How Writing Advice is Killing Your Writing, Part 2 – Personality

The internet is gigantic. There are billions and billions of pages of content, and the majority of them suck huge donkey anus in a bad bad way. So, tell me honestly, what do you think you’ll get if you add to it twenty more pages of polite, dry, stilted, boring corporate bullshit web copy?

And that’s how we’ll kick off Part 2 of our series on writing. (If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, make sure you do at some point. It’s a good’n.)

This week we’re going to look at the kind of bad writing advice that makes me grind my teeth at night and run into stationary objects with my head:

“Use personality in your writing, but only sparingly.”

Ugh. Right?

This is sort of like telling the beginning driver to always keep their hands at 10 and 2 o’clock on the steering wheel. It’s workable advice until they need to turn a sharp corner, at which point both of their arms snap off at the elbows.

Worrying about your personality when you’re sitting down to write will do nothing but haunt you with a noxious introverting residue. Why? Because the emphasis is all wrong. Let’s sort that out first.

What you say comes before how you say it

Personality isn’t the target or end product of writing.

The end product of writing is to convey a written message.

Sounds simple, because it is.

Any writing project, whether fiction, non-fiction or some corporate website copy, starts with something to communicate. There is a core message first and foremost.

Examples of core messages:

• The history of how your company was formed (business)
• A sex scene that takes place inside an Army tank (fiction)
• The technical specifications of industrial fan #647A-U (technical)
• What you think about cats (personal experience)
• How you make money online using affiliate marketing (instructional)

Now that you’ve got a core message, you get to engineer it and decide how you want to present it.

How much personality can you inject and still get the core message across?

There’s really not a right answer to this, but you can probably get away with much more than you think.

You’ll have to figure it out from project to project, but I can tell you how I do it. I have fun when I’m writing. And I have fun reading what I’ve written. That’s a pretty good litmus test. If what I write puts me to sleep, you can bet my readers aren’t going to think too highly of it either.

So inject personality, and a lot of it. You’re going to turn your readers into a bunch of rabid freaky fans if you do.

And I’d like to present for evidence a comment I received on one of my blog posts a while back. It said something like, “I don’t care what you sell, I’m going to buy it because I love your writing.”

On the other hand, guess how many comments I’ve gotten that said, “Wow, your writing is really boring. Do you have anything I can buy from you?”

You’re going to lose the customers you didn’t want in the first place.

Yes, injecting personality is dangerous. It will cost you customers. Good news is you didn’t want those people anyway. They’ll be wishy-washy conservative customers/clients who may or may not buy from you, and who will probably want their money back if they did.

So yeah…lose those people. Because you’ll lose far more people by showing zero personality.

Breathing life into copy…examples

Does this copy written for a fast car sound familiar?

“The V8 fuel-injected engine goes from 0-60mph in 3 seconds.”

Okay. Not bad. At least it’s information people want, and you won’t get fired for writing this drivel.

Or you could say:

“Have you ever felt a V8 fuel-injected engine push you from 0-60mph in 3 seconds? Well, it’s damn fast. So fast you might actually swallow your wisdom teeth.”

Same information, different personality.

How about selling some bricks:

“Our brick delivers benefits beyond curb appeal, including natural insulation.” (Paraphrased from an actual website)

Not awful, but it’s a bit of a yawner, no? But even bricks can be exciting!

“Tired of having a house that turns into a meat locker during the winter and an active volcano during the summer? Not anymore. Our brick is naturally-insulated. That means your house’s temperature will be regulated throughout the year, so you can forget about adjusting the thermostat 48 times a day. Not to mention you’ll save a bundle on heating bills, leaving you plenty to spend on your crack habit.”

Just kidding about the crack habit part, but you get it, right?

All goofing around aside, the point is that you have a choice between giving people what they expect to read (passive), and something that grabs their attention (active).