How to write ultra-clear, ultra-memorable copy

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"You're a fox."

Three words.

Three words that changed my life.

Growing up, I was not especially attractive. I was awkward. Shy. Scared.

Boys did not gravitate towards me.

I did not have long legs and blonde hair and blue eyes.

I DID NOT PLAY NETBALL.

To be fair, even today I am awkward. I bump into things. My arms are too short for my body. Yoga can be a hot mess.

I was lamenting this to my bestie once, in my mid-20s. I was telling her, in the deep privacy of girl talk, that I just wasn't the kind of woman that was SEXY. You know?

And she looked at me and she said, 'Ashleigh. You are a fox.'

Now, I could go into all the psychological dramas that unfolded in my head in the 2.5 seconds that followed, and how I grew to be the goddess of a woman I am today (as I snort my tea up my nose and have warm liquid spewing out my nostrils onto my upper lip)...

But I won't.

What I will do is say this: the image of the fox changed everything for me.

Sure, people had told me before that I was unique. My face was expressive. My eyes were big and blue and beautiful.

But the FOX - the sexiness of it.

The slinkiness of it.

The otherworldy animalism of it.

That image stayed with me.

And I just knew that if I held onto that image, I could see myself in a way I'd never seen myself before.

What does this have to do with writing for your business?

In his book, The Brilliance Breakthrough, copywriting great Eugene Schwartz writes about how our brains actually think in images, not words. So it’s easier for your brain to decode a picture into words than it is to encode words into a picture. This is why communicating in images increases the clarity of your message. It also makes your point more memorable.

Make things easy for your reader

Words like “beautiful” and “attractive” make the audience have to work harder. Because they have to work at imagining, understanding. Your audience must never work to understand. The word “fox”, on the other hand, is concrete, clear. When you hear it, you see the thing, the pointy ears, its tail, its pointed mouth, the lithe body, slinking down the street, avoiding eye contact, coy and unknowable. You see it.

Write in images

Help the reader skip the encoding step (i.e., turning the words into pictures). It makes reading easier and more clear. Less thinking, and less room for confusion. Create as many images as possible throughout your copy so that your message is understood faster and remembered longer.