Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Ruth. Welcome to my class on
writing crystal-clear copy. This class is full of
tips and techniques from my career as a
professional copywriter. I'll be teaching you how
to improve your writing and get your message across
clearly and persuasively. You'll then use your
new skills to improve a piece of your own copy
and make it crystal clear. The techniques I'm going to
show you are very simple, but they're also very powerful. I know that you're going to be astonished at how much you can improve your own writing just by using the skills that you'll
learn during this class. This workshop is
aimed at students who want to improve their
basic copywriting skills. You don't need any prior
experience or knowledge, you just need an appetite
to improve your writing. You'll find this class
particularly useful if you want to
improve your writing, but you struggle with
concepts like using the first and third person or using the active
and passive voice. Many people find those
terms confusing, but don't worry,
that's why I'm here. I'm going to talk
you through them using completely
practical examples so that you can see
exactly how they work and how you can apply
them to your own copy. The skills you'll learn in
this class are going to be useful for all of
the writing you do, but they're particularly helpful if you do a lot of
online writing. If you write blogs or social media posts or
copy for websites, that's where brevity and clarity are especially
important in writing. If you write those
kinds of things, you'll find this class
particularly useful. Writing clearly and
persuasively is easy when you understand the
active and passive voice, the power of direct commands, and how to use the
first and third person and when you understand things like nominalizations
and adverbs, what they are and how and
why you should avoid them. I'm going to take you through these principles of
good clear writing and show you how to put them into action quickly
and effectively. The best thing, as you start using these skills for yourself, you'll quickly find that
they become second nature and everything that you
write will be clearer and more persuasive as a result. Shall we get started?
2. Know Your Reader: [MUSIC] As a writer, there are a few things you
need to consider before you even put pen to
paper or finger to keyboard. It's impossible to write clearly and
effectively if you're unsure who you're writing for or what the purpose
of your writing is. That might sound pretty obvious, but it's amazing how
many people start writing something
like a web page or a social media post
without a clear idea in their mind of who it is
they're writing for and why. For each piece of
copy that you write, before you start writing, ask yourself, who am
I writing this for, who is my reader? Why are they reading it? What's their motivation? What do they want to achieve? Finally, how can I help them? What is it that I'm
offering that's going to help them achieve
their objective. You might find it
helpful to visualize an actual person who's going
to be reading your copy. For example, if you're writing the about page of a website, you might imagine a potential
customer who's reading that and how they might be feeling and what
they might do next. This is a technique
that I use and I find it incredibly useful. I know that some
copywriters even have photographs of
people in front of them when they're working
to keep their mind fully focused on the
end-user, the reader. At this point, I'd like
to introduce you to the clarify your copy worksheet. You can download this from the resources section of
the class project tab. You'll use it to complete
your project for this class. I'm going to work through
an example project during the class so that
you can see it in action. For your projects, I'd like
you to choose a piece of copy that you've written
and you'd like to improve. It should be about
between 50 and 200 words. Your social media bio or the about page of your website
would be ideal for this. For my example, I'm going to use some website copy sent
to me by my client Lois. Lois owns a local flower
shop called the flower yard. She sent me some
draft texts with the about page of her websites and I'm going to edit it so it's as clear as possible using the same techniques I'll be
teaching you in this class. Now Lois has done
her homework well. She's identified her readers as existing and potential
customers have her flower shop. She knows they're
motivated by their need for professional flowers
and flower arrangements and that she can help them
