Controversial Opinions

As a writer, I lurk in the background of many other writers' email lists. They're great to keep an eye on what the competition is up to, get inspiration, learn new techniques and skills, and generally nod along in agreement with their views and opinions.

There are even a few writers I follow who have with fairly....divisive opinions, though. I often cringe when reading their emails before filing it away, shaking my head in wonderment at their angst-fuelled rants about what's wrong in the world, the rise of 'cancel culture' 'the tide of woke' (hate that phrase).

Now I'm a pretty liberal guy, and I have fairly established and (probably 'woke' 😖) opinions on things like politics, race, LGBTQ+ rights, gender identity, religion, all the usual hot-topics that do the rounds.

Still, for the most part, I keep these to myself and ignore the thoughts of those I don't agree with.

Water off a duck's back.

If I flew into a rage every time I read a controversial view, I'd be spewing bile every time I scrolled through social media, or worse, ventured into the comments section of YouTube or the Guardian.

But, I feel like I have to talk about one particular point of view I just can't let slide.

I joined the mailing list of a writer who's constantly posting fairly strongly worded rants on LinkedIn about being a freelancer.

And they're the usual 'clients are bad,' 'freelancers have it tough,' 'join my membership and I'll teach you how to demand higher fees and qualify better leads and clients,' all the usual.

When I first came across this guy, I'd had a few potential clients vanish, never to be seen again, and I was feeling a little bruised.

I get it. People are busy. Priorities change. No biggy.

(but would it hurt to send even a brief courtesy "thanks but no thanks" email, so I'm not left hanging?! That aside...)

But this guy promised 'a new way' to qualify leads, and you'll never be ghosted again, so I signed up with a healthy dose of scepticism, prepared to hear what I'd heard a million times before.

And when I join mailing lists, I tend to reply to the first one so they don't end up in spam next time, and it's fun to see how they go about engaging with their newest fans:

Well... I wasn't expecting this...I'll let you read...

I stopped replying after that.

Other than the extremely frustrating habit of answering every question with a question, this is not something I can get on board with.

If I'm entering into a potential business partnership with someone, it massively impacts the dynamic if I charge money to even speak to someone.

And if I'm interested in hiring someone to work, with I know very little about, and they want me to pay for the privilege to see if they can solve my problems?

I'll pass, thanks!

Clearly, there is some merit in part of his idea—I need to make money, sure, and giving out free advice is not always the best route to take, but that advice can often lead to future work.

I've just signed up a new client who I first spoke to in December 2020.

I knew at the time, she didn't have any budget, but she was trying to grow her business, so I spent an hour talking through potential strategies and options she could try. What's the harm in that?

Well, she received a business development grant a few weeks ago to expand, and did she post on UpWork looking for a writer?

No.

She sent me an email.

She had money to spend, and she didn't bother speaking to any one else.

She knew I knew what I was talking about, and I had made an effort to help her even though I knew there was nothing in it for me.

We have our kick-off call next week.

It seems I'm not alone in my opinions about charging for discovery calls—I'll be chatting to the amazing Nicki Krawczyk (all-round copywriting genius and I'm happy to say, one of my mentors) about this in an upcoming Instagram Live next week.

Follow Filthy Rich Writer to hear what we have to say.

The final instalment on voice

It's time for another instalment in our mini crash course on Voice!

We've marvelled at the lyrical blows between waring lovers, empathised with heartbreak with a song packed with pathos, and now, the rhythm's gonna get ya as we take on your tempo, or in the world of writing, your cadence.

So what does it mean, this 'cadence?'

It's essentially, the rhythm of your writing. It's whether you use long and flowing prose peppered with perfect punctuation or style your sentences with Short. Sharp. Statements, and how you mix up the two to great effect.

Along with the words you use and the tone of your writing, your natural cadence is as individual as you are.

And as a copywriter looking to emulate your voice, I need to try and match that.

How?

Well, in the words of Lennon–McCartney, We Can Work It Out.

(But before we get to that, it's time for another shameless song segue...)

We Can Work It Out is a great example of what you can do when you play with tempo.

(Enjoy John Lennon pulling faces in a blatant attempt at getting Paul to crack a smile—he's slightly successful, too!)

The track seemingly slows as it goes into the middle-eight (around the 39-second mark) and then Ringo adds emphasis to the beat of each word So, I will |ask you |once |again| as they bring the song back to the original beat.

'Gotta love the Fab Four.

The actual measured tempo of the song doesn't change, but (at George Harrison's suggestion), the time signature switches from your standard four beats to the bar to a more waltz-like three beats, which has the effect of slowing down the track.

And you can speed up and slow down your writing in a similar way.

I recently wrote a piece about the birth of my niece, and I wanted to convey a sense of long, seemingly unending spells of waiting longing for news, followed by a sudden flurry of movement and a burst of excitement.

