she entertained fantasies
of winding up, like Plath or Sexton, a massive
talent who died too soon, ‘young and sad, a
corpse with her head in the oven.’”

27. That Miller ends this sentence
with “young and sad, a corpse

with her head in the oven” 

is NOT an accident.

28. Decisions had to be made
when crafting that sentence.
!
!
Guaranteed it did not flow from
Miller’s mind in the published form.

29. It was a piecemeal affair. 

An experimentation with
effect.

30. And this is the craft of writing

a damn good sentence.

31. Bone up on your
sentence-writing skills
!
and those pieces of content
will only get better
!
and be more
widely shared.

32. Want to learn how? 

Follow me.

33. 1
Insert
Facts

34. This is nothing more than basic subject and
verb agreement:
!
!
“Moses ate a muffaletta.”
!
!
Logical and consistent.
The building blocks of a story.

35. You insert facts by thinking through the 5 Ws:
!
Who
What
When
Where
Why
!
Think specific and concrete.

36. Compare these two sentences.
!
!
“On the first day of winter, Moses fed his
muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.”
!
“On the last day of winter, Moses fed his
muffuletta to the woolly mammoth.”

37. The significance is heightened
in the first sentence,
minimized in the second.
!
All by one word.
(Can you find that word?)

38. And notice how your sympathies 

change when I write:
!
!
“On the first day of winter, Moses fed his
muffuletta to the three-day old woolly
mammoth.”

39. Those new facts heighten

the emotional appeal of
that simple story.

40. 2
Create
Images

41. It’s not a coincidence
that the root of imagination
is image.

42. Imagination is the capacity for
people to see the world you
are trying to paint.

43. Intelligent people like to use
their imagination.
!
!
So, don’t insult their intelligence by
over-explaining … but also don’t abuse
their intelligence by starving it.

44. Use active verbs and concrete nouns
and you will naturally create images.
!
!
“The buzzard bled.”

45. Introduce one (or all) of the five senses
and you’ll enhance those images:
!
!
“The screaming buzzard bled.”

46. Use phrases like “imagine this” or
“picture this” to signal to your
reader you are about to paint a
picture.

47. “Imagine a fifty-something man in a blue
long-sleeve shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned,
his knuckles thick and coarse. He’s on
the side of the road, quibbling over a
stack of used cinder blocks with a
merchant.”
!

from 10 Productivity Tips from a Blue-Collar Genius

48. In those two sentences, 

you learn the color of the shirt, 

the state of the cuffs, 

and the condition of his knuckles.

49. You learn where he is and
what he is doing in concrete
language.

50. The writer uses very precise language to
tell you what he was doing.
!
For example, the character in the story
wasn’t talking, he was “quibbling.”
!
!
Something entirely different
than chatting.

51. 3
Evoke
Emotion

52. You can naturally get mood into your
sentences if you follow the two previous
steps.
!
!
But as a copywriter you don’t want
emotion to be an afterthought.

53. You must carefully plan
and manufacture emotion.

54. This starts by asking:
!
What is the dominant mood of your reader or customer?

What problem is he or she trying to solve?

Is it fear over losing a job? A spouse? A scholarship?

Pride of donating to a good cause? Joy for finally getting
muscular definition in his calves?

55. Here’s an example.

56. How often are these little tragedies
repeated in your life?
!
You write something clever, but everyone ignores it.

You hear about a new opportunity, but don’t pursue it
because you don’t have the skills or confidence to
attempt it.

You get overlooked by everybody – including your boss –
because the guy in the next cubicle seems to know
everything about SEO, email marketing, or copywriting.

You hear about all the new clients your peers are picking
up … but none are showing up at your door.

57. In that short opening,
I identified the relevant pain
and agitated it so the solution
was a no brainer.

58. But notice those four conditions are all
about rejection. Yet …
!
I didn’t use the word “reject,” or a
derivative, once. I didn’t tell you the
emotion you should feel. I simply
showed it to you.

59. Big difference in the
quality of writing.

60. 4
Make
Promises

61. As a copywriter, you aren’t merely
interested in heightening people’s
emotions for the sake of heightening
emotions.
!
Otherwise, you’d be a
novelist or screenwriter.

62. Entertainment is not a
copywriter’s 

bread and butter.

63. Getting action is.

64. So, you need people to see hope in
your sentences:
!
What promises are you making to the reader in this
sentence?

What advantages will the reader gain?

What pain will people avoid if they obey you?

65. In the opening to The Dirty Little Secret
to Seducing Readers, I wrote …
!
“I’m guessing you want to write copy that
sells. You want to write copy so irresistible it
makes your readers scramble down the page
— begging to do whatever it is you want when
they’re done reading — whether it’s to make a
purchase, send a donation, or join your
newsletter.”

66. The promise is that you can learn
how to write in such a way people
can’t resist your words.
!
!
And that’s compelling
for the right people.

67. 5
Practice,
Practice,
Practice.

68. Writing great sentences
takes work.

69. At first it may feel
mechanical, wooden.
!
That’s okay.

70. The goal is to get to a point where
you unconsciously blend these
elements so they feel natural in the
sentence and can’t be pulled apart.

71. Sort of like when a golf instructor
stops your swing to adjust your
mechanics.

72. That may feel mechanical and
unnatural, but eventually your
swing becomes natural and he
stops interrupting you.

73. Here are some exercises to
help you improve your
sentence writing.

74. Exercise #1: Copy great sentences
!
!
Hand-write 100 great first sentences. 

Memorize portions of great sales letters. 

Dissect killer lines.

75. Exercise #2: Concentrate on your
opening and closing paragraphs
!
It’s arduous to consciously think about each
and every sentence you write in a 500-word
article.
!
Concentrate your powers on the beginning
and the ending.

76. Exercise #3: Labor over headlines
!
!
Your headlines won’t be complete
sentences, but they offer you an
opportunity to focus closely on what you
are writing.

77. Exercise #4: Labor over subject lines
!
!
Unlike headlines, you can use your subject
line in an unconventional way.

78. “Thought of you while I was
at the steam bath.”
!
Who’s NOT going to open
that email up?
!
!
And make sure to measure responses,
adjust, and test more ideas.

79. Exercise #5: Labor over your tweets
!
!
Twitter is the perfect mechanism for perfecting
your sentences.
!
You are forced to say a lot in 140 characters.
And you get feedback.

80. People either respond —
or they don’t.

81. Check for retweets, favorites, and
replies.
!
And if you don’t get a response, try
sharing it again at a different time.

82. Your Turn

83. Each sentence in a 500-word article may
not be great …
!
!
but the more you practice the
fundamentals, the closer you are
going to get to perfection.

84. Don’t give up.

85. Keep plugging
away.

86. One sentence
at a time.

87. Click to learn more at
copyblogger.com