Is Letter Writing Really About Good Grammar?

You'll have to excuse me. I got Ds in grammar.

April 2005 By Jerry Huntsinger

multipage

For my part, I made “Ds” in English grammar while, at the same time, selling little adventure stories to magazines. My college advisor couldn’t figure it out.

Also, I had a learning disability and simply couldn’t pronounce big words or spell them, so I didn’t use them. That seemed like a workable solution.

Years later when I slid in the back door of direct-response marketing, I learned from a kind mentor that my goal in writing a letter should not be to impress the reader with my grammatical skills but to keep the reader involved in the copy long enough to make a positive decision. I believe it’s time for nonprofit executives to come down from the mountaintop, grammatically speaking.

Get warm and personal
My self-appointed crusade is to flit around the country, forcing nonprofit folks to communicate at a personal, rather than grammatical, level.

So here are 12 suggestions for charity presidents and their scribes to get them all communicating in a warm and personal style:

1. Write the way you talk. Use punctuation to help you breathe on paper.

2. Use the present tense. Your letter must be current, not past or future tense.

3. Use the second person. Don’t write, “Our donors will be proud to participate in this project.” Instead, write, “You will be proud to participate in this project.” The magic word is always “you.”

4. Use connectives and action words to hook sentences and paragraphs together. Always avoid a passive beginning of a paragraph. This includes, for example, “the” and “a.” Also, beware of beginning a paragraph with a prepositional phrase. Instead, use an action word or a strong connective word. An action word might be something like, “wait,” “discover,” “explore,” “stop,” “start” and so on. A connective word might simply be “and” or “so” or “but.”

5. Be very careful with periods. A period brings a thought to an end and that’s what you want to avoid, except when you want to merge into a new thought. Notice I used the word “merge.” You must always keep your letter
moving. Don’t let the reader stop. Remember, when someone is reading your letter, she rarely is 100 percent focused on what you have to say. Usually she’s scanning, and if she stops, then some distraction is going to capture her attention.

Maybe the television is on. Maybe her spouse is screaming about a bank overdraft. Maybe there’s a thunderstorm in the area. Maybe there’s another piece of mail that looks more interesting than the piece she’s looking at now. For goodness sake, don’t let the reader stop!

6. Use “I,” not “we.” Many years ago, a president told me that his organization is larger than just him and he can’t use the word “I” — he must use “we” to capture the breadth of its work. I told him that was a bunch of bull, and he fired me. True, the person signing the letter is the personification of the organization. But donors don’t respond to an organization, they respond to an individual.

7. Use contractions like you would in ordinary conversation. Don’t say, “Here is the reason I am writing you.” Say, “Here’s the reason I’m writing you.” Most writers I know will read their draft aloud to make sure it sounds conversational, which often includes adding many contractions to the copy.

8. Keep on dashing! It’s a good way to balance movement with gentle pauses — without adding a period — because you don’t want the reader to stop altogether, but you also don’t want to tire her out.

9. Believe in the mystic power of a quotation mark. Sure, quotation marks are supposed to be used for quoting someone who has said something. But that’s a rule. A quotation mark can be a tool, too. So, if you want to be “conversational,” then you can use a quotation mark.

10. Play around with parentheses. Why not add a little afterthought to an important thought? It’s a wink, a nudge. It’s under your breath. An aside. It’s a shrug of your shoulders. (Pssst … it’s a way to get even more personal.)

11. Use the question mark liberally. Ask a lot of questions. That gets the reader involved. It begins a dialogue. Why not?

12. And finally ... because I’ve used up my allotted space in this publication ... keep your copy moving forward by using the ellipsis. OK, I know. Grammatically, the three dots together indicate missing text in a phrase. That’s a grammar rule. But as a tool, those three dots can help you move from one paragraph to the other ... or just break up the copy.

Is all the above really grammar? Of course not. It’s marketing. And like it or not, that’s what fundraising is all about.

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

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