copywriting mistakes to avoid

Copywriting: The Biggest Mistakes to Avoid (Grammar)

Let me start by saying this, grammar isn’t the most important thing when it comes to effective copywriting so don’t worry too much about it. That said, you don’t want to look daft either so read on to make sure you sound professional in all your communications.

Here’s the most common basic mistakes people make when it comes to general writing skills, and how to avoid them.

Random capitals

Just because you think a word is important in a sentence doesn’t mean you should capitalise it. Capitalise words at the start of a sentence and proper nouns – the names of things, and not much else.

This is a bit of a minefield so I can’t look at it all here but you can Google any situation that you’re unsure about. If you’re still not sure, go with lowercase.

Let’s just take business services as one example…

We wouldn’t write, ‘please use our Copywriting Services.’ But we would say, ‘check out The Pearson Brown Blueprint.’ A basic rule of thumb is, if it’s a generic term, it’s lowercase, if it’s an actual name of something or someone, capitalise it.

Huge sentences

Commas are great for a couple of reasons – to separate different aspects of a sentence, and to guide the reader to take a pause when you want them to for impact. You shouldn’t use them to separate unrelated things as you’ll end up with huge, ugly and confusing sentences. Plus, shorter sentences are more impactful. When editing your work, check your comma usage and replace some with full stops where you can.

Passive sentences

Avoid passive sentences wherever possible, they’re soft, wimpy, and unconsciously give the reader less confidence in you and your company.

What’s a passive sentence?

Simply, when the subject of the sentence is having something done to it rather than it doing the something to the thing!

At least that made sense in my head.

The subject needs to be the giver not the receiver!

An example. Golf clubs shouldn’t be thrown into the lake after a bad shot.

That’s passive and not really convincing the angry golfer. Instead say: after a bad shot don’t throw your clubs into the lake.

That’s now an active sentence that has more authority and you’ve directed it properly at your audience.

Pearson Brown is a copywriting agency that was established to help grow businesses. – Passive. Not great.

I established copywriting agency Pearson Brown to help grow businesses. – Active. Better.

To keep track of this in Word turn on readability stats. In Word go to file, options, then proofing and select ‘show readability stats.’

turning on readability stats

Then when you select the book icon at the bottom left of your page:

You will see more detail, including your passive sentence percentage. Here’s this article’s stats so far:

*It’s starting to get to me now that I’ve had to keep the examples of passive sentences in!*

Most experts will say that for a longer piece keeping passive sentences under about 12% is fine. I prefer 0%!

Double space after full stops

Don’t do this. Just don’t. It’s not up for debate.

Thinking your English teacher was right

I don’t care about verbs, adjectives or whatever the other word types are. Thinking too technically limits creativity.

And it’s fine to use ‘and’ to start a sentence. But not always. ‘But’ is fine too. You can also use ‘and’ more than once in a sentence.

Forget school. You’re an adult now, you’re free!

The reason they taught you not to do that isn’t because it’s bad writing, it was lazy teaching. It was the easiest way to stop you writing things like:

And then I saw a dog and a cat and a mouse and an ostrich. And then my dog ate my homework and it wasn’t good and now I don’t have it and you’re going to be mad at me.

Forget the lazy lessons and re-learn everything when it comes to creative writing for your business.

Incorrect contractions

Unsure about it’s or its? Your or you’re?

I’m not going to look at this in detail but just remember that using an apostrophe usually means you’re joining two words together (a contraction) or you’re indicating a possessive (that something belongs to someone.)

You’re = you are

Your = indicates the possessive

‘Your awesome’ doesn’t make any sense. You are awesome contracted to say ‘you’re awesome’, does.

And always remember, there’s a big difference between saying you know your shit and you know you’re shit. Keep that in mind!

It’s = it is.

Its = an object/thing/possessive.

Its raining today – no. It is raining today = it’s raining today – correct.

Easy.

Don’t lose sleep over any of this

You don’t need to know too much about technical writing to produce effective copywriting, just avoid most of the mistakes that I’ve outlined here and then get creative. Copywriting is a creative skill after all, not a professional one.

If you want any help, you know where we are. You can check out how we do things here and find out more about our copywriting services here.

matthew brown pearson brown

-Matthew Brown, founder & director