achieve that by selling them a range of beautiful
value for money flowers. With all that in mind, the content of her
about page text is looking good overall, she talks a little bit
about the history of her business and
her own experience, then she gives an
overview of the services the flower yard offers and
what makes them unique. She then goes on to talk about the company's customer
service ethos and she ends on a
call to action. There's just one
thing that's not right here in terms of content, and that's this sentence about
Lois's puppetry business. That's nothing to do with a flower shop and
its information that just isn't relevant to
the readers of this page. The first thing we're going
to do to improve this copy is get rid of that
irrelevant sentence. Now, that might seem like a
really obvious error to you, but it's amazing how
often people include irrelevant information just
like this in their own copy. That's why it's so
important that you answer the three
questions of who, why, and how to focus your
copy on what's relevant. It all starts with
knowing your reader. Now that we've got
the basic content of our piece of writing correct, let's work through the clear
copy principles to make the copy itself as clear and
concise as possible. [MUSIC]
3. Short, Sharp Sentences: Long rambling sentences are
a feature of bad writing. They're difficult to read, and they're confusing
for the reader. You should aim to have an average sentence length of around about 15-20 words. That doesn't mean that all of your sentences have to
be the same length. In fact, it's a good idea
to vary the length of them. It makes the writing
more interesting. But you should really
get rid of any sentence that's longer than
around 30 words. That's generally
going to be too long. The good news is that
long sentences are relatively easy to
spot and eliminate. One good way of spotting
if a sentence is too long is what I call the
take-a-breath test. If you read your copy out loud, and you find that you're
running out of breath at any point, that's a surefire sign that a few full stops
wouldn't go amiss. Another warning sign is, if when you read your copy, you see a lot of
connecting words, so words like "and" and "but," or if you see a lot of commas. Finally, most word
processing programs will count your words for you. So if you can see a sentence, and you're wondering
if it's too long, you can highlight that, and it'll show you
the word count somewhere on the screen. So you've found those
long sentences. Now how do you go
about shortening them? Let's take a look
at that copy from the Flower Yard as an example. I'm going to try reading this
first sentence out loud. Feel free to join in. The Flower Yard is a
flower shop in Leicester, conveniently located in the city's vibrant and
colorful Cultural Quarter, that was established in 2014 by local florist and
entrepreneur Lois Spires, who had her education at the Institute of
Professional Floristry and already had over a decade
of experience in the trade. Phew, that sentence is
definitely too long. Not only am I running
out of breath saying it but I'm also getting confused. For example, was
it the flower shop or the Cultural Quarter that
was established in 2014? It's not clear. Let's
add some full stops at natural points between ideas. Now let's amend the words
at the beginnings of our new sentences so
that they make sense. That's better. If we
read it through again, it's already much clearer. If we carry on reading
through the text, we get to this sentence, and alarm bells start ringing because we've got a lot
of connecting words. We've got "so", "and",
and "and" again. Let's try getting
rid of that midland and replacing it
with a full stop, and we'll just
adjust the start of the sentence so it makes sense. That was easy, and that passage is now
much easier to read. The one way of finding
long sentences we haven't tried yet is using the word count
function on Microsoft Word. So let's give that a go
on this final paragraph. If I highlight the words
up to the first full stop, it tells me at the bottom here that it has 10 words in it. That's fine, well below our
maximum 30-word threshold. This next one is 13, and the next one, 20. They're all okay. But then
we get to this sentence which is far too
long at 51 words. Let's break that sentence up and tweak the beginnings
of our new sentences like we did before. So we've used three methods to spot overlong sentences: reading out loud,
looking out for connecting words, and checking using the Word Count
on our computer. Our sentences are now
all below 30 words. Time to move on to the next
[inaudible] Copy Principle.
