Dear Chase,
Hope you've had a great week.
I have a vivid memory of when I was in high school, getting into an argument with this dumb guy.
He wrote a paper that had some serious grammar issues even though the content was decent.
Because it looked like it was written by a toddler, he got a terrible grade.
I argued that proper grammar, spelling, and structure is very important to the overall message of the piece.
He argued that as long as you're using close-enough grammar and close-enough spelling, the person SHOULD get the point, and you don't need it to be perfect.
He kinda had a point. But it's not as simple as he makes it out to be.
That's when I realized that HOW you say things actually matters just as much (if not more) than WHAT you say.
This memory just came back to me this morning, and I thought it would be relevant to write you a little email on how you can use this fact to build more trust with your audience.
This is some high-level stuff, so I hope this all makes sense for you and your audience.
When you're writing copy, the words are only half of it.
The "between the lines" elements make a big difference, too.
The guy from my high school's audience was a college-educated English teacher.
She loves proper spelling and grammar. It's the reason she gets out of bed every morning, probably.
If you're writing something that she's going to read, you CANNOT get away with messing up spelling and grammar.
But is she representative of the world as a whole?
NO.
There's a whole subset of people (which may be like 40% of America) that actually does not care at all about spelling and grammar.
And writing "properly" may actually turn them off from the message that you're trying to get across.
I've tested this before.
I used to write a newsletter for this guy who was a day trading coach.
He made a bunch of money showing people how to buy Dogecoin and stuff like that.
His audience was a bunch of 18-year-old high school dropouts. They don't even KNOW what proper English looks like.
So when I wrote to that list, every email would start with, "Yoooooo what's good!"
It was so dumb.
But they ate it up.
If I wrote to them in the style I'd write a B2B newsletter, they wouldn't even read it.
The point of this is that you need to know your audience, and don't get stuck in a box of ONLY writing in perfect grammar.
You can actually break trust by writing "perfectly" with an audience that doesn't actually write that way themselves…
Just like you can break trust with a professional audience by writing like an idiot.
This is why "scam emails" from Nigerian princes are written with terrible grammar on purpose.
It's more relatable to the people who are gonna fall for that stuff anyway.
Don't just write in the language of your audience.
Write in their style, too.
It's something deep inside of us that goes off if we see someone who has the same slang and style as we do.
It's the fastest and easiest way to build trust at a fundamental level.
Yours truly,
Alex.
Sent from my i fone
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