---

“I’d stare out of the window, looking down on the hospital car park, transfixed by the steady stream of cars and ambulances flowing in and out.

I read every sign and every poster on the bulletin board and noticed every detail of the barren and featureless waiting room.

All the while, my caffeine-fulled imagination ran riot, filling the information vacuum with countless scenarios, each worse than the one before.

It was like waiting for a job interview, your driving test, and speaking in public combined and multiplied a thousand times.

Until…

Hang on, is that?

It was!

There was my Mam, bouncing towards us, beaming and crying, and almost skipping every step as she made her way along the long hospital corridor.

She’s here! She’s born! Everything went perfectly. Your sister’s been amazing, yes, she’s fine, she’s fine. Tired, but fine. The baby? Oh, the baby’s gorgeous! So small! And her hair? The longest blonde hair I’ve seen on a newborn, she’s precious, she’s tiny, oh just wait ‘till you see her!

The words came tumbling out, the devoted Nana, ready to step into the role she’s been waiting to fulfil since she had her babies, 30-odd years ago. ”

---

Just by adjusting the sentence length, playing around with punctuation, and adding few carefully chosen verbs, you can increase the energy of your words, keep the rhythm ticking over or slow the pace right down as required.

So how do you work out your cadence? Get your calculator out? Start counting words?

Nope!

The wonderful people at www.analyzemywriting.com have your back.

Here you can see the breakdown of my piece of writing quoted above:

The writing falls into four distinct camps, as I adjust the tempo:

• nine of my sentences have between 2 and 5 words

• one sentence has twelve words

• four sentences have between 20 and 22 words

• and three sentences have between 25 and 27 words

As most people write with approximately 13 words per sentence, you can see the impact of switching it up like this, and how it alteres the feel of the writing—this wasn't accidental.

There's more science to creativity than you realise.

So there you have it—lyrics, tone and tempo.

The three components that make up your writing voice.

And once you know your voice, you know how to change it to emulate somebody else's.

It's back to the words of the immortal Mr Williams...

Want me to do yours?

It's time to talk tone...featuring Joni Mitchell

For the last few weeks, I've been talking a lot about voice and how you can adapt your writing to mirror that of your client.

But first, a quick refresher:

As we know, your voice is made up of your:

• Vocabulary

• Tone

• Cadence

Last week I talked about Vocabulary and used the words of the iconic Fleetwood Mac to make my point (here it is if you missed it).

Now it's all about the tone of your writing and, you guessed it, it's back to Spotify!

Changing the tone in music is relatively straightforward.

You can change the key or the instrumentation, and the song changes completely and tells a whole different story.

Take Joni Mitchell, for example.

Her first outing of Both Sides Now in 1969 was light, floaty, and whimsical.

She captured the imagination of a child looking at cloud formations while a simple guitar strums away in the background

If you don't know it, take a moment and have a listen.

The song went on to be a standard and covered by many different artists (in fact, despite composing the track, Joni wasn't the first to record it).

But the song returned 33 years later in 2000, as a sultry, brooding, and dark reimagination, Joni is older, wiser, and has a full orchestra behind her.

It's a voice of experience.

It's almost unrecognisable and exploded into popular culture in 2003 as the soundtrack to Emma Thompson's heart actually breaking in Love Actually.

Gets me every time…

Getting the your tone across in your writing isn't as easy to do as dropping the key of your music, though.

How many emails or texts have you sent that are misinterpreted by the reader due to your sarcastic tone, or a joke which didn't land?

The tone of your writing is again, controlled by the words you choose.

Scroll back up and take a look at how I referred to the two different versions of the same song.

Go on, have a read...I'll give you a few minutes....

Did you see it?

Whimsical vs sultry

Light vs dark

Floaty vs brooding

Just by switching out a few adjectives, I've changed the tone of my writing completely and projected my opinions of the songs onto you.

And this is just a brief description of a 4 minute song.

In a longer piece of writing, you can vary your tone multiple times and take your reader on the emotional journey of your choosing.

Powerful stuff, these words!

So your vocabulary affects your tone, but your tone can be reinforced by your punctuation, your sentence and paragraph length, and the rhythm of your writing.

And that, my friend, is your cadence.

And I'll talk more about that next week!

A Lesson in Voice by Fleetwood Mac

Last week, I started to talk about voice and how I was doing a bit of a deep dive into the intricacies of writing in other people's voices.

(I know, I know, last week feels like forever ago, but it was the one with the Mrs Doubtfire GIF. Remember? No? Ok, it’s here if you want to refresh your memory)

Next to price, the biggest blocker to someone hiring a copywriter to work on their behalf is the fear that it will sound...wrong.

That someone else has written it and not them.

So how do you know if you're writing in your client's voice and not your own?