4. The Active Voice: [MUSIC] Using the
active voice makes your writing more
direct and impactful. The active voice describes
a sentence where the subject performs the
action stated by the verb. It follows a simple
subject-verb-object format. Using the passive voice,
on the other hand, makes for murky,
roundabout sentences, and overuse of the passive
voice is another one of those sure-fire signs of
unprofessional writing. With the passive voice the subject is acted
upon by the verb. Now, don't worry if
you're not 100 percent sure on the whole
subject-verb-object thing, it's going to
become really clear as soon as I show
you a few examples. Here are some sentences written first in
the passive voice, then in the active voice. With the passive voice, the doer comes after the
thing that was done. Another way to spot the passive
voice is to look out for forms of to be followed
by a past participle. To recap, to identify
passive voice look at what happened and look at who was responsible
for doing it. If the person or thing responsible for doing
the action is either not there or turns up in the sentence after the
thing that happened, and if you see a past participle straight after the
form of to be, it's the passive voice. In the first example, it's the company
that won the award, but the company comes after
the award in the sentence. There's also the past
participle of to be in the form of was won by. That's the passive voice. Now, what's wrong with it? Well, you can see straight
away that the active version comes across as much more
natural and straightforward. On the other hand, the
passive examples are more bureaucratic
and long-winded. Writing more complex
sentences using the passive voice
can also become really confusing for the reader. Luckily, once you've
identified the passive voice, it's really easy to fix. I've highlighted where
the passive voice has been used in
the example text. Now it's just a case of working
through each sentence and reworking it so that the doer is at the
start of the sentence, then the action, then
the thing being done. This sentence is in
the passive voice. The doer is Lois and she comes after the
verb, established. To change it into
the active voice, I'm going to swap it
around so that we have Lois establishing the business. Can you spot the next one? It's this sentence here and I'm going to swap it around
in the same way. Notice how the words themselves
change only a little. It's mainly just the order
they're in that changes. There are two sentences in this last paragraph that's
written in the passive voice; think about how
you'd change them. You'll be able to see
how I fix them when we revisit the text in
the next lesson. Before we finish with
the passive voice, I do want to add in a disclaimer because the passive
voice isn't always bad. There are times it
can be quite useful. One of these is if the doer of a particular thing
is unimportant. For example, if you wanted to say that a book had
been published, the book itself might be
the most important thing in the sentence and the name of
the publisher unimportant. You might say the
book was published, instead of Oxford Press
published the book, for example. Similarly, if you don't
know who the doer is, you can avoid mentioning them completely by using
the passive voice. Finally, it can be helpful to have the occasional
sentence in the passive voice to break up text and stop it from
getting too monotonous. Don't think that
the passive voice always equals bad writing, it's just a handy
general rule to stick to the active
voice whenever you can. On average, aim to make 80 to 90 percent of your
sentences [MUSIC] active.
5. Trash the Adverbs: What is an adverb and what have I got against them anyway. Well, an adverb is a word that modifies an adjective or a verb. It tells you how someone does something and they're
not always bad news. But if you struggle to keep your writing clear and concise, then chopping out a few of
those adverbs is probably going to be really helpful and is going to improve
your writing. Let's go on a little
adverb call of our own. There were a few different
types of adverbs, but the type that it's most
important to check and consider deleting are
easily identified. That's because they almost
always end in the letters L,Y. I've highlighted all of the L,Y adverbs in Lois' text. Have a look at them. Remember what I said
about adverbs modifying the word after it to tell
you how something was done. Do you agree that these adverbs are
weakening the phrases that part of and making them
Vega and more long winded? Let's go through them and see if they really need to be there. First, we have the
word conveniently to describe the
location of the shop. I don't think this is needed. We've told our readers
where the shop is, they can decide for themselves
whether or not it's convenient for them.
Let's delete it. In this paragraph, we have
the words enthusiastically and proudly to describe the
way the flower yard works. Again, I don't think
these words add anything or tell
us anything new. I think the flower
yard communicating their enthusiasm and
pride effectively and subtly without having to overtly tell people that
they are those things. For the sake of clarity, I'm going to delete those two. Now we have this phrase,
continuously tries. This is a good example
of where we can strengthen the original verb, in this case, "tries"
and in doing so, make the adverb that comes
before it unnecessary. What's a stronger
word for tries? How about strives? With that nice strong
verb in place, we can get rid of the adverb
without losing any meaning. Getting rid of those adverbs
was easy and it's made our writing feel much more
direct and professional. With the next principle, it's time to get personal.
