I just passed up buying a $77 ebook. The funny thing is I really wanted it.

I still do. The sales letter made the book look very interesting and I might have learned something from it had I bought it.

But I didn’t and the reason why is because the sales letter was full of mistakes, punctuation errors, misspellings and awkward grammar.

What’s sort of interesting about this is that the “sales” part of the sales letter was great. The AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) formula was in place. All the bullet points were great. It told me a story and sucked me right in. And even though I figured it was just like the other 4,239,123 ebooks that were published today, I still wanted it.

But not enough to buy it, and that is what is known in the sales world as a complete and utter failure. The poor sod who wrote the sales letter just lost me as a customer and won’t be enjoying a $77 steak on me tonight.

This made me sort of curious, because I’m not a grammar snob. Why do I care how the damn thing was written? But when I got to thinking about it I realized I’d made all sorts of assumptions about the ebook based solely on the quality of its sales letter.

Here are those assumptions. I’ve listed them out one at a time so you may more easily see how much of a jerk I am.

In Charlie’s world a sales letter with lousy English equates to:

1. A 93-page book full of similar mistakes that will get awfully tiresome
2. Lies and/or mistakes with facts in the book
3. Poor design
4. Something nebulous that feels like lack of care for me, the reader
5. A half-ass return policy
6. Possible problems with the .pdf download
7. No customer service to help with the .pdf download problems
8. Finally downloading the .pdf which gives my computer herpes
9. Other random stuff that just pisses me off

It may have been the best ebook ever. It may be perfect down to every last semicolon, whatever those do. But I’ll never know because I just didn’t trust that the quality will be there. At least not enough to drop $77 on it.

I wanted to link to the sales letter here but decided against it. Maybe someone is making a living off that ebook and I’m not going to try to tip the balances against them. They don’t need to lose sales just because I’m a picky old bastard. This is merely advice to those out there who may want me to buy their ebooks in the future Another piece of advice: free dark chocolate.

What? You hated this post? The next one will be much better, I swear. You’d better Subscribe now so you don’t miss it.

If you use the tips in this post you’ll see a rise in the amount of time people stay at your site. Guaranteed.

Writing well is important, but so is dressing up your writing so it looks good.

Even if your writing is Shakespearian in quality if it looks too clunky it may not be read at all. Huge chunks of unbroken text just look too scary, too long, too hard to read.

Online, most people read by scanning. Our eyes hop from headline to headline, to a word in bold, to an image, to a bulleted list, etc.

This document was written to help you make your writing look more appetizing for those who scan. If you’ve put in the work to write something, you better make sure it gets read. Here’s how you do so.

Headlines

In the advertising world, ads without headlines are invariably less successful than those with headlines. This is for the simple reason that without a headline, someone might not even notice there’s writing there.

Imagine you’re flipping through a magazine or click wildly through a list of websites. You come across one that is all monochromatic text with no headline. To someone scanning, a page like this registers as a solid field of gray.

So, yes, you’re writing should have a headline. And as a simple general rule for headlines, they should be bigger than body text. The headline doesn’t necessarily have to be darker, a different font type or an entirely different color. Its size sets it apart already, but those things often help as well.

Section Headers and Sub-Headers

If there’s any question as to what a section header is you just read one.

Many of your readers aren’t going to read your post word for word. They’ll scan it and see if some of it looks appetizing.

Bold type

Bold type looks good too. It will help your readers scan for important and interesting words/subject matter within a body of copy.

Lists

Ah, the list! People love lists! That’s why you see so many articles with headlines such as:

• “Top 10 Fastest…”
• “101 Ways to…”
• “5 Things That Will Destroy…”

Not only do lists make great headlines they’re also easy on the eyes. They’re full of whitespace, have plenty of breathing room and are bite-size. Readers love all of those.

There are two different types of lists that you can use to excellent effect. And from what current research is telling us it’s nearly impossible to either.

The ordered list

Like its name implies, an ordered list is a list. And it’s in order. You can use it for sequential lists, like so:

1. Get in the car
2. Go to the store
3. Pick out your groceries
4. Run away without paying for them
5. Just kidding. Always pay for your groceries

The unordered list

This is also a list but is not in order. Instead of numbers there are bullets. An unordered list looks like this:

• Wilma Flintstone
• Betty Rubble
• Dino

Use Smaller Paragraphs

Even if you don’t use lists, never use section headers and refuse to use bold text, there is still one thing you can do to make any writing look drastically better.

Break up your writing into smaller paragraphs.

The more paragraphs you use the more whitespace there will be in your text and the more palatable it will seem to your reader.

Smaller paragraphs just seem more inviting.

Like this paragraph here.

And this one.

Again, yummy whitespace.

Do you feel more at ease with all that air in there? And doesn’t it actually make it seem there is less text than there really is? Less text, even if it’s only apparently less text, is much more likely to be read.

Columns

Similar to using smaller paragraphs, you can also break up one big text field into two (or more) columns of text. Look at the difference it makes…

Doesn’t the two-column layout seem more appealing to you? These two-column layouts aren’t something you’re necessarily going to use on the web much, but keep it in mind for those non-web projects.

Blockquotes

Tell your friends there’s a new sheriff in town.
His name is Roscoe P. Blockquote.

There’s another element that newspaper and magazine editors use all the time, and for good reason. If your medium is 99% text, making the words themselves appear more interesting is a very good idea.

And that’s exactly what blockquotes do. They’re great for breaking up a monotonous page.

Dialogue

Dialogue is brilliant for breaking up writing. It’s fast, it tells a story and it’s engaging. More than that, it’s also inherently full of whitespace and small chunks of bite-size writing. Look:

“I don’t like toast,” he said.

“What?” she asked, obviously surprised.

“I don’t like toast.”

“But everyone likes toast.”

“I don’t like toast,” he repeated.

“Yes. You do. Even people who don’t like toast like toast.”

“Not me,” he said. “I don’t like toast.”

See how that flows? See how all that whitespace and the small text chunks seem so easy to read?

Images

If a picture’s worth 1000 words, why not use an image and get rid of all that bastard text? What better way to break up text than to get rid of it completely?

Special Code

If you’re a programmer or web guru you can also include code snippets into your text.

<php? echo "Wow! I never ever thought of that!" ?>

The cool thing about code snippets is that it is almost always formatted in a completely different fashion from the surrounding body copy. Not only is it a different font-style, Courier usually, it’s also often formatted with a completely different color.

Summary

These are really only a few of the ways you can increase the visual interest of your writing, be it online or in print. I’d recommend trying a few of these for yourself. Before you do, take a look at your web stats, specifically at the “time spent on site” stat, and make a note of it. Check it again a month or two from now, after using some of the tips in this post. I can pretty much guarantee that number will increase, as your visitors will simply find your content more appetizing.

Now, I know this was a brilliant post and you hate to see it end. That’s why you should come back. Subscribe now and you’ll be first to know when there’s a new post. Well, first along with all the other subscribers…