Well, that's where it gets a little tricky...but it's fascinating, so bear with me!

As I said last week, your voice is made up of three things - your vocabulary, your tone and your cadence.

Or (because I love music), your lyrics, your tone, and your tempo.

Let's start with the Lyrics.

In popular music, I can barely name half a dozen instrumental songs.

The words add the depth, the power and the drive to the music.

Song lyrics can cut you down and stop you in your tracks or lift you up and fill you full of confidence.

Sure there are some terrible lyrics out there (this being a prime example), but a lyricist has an awesome weapon at their disposal.

Take my all-time favourite band, Fleetwood Mac, as an example.

During the recording of their iconic 1977 Rumours album, Christine and John McVie (of Mac fame) were getting a divorce.

At the same time, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were breaking up, too.

This angst and emotion fuelled some of the best songs they've ever recorded, but there are some not so subtle blows being traded when you look at the lyrics.

Take Buckingham's Go Your Own Way, for example:

Loving you
Isn't the right thing to do
How can I ever change things
That I feel

and

Tell me why
Everything turned around
Packing up
Shacking up is all you want to do

Clearly a thinly-veiled swipe at his ex, Stevie.

Not to be outdone, she countered with Dreams:

Now here you go again
You say you want your freedom

Well, who am I to keep you down?
It's only right that you should
Play the way you feel it

But listen carefully
To the sound of your loneliness

Brutal.

So the words you use are important, sure, but how do you know if you're using the right ones?

Well, that will always depend on the topic at hand, but in general, you need to make sure you're writing at the correct level (which you can measure using the great Hemingway app).

This email, for example, is written at a 7th Grade level, which is higher than I normally write, but I've got words like cadence and vocabulary skewing things).

Do you want to write using simple and straightforward words or long and complicated?

Passive voice is a great way to soften your message, or you can write in the active voice for a more direct, action-orientated message.

Adding in hedge words, such as just, like, maybe or filling your writing with adverbs such as quickly, simply, bravely will soften your impact but could make you sound vague and unsure.

Where you're from can make a huge impact, too.

I'm originally from Newcastle, and the Geordie slang and dialect is a million miles apart from that of London, where I now call home (well, Surrey, but close enough).

So when I'm writing for other people or even a brand, be it an email or a blog, a social post or a website, I need to make sure I use my client's vocabulary and style and not my own.

Or else it just sounds...well, wrong.

I'll be back next week to talk tone!

I do voices...

What was your favourite film as a child?

Mine was Mrs Doubtfire.

I'd watch it so much I could real off almost the entire film verbatim. I almost wore out the VHS.

I watched a few YouTube clips as I was writing this blog post, and I could still pretty much recite them word for word.

Watching Robin Williams become so many different characters when he searched for the perfect alter-ego showed off his comic skill and acting chops so much better than any showreel.

I do voices…

The best copy is indistinguishable from your client’s voice.

It should sound as if they wrote it themselves.

So how on earth do you begin to embody someone else’s voice in your writing?

Well, it all comes down to three things.

Your vocabulary—Simple and straightforward, or complex and convoluted?

Your tone of voice—exiting and casual, or formal and informative?

Your cadence—short and punchy, or flowing and descriptive?

Your writing voice is as distinctive as your accent and individual as your fingerprint, and in the next few weeks, I’ll be adding voice guides to the services I’ll be offering to clients.

I can’t wait to ‘do voices’ even more!

The Tools of the Trade

I'm a sucker for software and apps.

Always have been.

I've had iPhones since the iPhone 3G and love to geek out over iOS beta versions and see what new toys there are to play with.

Even when they break my phone or make it as hot as the sun.

So when the chance to do a live video in my copywriter Facebook group came up, I thought, I’d share my recommendations for the software I use every day to make my life a little easier.

And since I’m all for an easy life, I thought I’d double up and make this the topic of this blog post, too!

So...brace yourself...it’s time to talk tech!

Grammarly

Most writers worth their salt use Grammarly.

My spelling can be attroccious, so it would be career suicide not to run my work through a spell check or two.

But Grammarly is more than just a spell check.

It's on the hunt for a whole range of grammatical issues, too (I mean, the clue is in the name).

It has saved me from writing in the passive voice more times than I’d care to imagine and is great for knowing when a semi-colon should be used (in copywriting, virtually NEVER!) and what on earth a comma splice is.

Had he been alive today, I'm sure Hemingway himself would have used it...

Hemingway

Speaking of Hemingway, my next recommendation has a rather appropriate name.

Hemingway is for you if you have a tendency to waffle on a little….

The old phrase ‘Keep it Simple, Stupid’ springs to mind.

Hemingway colour codes your writing to show when you’ve written difficult to understand sentences and paragraphs and highlights when you’ve used too many flowery adverbs.