6. You and I: Your words will be
read by human beings, not by machines or organizations
or demographic groups. That sounds pretty
obvious, doesn't it? But how often have you read a form or a letter
or a bit of web copy that sounds like
it's been written by a robot for another robot? I've read plenty. One of the things that
can make your writing stilted and overly formal
and dull and robotic is if you overuse
the third person. When you write from a
third person perspective, you write as though both you and your reader are removed from the events that
you're describing. You write as though you
were an entity separate to yourself and your reader is an entity separate
from themselves. That's pretty weird when
you think about it. Imagine if I was
sat here saying, Ruth wants her students to stop writing in
the third person. No. I want you to start
writing in the third person. You're going to
do it by learning how to identify when you're doing it and then killing it with three very simple words; you, we, and I. Take a look at these examples. The sentences on the left are written in the third person. They talk about people and
things as if they were remote from both the
writer and the reader. Compare them with the
sentences on the right. They speak directly from
the writer to the reader. They're warmer and feel
more direct and personal. Let's take a look at how
this works in practice, using The Flower Yard
copy as an example. Because as you'll see, you can't just ditch the
third person completely. You need to use it carefully
to keep your writing clear. At the moment the entire text is written in the third person. It makes sense in
this first paragraph. We're introducing The
Flower Yard very broadly. We want to make sure that people know what
we're talking about. But it gets very tedious
later on when we see this constant repetition of The Flower Yard this and
The Flower Yard that. What we need to do is switch at some point to the
first person we. There's a clever trick
we can employ to do just that without
confusing people. Look at the start of
this first sentence, The Flower Yard creates. Let's rephrase that
so that it reads, at The Flower Yard we create. Now that we've announced
that shift in perspective, we can use we in the
place of The Flower Yard throughout the rest of the text. The only other thing we
need to bear in mind is that The Flower
Yard is singular, whereas we is plural. We need to make sure we tweak the other words in the
sentences to reflect that. For example, it utilizes
with an S at the end, becomes we utilize
without the S. Now I'm going to fast-forward
through the next bit as I update all of
those third person, The Flower Yards, to
first person we's. That's already made
a big difference. Now remember at the
beginning of this class when we identified our reader. In this case, we know that
the readers of our copy will be customers and
potential customers. Instead of referring
to customers as if they were somewhere
and someone else, we should use you whenever
we refer to them. One final thing for
us to consider is how Lois refers to
herself in this copy. Things can get a
little confusing if you use I and we in
the same piece of text. That's why I'm not suggesting that we do a similar transition
to the first person I from the third person Lois
in this first paragraph. There are ways
around this though. One would be to have a separate boxed off
biography section where Lois could
talk more directly to her readers using
the first person. Another would be to have a quote from Lois with her name
underneath or Lois said, and then her words
as a direct quote. As it is for simplicity sake, I think we're best leaving this section alone in this case. However, if we isn't
getting in the way, so if you're writing from your own point of view or
on your own personal blog, or you're writing your social
media bio, for example, I'd strongly suggest using the first person I throughout. I hope you'll agree that
this one simple rule has had a dramatically positive
effect on our copy. The next one is going
to help us even more.
