Just Slightly Contrarian: This Ain't Literature You're Writing

He was an extremely gifted and articulate communicator, a man of passion who, when he was finished with his speech, left you wishing he wasn’t.

So when I drafted an emergency fundraising letter for his organization, I used his words, his phrases, his syntax, his simplicity, his stories. And the letter turned out, I thought, really, really good. It captured both his personality and the mission of the organization.

Not so, he told me. Not at all. Not even close. In brief, he said, it sucked.

“It just doesn’t sound like me,” was his conclusion.

Tentatively, and stifling a tendency toward belligerence, I suggested, “But those are your exact words, from your speeches, all of which have been quite well received wherever you go.”

“That may well be,” he said, “but you must understand the difference between a letter and a speech. When I write a letter, I call upon my background with the world’s classic literature, and I use eloquent words and phrases. Not this colloquial jargon you’ve presented to me.”

He wasn’t finished.

“My donors are well educated and extremely knowledgeable when it comes to the subtleties of our organization. They are far different from the knee-jerk, emotional contributors to most other charities.”

And on and on he lectured. Meanwhile, I’m sitting there, listening with one ear, but also quietly figuring the amount of the traditional kill fee, because I have no intention of going any further with this man. I’ll take what I can get and go on to the next project.

Momentarily, I recalled the days when I was really hungry and would try to help a guy like this understand what successful letter writing really is all about. No more. He can have his eloquent and sophisticated language and go on living in a fairy-tale world where his donors are different. I really don’t care.

But I do care about writers of fundraising letters and packages, many of whom consider themselves to be stylistic wordsmiths.

“That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?” they say.

The truth is, the ones who give up that nonsense early in their career usually are successful. The ones who continue to be wordsmiths struggle, if they survive at all, and just never understand why their carefully crafted letters fall short when compared with letters from sloppy writers who don’t know the difference between the singular and the plural.

You gotta dumb it down
Here’s the point: Referring again to the gentleman I just quoted, he also said, “Huntsinger, this sounds like something my seventh-grade daughter would write.”

Actually, most successful letters in control packages are written at an eighth-grade level. Read it and weep, wordsmiths.

Furthermore, another common characteristic of successful control packages is that they are written in an “oral style.” By that I mean, the copy flows just like you were talking. Or are talking. (See how you can get hung up on grammar?)

Even worse, another common characteristic of successful fundraising letters is that they use precisely the same techniques as commercial direct response marketing — commonly and, oft times, unfortunately called “junk mail.”

Ask yourself, “Exactly what is the mission of my charity?” Is it to improve and/or raise the literary level of fundraising letters in our society? Is it to set a high standard of communication excellence and be numbered among those cultural leaders who protect and preserve the grammatical heritage of our nation?

Or is your mission to raise money for your organization at the lowest cost possible? Don’t confuse the two goals.

Don’t forget to study
I hope you can accept this basic premise, and then take the next step. Emulate (now there’s a word that will never appear in one of my letters) successful marketing patterns. Start by reading several control letters aloud. Feel the cadence. Feel the underlying beat. It’s there.

Read commercial mail. Yes, again, out loud. Once you get into all this, you’ll be amazed at how the writers use simple words and homespun, down-to-earth expressions and colloquialisms to build word pictures and tell stories.

Check out the vocabulary. Actually, you should do this on three different levels. Level one is basic usage, which is at an eighth-grade level. Level two is the technical words used to express the particular mission of the organization. For example, a disease-type appeal will have, from necessity, certain medical words. An ecology appeal will have certain words that relate to our environment.

And then you have, at level three, the organization’s “buzzword” vocabulary, along with the shorthand phrases and initials, and the executive jargon. Be careful!

And be wary of putting together, in a sentence or a paragraph, too many technical words, too much organizational “buzz” and too many initials. Your donors do not deal with these topics on an everyday basis like you do.

And how do you know whether or not you’re using too many complicated words and if you are writing at an eighth-grade reading level? Pull up one of your letters in Microsoft Word. Pull down the tools menu on the top bar of the screen and choose Options. Then click on Spelling and Grammar. Next, click on Readability Statistics.

Look at the information for the Flesch Reading Ease and the Flesch Kincaid Grade Level data. The Flesch Reading Ease score needs to be 60 or higher for your material to be considered eighth-grade reading level. In Word, this article you are now reading was analyzed at a 7.9-grade reading level, with a Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease of 60.1.

Forget what you know
So, if you’re writing fundraising letters at a college graduate level, just what do you do to bring your copy down to an eighth-grade reading level? Here are a few quick suggestions — perhaps too quick because entire books have been written on this important subject.

But first of all, forget everything you ever learned about being grammatically correct. Your English 101 instructor didn’t realize you were going to be a marketing writer.

Listen to the way people talk. Listen to the way you talk. When you catch your breath, that’s a comma. When you pause, that’s a period. When you gesture with your hands, that’s an exclamation mark. When you point your finger, that’s the beginning of a new paragraph with a connecting action word.

What I try to do is write the way I talk, and then clean it up so the verbs sorta agree, most of the time. I try to be grammatically correct. But I’m into the flow, not creating literature.

Run-on sentences always have been a characteristic of successful copy. Don’t be afraid to go on and on without a period. Just use plenty of commas. Force the reader to breathe on your terms. This means that if you have a big or technical word, quickly bring the sentence to an end, because a long sentence with several technical words will choke the reader.

Don’t use a semicolon; that confuses people. They don’t know what to do with it. Is a semicolon a comma or a period?

Use short paragraphs, mostly. Use some long paragraphs. Use a variety. Don’t get stuck in a deadly routine. Use underlining. Use bold type. Use sentences that begin with action verbs.

And be careful with periods, because a period brings a thought to an end, and that’s what you want to avoid sometimes in your quest to keep the readers moving on and on and on. That’s why at the end of a paragraph, of course, you traditionally use a period. But then, as I mentioned, you begin the next paragraph with a word connector. Also, you can end a paragraph this way …

… and excuse me for a moment if I quote myself — but look at the first paragraph of this article. It’s just one sentence. With commas. And it flows right into the second paragraph. I didn’t really plan it that way. That’s just the way it came out when I dictated it. And as you know, I always dictate the first draft of a letter, in order to get a feeling of movement. Those of you who grew up using a keyboard before you were out of diapers can do the same thing if you are a fast typist. But never look at your copy as it magically appears in your Word document. Keep your eyes fixed on your flying fingers.

Also, never make any edits or correct words or change anything at all until you have finished the entire letter. Just go as fast as you can. Yes, that’s tough sometimes when you have a lot of technical crap to use, but just fake it at first, and then come back and clean it up.

Here’s the bottom line: When a prospective donor gets your mailing package and does you the remarkable courtesy of pulling a letter out of the envelope, she might be talking over her shoulder to a bitching spouse or watching headline news out of the corner of her eye or worrying about the transmission in the SUV …

… and if your letter isn’t easy to read and doesn’t flow quickly from thought to thought, and if she really has to concentrate to understand what you’re saying, well, you’ve wasted money for your organization.

Jerry Huntsinger is a freelance copywriter and a senior creative consultant at Craver, Mathews, Smith & Co. You can e-mail him at jerryhuntsinger@starband.net.