In Marketing, Punctuation Matters — a Lot!

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The best punctuation goes entirely unnoticed, even if it means breaking some rules, Sigl Creative reminds writers of marketing copy. The site offers a birds-eye view:

  • Periods, exclamation points, and question marks symbols mark the end of a complete thought. Periods are used the most, and readers will barely notice them.
  • Questions are great, drawing in the readers, posing a problem the reader wants solved.
  • Exclamation points, not used in formal writing, are appropriate for copywriting. You’re excited about your business, and you want the reader to be, too. (Don’t use too many, and never two in a row.)
  • Fragments (“Just. Like. This.”) break up the flow of words.
  • Em dashes (which interrupt a sentence with an idea) can be visually exciting.
  • Ellipses (a series of three periods) add informality, mimicking human speech.

But do these details matter?  Oh, yes! “You don’t want to distract your readers from the message you’re trying to send,” Jessica Perkins of Agility PR Solutions writes. Without proper punctuation, you can produce run-on sentences, dangling modifiers, or sentence fragments.

It’s not hard to find websites listing funny examples of how punctuation can lead to total misunderstanding, as I pointed out five years ago in this Say It For You blog:

  • A woman without her man is nothing.
    A woman: without her, man is nothing.
  • Let’s eat Grandma.
    Let’s eat, Grandma!
  • I have only twenty-five dollar bills.
    I have only twenty five-dollar bills.
  • I’m sorry I love you.
    I’m sorry; I love you.
  • The author finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.
    The author finds inspiration in cooking, her family, and her dog.

Anything that puzzles readers interferes with their interest and engagement, defeating the purpose of the content. In today’s competitive business world, content writing is a tool for “getting personal” and earning trust. As writers, we need to help our business owners express who and what they are, so that they come across as “real”. Being real, though, doesn’t mean being sloppy.

In marketing, punctuation matters – a lot!

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Ampersands OK in Blog Titles, But Not in Content

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“Use and, not ampersands, in business writing, even for emails. It is more professional,” Mary Morel advises in onlinewritintraining.com. Ampersands are for titles, signage, and where they are part of an organization’s branding, she adds.

Historical trivia bit – The ampersand was once the 27th letter of the alphabet In the early 18th century. Roman scribes, writing the Latin word “et” (meaning “and”) would link the E and the T. creating the shape of the ampersand. Centuries later, children reciting their ABCs found it confusing to say X,Y,Z, and”, so instead they would say “and, per se, ‘and'”, clarifying that the
ampersand was a separate letter.

The ampersand “adheres to a modern ethos of speed and brevity,” grammarbook.com explains. The ampersand helps save space, and fits in with other letters’ heights. “Still,” the authors conclude, “the more sparing you are with ampersands in formal writing, the better,”

Ampersand usage is a style detail many people don’t think important enough to merit attention, the probizwriters.com blog observes. “After all, if most people don’t know the rules, who will notice if you screw it up, right? Unfortunately, it’s little details like proper ampersand use that can make your writing look or feel clunky or dumb, even to readers who don’t know exactly why.”

Worst of all, speaker Todd Hunt believes, is inconsistent use, mixing “and” and “&” in the same writing piece.

As a blog content writing trainer, I think the most compelling reason to avoid ampersands in blog content was explained by Rebekah Wolf in medium.com: Copy devoid of characters is easier to skim and even easier to understand. As readers scan your blog post, their eyes are likely to be drawn to the character instead of to the most important words.

Of course, blog content writing should be more informal in tone than academic pieces, as we stress at Say It For You. Blogs are meant to be more conversational, more personal, and tend to be most effective using an “I-you”, author-to-reader tone. There’s an invisible line, however. Could the ampersand represent one of those subtle dividing points between casual and careless? Hmmm….

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When an Ellipsis Is – and Isn’t – an Excuse for the Entire Quote

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ellipses
The ellipsis (consisting of three dots) may be the punctuation mark least used by blog content writers, but it certainly has an important function, showing that words are missing from a text, as Tony Rossiter explains in Effective Business Writing in Easy Steps.

For blog content writers, using an ellipsis can help avoid having the reader’s thought process being distracted from the point you want to make through using a quote. A series of three dots can be placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence or clause, standing in for sections of text that do not change the overall meaning. You’re quoting someone in order to make or reinforce a point, and you want to use only those words that help you make that point.

Ellipses, literarydevices.net points out, are also common in filmmaking, where the parts and scenes that are of no significance to the plot or character development are simply left out. In fact, this entire ellipsis discussion harks back to my Say It For You teachings about focus in blog posts and “the Power of One”. If your copy tells too many irrelevant stories, you will lose your prospects’ attention and interest. Each post can have a razor-sharp focus on just one story, one idea, one aspect of your business.

Incorporating a quote (from an expert in your field or from a historic figure) can certainly help reinforce that one idea on which you’ve chose to focus that day’s blog post. But you don’t necessarily want to use the entire quote, when the idea can be conveyed by using only a certain part of it, and that’s where the ellipsis punctuation mark can become useful. “To cite means to quote someone, or someone’s work, as a authoritative source to support an argument,” the editors of The Book of Random Oddities explain. But the fact is, people read blogs to get information and we, as content providers need to provide that information with honesty and respect towards the original creators of any materials we use to support the points we want to make.

That’s precisely why what isn’t “cricket”, as Mignon Fogarty of Grammar Girl.com reminds writers, is using ellipses to change the meaning of a quotation. Don’t be lazy, she admonishes, allowing “the sweet lure of ellipses to muddle your ability to write a complete sentence”.

Blog posts that demonstrate a high degree of expertise backed by solid research, plus a very high degree of focus, have a good chance of gaining reader respect. For maintaining focus and brevity while bringing in outside expertise, those three little ellipsis dots can pack a might punch!

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