7. Find the Right Words: If you only take one
thing away from my class, I'd like it to be to always write with your reader in mind. It's something that
I go on about a lot. It's the golden rule for good
writing and it will improve your writing no end
if you just keep that one simple
principle in mind. It's something that applies
to the words that you use when you're writing as well the kind of language
that you use. Every career or
industry, or hobby has its own specialist
language, its own jargon. If you're writing
for other people within that specialist group, it's fine to use that kind of language because
they're going to understand
exactly what you're talking about, so
that's appropriate. But one mistake that a
lot of people make is when they're writing
for a broader audience, they continue using that
insider industry jargon. It's not appropriate
because that reader, the general public isn't
going to understand it. If we look again at that
copy from the Flower Yard, we can see that this
is a mistake that Lois has made on her About page. Do you know what
a boutonniere is? How about an ikebana? I have no idea and I bet very few people outside the
florist business know either. Lois has forgotten her
reader here and is using industry jargon when she's writing for the general public. I'm going to replace those words with some more everyday ones. That's my first tip on
using the right words. Avoid industry specific jargon. If you are writing
about something you know very well and you're not sure if a word or a
phrase is jargon or not, the best way to find out
is to ask someone who's unfamiliar with whatever it
is you're writing about. I'm pretty sure that
if Lois had asked any non florist, if they
knew what a boutonniere was, they would have told
her they didn't. It's not just jargon words that you need to eliminate
from your writing. Language tip Number
2 is don't use complicated words when there's a simple alternative that
means the same thing. Here are some examples to
show you the thing I mean. You might think that using
a fancy sounding word makes you seem like
a better writer, but I'm afraid the
opposite is true. Dressing up standard business
writing with fussy words is like dressing up a pig in a pair of frilly
pink knickers. It's not big, it's not clever, and it confuses people. Let's swap these silly, formal words that Lois has used for some much simpler ones. Utilize becomes use,
assured becomes sure, purchase becomes buy, exigent becomes urgent, require becomes need, and
affable becomes friendly. That's a lot better. Let's move on to the next principle.
8. Don't Nominalise: A nominalization is a noun that's isn't
a physical object. It might be a process
or a technique, or an emotion, and it's
formed from a verb. Now, this is one
of those occasions where seeing a few examples it's going to be
much more useful to you than hearing me explain it. Let's take a look.
See what I mean? The words in the
left-hand column are nouns, they're static things. The words in the right-hand
column are verbs, they're active doing words. Nominalizations
often end in either T-I-O-N or M-E-N-T. Nominalizations are very common and very useful. In fact, the English language
would be lost without them. There's nothing wrong with them when they're
used sparingly. However, too many of them
in a piece of writing can make it sound academic,
stilted, and dull. Often, things can be
livened up by rephrasing the sentence so that you replace the nominalization with
the original verb. Here are a few examples. See how the sentences that use the original verb
are easier to read, clearer and more vibrant than the ones that use
the nominalization. Let's look at Lois' text. I've highlighted the
nominalizations. This phrase, "Lois
had her education" is already quite clumsy. We could improve it and replace
the nominalization with the verb by saying,
"Lois was educated." But I think we can improve
it even more by using a synonym and saying,
"Lois trained." That's much clearer and simpler. I'm going to jump forward
to this sentence with the nominalization
"discussion" in it. What if we use the verb instead of the
nominalization and say, "It's why we take the time to discuss what you
need in detail." That's better, but
the word "discuss" is still a bit fussy. How about we replace it
with "talk through"? That sounds more
informal and friendlier. The other nominalizations
in the text, I'm going to leave alone. They're not hindering
the clarity and there's no straightforward way of replacing them with
their original verb. That's nominalization
in a nutshell, limit your use of them, but there's no need to get
rid of them completely. While our copy is getting clearer and more
concise all the time, we've just got a
few more steps to go to make it crystal clear. Let's not waste any time because our next principle is all about being direct and to the point.