And if the passive voice was missed by Grammarly, don't worry. Hemingway has got your back.

It also shows you what grade you’re writing at so you’re not being overly obtuse or obfuscating, which is an instant customer turn-off.

meta…

So those are the writing apps I use, but that writing needs to go somewhere.

Which is where my next recommendation comes in...

ConvertKit

The very tool I use to send my newsletter emails (most) weeks.

You can do amazing things with ConvertKit, from funnels to landing pages, automated Welcome emails, to list segmentation.

It’s a great way to get to know my subscribers better, and make sure I send relevant emails!

When I know what it is you're looking to get out of being on my list, I can focus my efforts into making sure I deliver for you.

And the best way to get to know someone is to have a chat, but it's always a bit of a hassle trying to align calendars.

If only there was a way to do that...

Calendly

I love me some Calendly.

With Calendly, you can see my availability and book time straight into my calendar.

I know, right?

So whether you want my thoughts on your website or welcome email, or you want to kick-off a new copywriting project, you can do it in one click (as long as I’ve remembered to update my calendar of course 🤦🏻‍♂️).

And once that project is complete, there's the...ahem...

....slightly...well...awkward task of...

...settling the bill.

Wise

I work with a number of US and European clients and I was getting a little peeved at PayPal and their less than generous conversion rates.

Thankfully, Wise (formally Transferwise) lets you create ‘virtual’ bank accounts in a whole range of different currencies and countries, and their conversion rates are often the best around.

Admittedly, you need to pay £16 to get account non-UK account details, but it’s only a matter of time before you break even and then you’re quids in 🤑

If you fancy getting yourself a Wise account, click here to sign up.

(Disclosure—this is an affiliate link so I may earn a little commission if you do, but it doesn’t cost you anything.)

So there you have it. A few of the recommended tools of the trade.

Do you have use any you’d recommend?

Add a comment below.

Until next time…

Why the Big, Bad, Wolf is a very naughty boy

Last week I was extolling the virtues of a little linguistic law that we all know, but we don't know we know. You know?

The marvellously named ablaut reduplication (if you missed last week's blog, you can read it here and then post below with your excuse, and I'll consider an appropriate punishment)

(To summarise:

Definition of ablaut: a systematic variation of vowels in the same root or affix or in related roots or affixes, especially in the Indo-European languages that is usually paralleled by differences in use or meaning (as in sing, sang, sung, song)

Definition of reduplication: an act or instance of doubling or reiterating

and it's why we wear flip flops and why the clock tick-tocks.)

But there is another even more fascinating English rule we all follow without realising it—the order we place adjectives in sentences.

To quote Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, the correct order is always:

opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose noun.

And the often quoted example is:

a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

Get the order wrong, and your sentence is just...weird. I mean, we're never going to find green little men on Mars now, are we?

So Little [size] Red [colour] Riding [purpose] Hood [noun] fits the pattern.

But hang on, what about our friend (and Red's nemesis), the Big [size] Bad [opinion] Wolf [Noun]?!

Surely he should be Bad Big Wolf?

Well, he is an example of the other fascinating facet of English.

Every rule has its exceptions.

In Wolfie's case, he's following a whole different set of rules, the i, a, o order of vowels we talked about last week!

mind…blown

Somehow, 743 million people speak English as a second language.

How, I'll never know.

I'm off to add Mark's book to my reading list.

And if you need a hand with all this English-writey-thing, give me a shout.

Laters!

What does Little Red Riding Hood and Drag Race have in common?

There are a few things I'm thankful for being born British.

Opportunities, amazingly fascinating (and occasionally brutal) history, our amazing National Health Service, and also the fact that I've not had to learn English as a foreign language because...

I'm not sure I would have coped.

English is strewn with quirks and intricacies and more words that break the rules than follow them.

And for the most part, we know the right words by instinct rather than applying any rhyme or reason.

It just is.

I learned about a new concept this week, but I've known about it for as long as I've been able to speak—Ablaut reduplication.

Whaaaat?

Ablaut reduplication.

If you've heard the term, I applaud you, but I imagine you, like me, will be more familiar with its effect than its meaning.

It's the reason why we have a Big Bad Wolf and not a Bad Big Wolf.

...Flip flops and not flop flips...

...Tick Tock and not Tock Tick....

...and why the Queens in DragRace UK sang about Bing Bang Bong.

So, what is going on here?

Essentially, it's the order in which vowels MUST come in a series of two or more words or else it just sounds. Plain. Wrong.

I followed by A followed by O.

Or if you have two words, you have a choice.

I followed by A or O.

In the words of my 2-year old niece, but WHY?!

Damned if I know.

It just is.

English*, huh?

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*it happens in most Indo-European languages, apparently... isn't language a tricksy thing?!