I know my English teacher is going to give me heck for this article but so be it. If you want to write copy that isn’t going to lose your reader, one of the things you MUST do is forget all those punctuation rules that you learned in school. Grammar is another thing. Not every sentence has to be a complete thought. So that you understand what I’m talking about, this article is going to pick out specific things that you definitely want to do and not do when writing your sales letter. Follow these and you should do very well as far as increasing conversions and getting more people to read through your whole copy.

The comma is absolutely the most useless form of punctuation in the world when it comes to writing sales copy, next to the semicolon. But we’ll get to that later. Okay, why don’t we want our prospect to see any commas in our copy? The reason is because of what a comma subconsciously makes the reader do…and that is it makes him pause. Any time your prospect pauses, that’s an opportunity for him to turn away from your copy. Now granted, we sometimes need to take a pause. We certainly don’t want to write one long run-on sentence. So, if ever we feel there needs to be a pause in our sales copy, instead of the comma we use either EM dashes or ellipses. They serve the same purpose when writing a sales letter and they don’t have the same psychological effect on the reader.

Let me touch on why the semicolon is even more useless than the comma. The semicolon is lost somewhere between a colon and a comma. It doesn’t know which one it wants to be. Therefore, I don’t even consider using these in my sales letter. Again, use the EM dash or the ellipse.

Quotation marks are something else that copywriters many times use for the wrong reasons. A quotation mark is to be used to designate a quote…nothing else. I see copywriters using them when they want to highlight a word. This is really bush league. If you want to highlight a word, use bold, italics or underline. Never use quotation marks.

There’s a lot more, but digest these for the time being. The point is, there are no rules for good punctuation when it comes to writing sales copy. YOUR goal is to write copy that captures the prospect’s attention and keeps him on the page…period.

If you want to discover all my punctuation tricks and just about everything else you’ll need to become a top notch copywriter, check out the link in my signature.

And tell your grammar teacher I said so.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to save $2,500 to $15,000 in copywriting costs? Want to write copy yourself that can command that kind of payday? Visit my site at http://www.bcipe.com/ and discover killer copywriting tips that have allowed me to write my own copy for years and earn myself a 6 figure a year income selling my own products.