9. Be Direct: Nobody wants to come across as rude or curt or abrupt and that's why we often slow our copy down with
a lot of fussy, polite filler words that don't need to be there
and that just end up clogging up our copy when actually it would be better
off getting to the point. The politest thing
we can do from a reader's point of view is
get our message across as quickly and succinctly as we can rather than wasting
their time, that's rude. Write confidently and don't be afraid to give
direct instructions. Let's look at a few examples. I'm sure you recognize
a few of these from official letters and
forms you've been sent. Isn't it better
when people get to the point and say
exactly what they mean? It's especially important
in situations like these when you're asking
someone to do something. A good example of that, it's a call to action. I'm sure you know
that you should have one clear call to action at
the end of each web page. If we look at Lois's copy, we can see that there
is a call to action. She wants people to
visit her services page, but it's wrapped up in this
polite, fussy language. It's not necessary,
and it's also not expected in web
copy in particular. Let's clear it up by getting
rid of the unneeded words. There's another way that
unnecessary extra words can get in the way
of your message, that's when you say
the same thing twice. You make your point and then
just to be on the safe side, you say it again in a
slightly different way. Now, people do this
in conversation all the time and it
doesn't matter too much. But when you do it in your copy, you risk your reader getting bored and going off
to do something else before they even get to your all-important
call to action. Lois has been guilty of
this in a couple of places, but only on a small scale. She hasn't repeated phrases, but she has used more than one word that
means the same thing. If we pick either
vibrant or colorful, this sentence will be
quicker to read and clearer. The same goes for taste, inclination, and preference. They will be more or
less the same thing. Let's make life easier
for our readers by picking just one of those words and
deleting the others. Just as using more
complicated words where simple ones will do doesn't
make you look clever. Neither does using more words
that mean the same thing. It all just makes
your writing fussy, long-winded, and
tedious to read. Isn't our writing
looking better? There's just one small
but important step left before we're
ready to publish it.
10. Polish Your Copy: [MUSIC] Nobody likes a
smug grammar pedant. If you're getting your
message across clearly, the odd little typo or grammatical faux pas is not
going to ruin your writing. However, nothing
interferes with clarity, like a confusing or funny typo. There's nothing
worse than suddenly realizing that a piece
of copy that's been on your website or your
social media bio for months and months has an
embarrassing typo in it. Let's look at how
we can avoid that. Well, what you shouldn't do is rely on your
computer's spellcheck, because often a word
is in the dictionary, but it's not the
word that you meant, and your computer spell check isn't going to pick that up. You need to try a little
bit harder than that. The answer is all about
proper proofreading. Here are my top three tips
for proofreading your copy. Check the spelling
of proper nouns. That's the names of
people, businesses, and addresses
particularly carefully. These won't be picked up
by a spellchecker either, so you need to double-check
them yourself. Print it out. There's something about
reading your words on paper that makes errors jump
out of the page at you. Finally, ask a
friend to read it. Having a fresh pair of eyes on your copy is
really invaluable. I've done a careful check of The Flower Yards
about page copy and I've spotted three
errors that would never have been picked up
by a spellchecker. Firstly, I've looked
up this organization, the Institute of
Professional Floristry, just by doing a
quick Google search and finding their website. It turns out that it's not the Institute of Professional
Floristry at all, but the Institute of
Professional Florists. That's a really easy
mistake to make, but getting the name of your professional membership
body incorrect on your website has the potential to make you
look very unprofessional. It's good that we've spotted it. We did so just by
paying a bit of extra attention to
our proper nouns to make sure they were correct. You can probably see
the problem with the other two highlighted words. Male and flora are
both valid words, but they're incorrect
in this context. Male should be spelled, M-A-I-L, and flora
needs an L on the end. These are the most common errors you'll find when proofreading. They can be found
and corrected with the three-step plan I
told you about earlier, check proper nouns, print it out, and ask a
friend to read it for you. Now, our copy isn't
100 percent perfect, but it's a huge improvement
on what we started with. In less than 10 simple steps, we've taken a piece
of text from unclear, confusing, and rambling,
to clear and concise. Using the same
straightforward process, you can transform your own copy. We'll finish by looking at some free online
resources and tools that will help you even
further on your [MUSIC] quest for crystal-clear copy.
