A Writing Challenge
Do the Hundreds of Writing Tips Work? Yes, but Not Always the Way You Expect.
Writing tip: Rewrite every sentence — an interesting concept that’s easy to test, with these results.
The April 30 article, How To Write Articles That People Want To Read, by Matt Lillywhite triggered this experiment. His tips were partly a way of thinking and partly procedures. The idea of rewriting every sentence was intriguing, but daunting.
1. Start With An Engaging Headline 2. Make It Interesting For The Reader 3. Provide Some Personal Experience 4. Rewrite Every Sentence
I decided to apply his four tips to an existing article and measure the results
I have a way to analyze all of the tips numerically instead of using fuzzy impressions.
The experiment
The subject article ranks 61st out of my 67 articles in views and reads. I will determine if that is because of the subject, or the article’s structure and writing style.
I’ll provide before-and-after examples for each tip as I applied it. I’m particularly interested in the results from the sentence rewriting tip.
Some results surprised me, especially the title
The links to the before and after articles are at the end if you want to scan them.
The rewrite is unlisted, i.e. not eligible for payment and not listed under my profile. I may relist it later, after views for this article die down.
Tip #1: Start With An Engaging Headline
Everybody says that. It is not as easy as it sounds.
I have been using the Headline Analyzer from the Advanced Marketing Institute for months to calculate the Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) of my titles and sub-titles. I tested 21 different titles for the revised article, with these results:
Before title: Picking Fresh, Tasty Berries in the Spring ( 28% )
After title: Improve Your Health and Dining Experience with Fresh, Tasty Berries Straight from the Farm ( 33% )
Professional copywriters try for a 30%-40% EMV score in their headlines. There’s not much difference, percentage-wise, but the first title gives very little information whereas the second one does.
Are you, the reader, a migrant worker, a homeowner picking your own berries from your garden, or a shopper buying them at the store? Based on the original title, there was no way to know. Why should you even be interested in the article? There was no clue.
The subtitle is just as important
I ran subtitles through the Headline Analyzer, too. In this case, there wasn’t that much difference.
Before: Fresh picked berries from the adjoining farm taste better than store bought & cost half as much. ( 25% )
After: Freshly picked berries taste better than store bought & cost half as much. (33% )
The subtitle gives you more words to work with. I have had ratings as high as 60%, once I started using it.
The percentages for this article’s title and subtitle are 26% and 58% respectively.
Tip #2: Make It Interesting For The Reader
To quote Matt, “if you promise them a great article, you need to deliver on what you say.”
You must do that immediately and then throughout the story. In my original article, I started out like I was giving a speech to a captive audience at a convention — slowly building up from a seemingly random beginning.
Readers on the internet are not going to stick around through those first four paragraphs. They were interesting, in an abstract sort of way, but had nothing to do with the title of the story.
The first sentence and paragraph has to tie to the title
If not, the reader will conclude that the title is clickbait and not continue. Every paragraph needs to tie directly to the title or prior paragraph. You will lose the reader with too many diversions.
There were 8 additional paragraphs near the end that had nothing to do with the title. Again, abstractly interesting, but not pertinent.
Finally, you have to deliver throughout the story.
The reader won’t wait for some big climax at the end, either. These are articles, not novels. In some cases, you can make your point in the first paragraph and let the remainder of the article provide support.
Tip #3: Provide Some Personal Experience
I’ve never had trouble with that. But again, those experiences must tie back to the title. For example, the berries I picked today cost $33.00 at the farm and $85.00 for the same weight later at the store.
My original story just said that the store berries cost twice as much. Real numbers always work better.
Tip #4: Rewrite Every Sentence
Only the core, a 2-minute read, remained after throwing out the 12 extraneous paragraphs.
To be a valid test, I rewrote every sentence, used the Headline Analyzer to find the best possible replacement, and logged the before and after EMV values. It took 2 1/2 hours to complete.
I was able to improve some sentences, but not as many as I expected. For example, this phrase showed the largest improvement:
Before: I had a blackberry patch at my house in Indiana. It was a glob of intertwined branches covered with at least 10,000 thorns. (20%)
After: My blackberry patch in Indiana was a glob of intertwined branches covered with at least 10,000 thorns. (40%)
Whereas, this one declined dramatically.
Before: The plants hug the ground with the berries usually ripening under the leaves. (46%)
After: The plants hug the ground and the berries ripen under the leaves. (16%)
Final analysis
I expected a dramatic improvement, but didn’t get it where I expected.
- The title was not clear! No target audience and no reason to read the article.
- Too many distracting paragraphs. Twelve paragraphs, though mildly interesting, had no relationship to the title and little to the remaining article.
- Personal experience did not relate. Cost comparisons were mentioned, but did not include a real comparison in dollars.
- Sentence rewrite had minimal impact. Of 31 sentences, 4 had improvements of 10% or more, and 7 sentences actually declined in EMV value, one by 30%. Overall, the sentence rewrite exhibited a 2% average change.
So, why does the author exhibit such a big improvement by rewriting every sentence and I do not? Was my sample article a fluke?
Nope. Different writing methods.
My theory: many articles recommend that you write whatever comes to mind, as fast as possible, just to get it recorded. Then go back and polish it up.
I don’t do that. When I type my first draft, it is fully structured and grammatically correct, almost but not quite ready to publish.
For months, I have been reading my pre-publication articles to the 25 book authors of my writers club in The Villages. Their critiques usually center around my “Intuitively Obvious” moments, not sentence structure or content.
“Intuitively Obvious” moment: What is obvious to me is usually obvious to nobody else.
Except for the Intuitively Obvious moments, I doubt if I will change 5% of this article even with suggestions from the Writers Club, Grammarly, and my own observations from listening to the online audio reader. They found one Intuitively Obvious sentence.
So, tip #4 was tailored for the author’s writing methods, not mine.
Conclusion
The first three tips are common across most help articles for writers. They work, so I will continue to follow them.
The fourth tip, rewrite every sentence, did not work for me and was very time-consuming. I won’t do it again. If you use a shotgun approach to writing your first draft, it may work well for you.
Finally, the writing advice articles are worth reading. You just need to be aware that they may not fit your writing process. However, you never know where you will pick up something important that works for you.
Here are the before and after articles:
Before:
After:
You will be able to see the differences just by skimming the two articles.
April 30 tips article by Matt Lillywhite