11. Tips, Tricks and Tools: [MUSIC] In this class, you've learned how to improve your copy and get your message across
clearly and persuasively. I hope what you've learned is giving you the
confidence to spot those warning signs of bad
writing and to correct them. But sometimes, we all
need a little help. So I've put together a list of free online resources that you can use as you're practicing the skills you've
learned in this class. You can find them all in the Resources section of
the Class Project tab. These are tools that
I use myself in my career as a
professional copywriter. I use them every day, so I'm sure you're going to
find them useful as well. The Plain English Campaign is the ultimate guardian of
clear, concise language. Since 1979, it's been campaigning
against gobbledygook, jargon, and misleading
public information. It's helped many
government departments and other official
organizations with their documents, reports,
and publications. They can also help you. Their website has
downloadable guides on everything from
how to write in plain English to A-Zs of financial
terms and legal phrases. There are tips for how to write
a bibliography or a form, and special guidance on
writing letters and emails. There are also a selection
of grammar guides that explain complex grammatical
terms in a simple, easy to understand way. To sum up, this is definitely a website you need in
your bookmarks bar. Here's another, the website of the Oxford
English Dictionary. This is my go-to dictionary when I need to check the
spelling of something, but it's much more than that. There's also a
comprehensive thesaurus and a grammar guide. If you're interested in word
origins or geeky word facts, their blog is
well-worth a read too. Next up, and this is the
big one, meet Hemingway. This is the number 1 big
daddy of copyrighting tools and it's completely free. If you copy and paste
your text into Hemingway, it will check it for
common writing errors. The aim is to make your copy as bold and clear as possible. You can see the things
that checks for on the right-hand side and some of them are going to
look very familiar. We've got adverbs,
passive voice, and simple word alternatives. Hemingway also flags up when
sentences are hard to read, something that can
usually be remedied by breaking the sentence
up into shorter ones. If you only remember two things from this class, make it these: always write with your
reader in mind and use this website to tidy up your writing in
double-quick time. Finally, an honorable mention
to counting characters, this handy little website counts the characters and words
in a piece of text. There's also a tool that checks the number
of characters in a web page and there's even a Chrome web app
that you can download. Handily, there's also a
section that tells you the maximum word count for the most popular
social media channels. I find it very useful
to have all of that information
in the same place. You can find links to
all these resources on the class About page. Now that you've got
all the tips, tricks, and tools you need to
perfect your writing, it's time to look at
the next steps and how to get started on
your class project.
12. Next Steps: [MUSIC] Thank you for
watching my class on writing crystal-clear copy. Now you understand what
the active voice is, how to use the first person, and the power of
direct commands. You also know all about
nominalizations and adverbs, what they are and why
you should avoid them. The techniques that I've
shown you are really simple, but they're also very powerful. I'm really excited
to see how you're going to use them to
improve your own writing. Now it's time to start
your class project. You're going to be using the skills that
you've learned in this class to improve a
piece of your own copy. Start by downloading the Clarify Your Copy worksheet from
the class project tab. Choose a piece of
copy that you've written and would
like to improve. It should be between
50 and 200 words. Your social media bio or the about page of your
website would be ideal. Copy and paste
your text into the before and after sections
of the worksheet. Work through the clear copy
principles to find and destroy the causes of
unclear fussy copy. Then the after version of
your copy as you go along, your writing will become
clearer with every step. If you get stuck, share your worksheet with me and the Skillshare community and we'll help you work things out. Your new copy doesn't have
to be 100 percent perfect, but you should see
a huge improvements in comparison with
what you wrote before. Remember to upload
your worksheet to the class project page when you're done so that
other people can see the difference you've
made to your copy. If you use the writing online, you could also upload
a screenshot of it in situ. I'd love to hear your feedback about this class
and I'd also love to hear the positive feedback
that you get on your new crystal-clear copy. Keep practicing
the skills you've learned today and
you'll find they soon become second nature and all of your writing will be vastly
improved as a result. Thank you again for
watching my class. Enjoy the rest of
your day [MUSIC].
Ruth Clowes, Professional Copywriter
